exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

DrF wrote: ↑Sun Aug 12, 2018 6:59 pm Quite strange as I was thinking about using a ARM on a Raspberry Pi type board to offload/emulate hardware last week, like a video card, soundcard or FPU did some looking into it and well gave up

Adding a Pi would mean we could add massive amounts of stuff very easily, I mean just look at cosmosex.. But it's also very slow and complex bit of kit. I mean if we wanted to add USB, I would just use a USB bridge controller to do the job, I wouldn't just jump in and use a Pi, I would just be serious overkill and just making something otherwise simple, rather bloated and overcomplicated.

The DSP can crunch data of any kind. I know it can play tracker music on there, likely wav, maybe even mp3 with right software.. as to if anyone would use it or not, probably not but I am often alone in my line of work, so if I want to add a DSP I will do it

Of course Peter is patching games all the time, if I did say to him, load this file from hard drive, copy the data over to special audio RAM, then set bits the single register to select audio file to play, he could easily batch anything to play MP3 files. Of course this would be easy way to set up advanced audio system on the ST, but of course DSP offers a lot more features.

It really depends on if there is a MP3 / audio decoder out there which can operate in parallel mode with its own SRAM to store the audio data.

Looking at this...

http://www.vlsi.fi/en/products/vsmd001.html

It says it can use serial Flash.. Not really good for instantly changing sounds, but I wonder if could be adapted for serial RAM instead. Would really want to go with parallel interfacing make life a lot easier data transfer


EDIT
Actually isn't there a MP3 licence to be had is using them or something ? I'm half remember something like that a few years ago

EDIT2:

Saw this...

Previously, the MP3 format was protected under patent, so anybody who wanted to sell products that used MP3 files would have to pay a licensing fee. Now those patents have expired and MP3 is freeeeee and you can embed the decoder into any project or product!

This is an awesome topic Chris, I think people would love an Exxos 'special' upgrade like this. You usually focus on 'bread and butter' boosters or stability mods, very nice to see you broadening your horizons.