GameToy hardware project
These pages describe a sort of blog-ish time log on my 'GameToy' hardware project (stalled indefinitely).
[<< First entry] [< Previous entry] [Next entry >] [Latest entry > >]
June 2nd, 2006 - Laura
The STK500 did not arrive in the mail today, so I'm hopingtm early next week. I threw the supplier an email and I was assured that it has been shipped.
I surprised myself yesterday by managing to play some simple piano .mid files in a recognizable manner =)
I'm only using 'note on' events, and a simple piano mid file shrunk from 14k to 1.4k, but it's still rather large. And that's by only using 'note on', without different kinds of instruments or aftertouch or note offs or anything.
The 8kHz sample rate sounds rather bad, so I'll have to see whether I can afford pumping it up to 11 or even 22kHz. It all depends on how fast the synth will be on the target device.
In any case, I consider the audio work to be done for now - I'll have to wait for the STK500.
Next up is a bit of graphics work. I'll have a 8x8 'sprite' format, with mask and data, and I need to be able to blit those on other-than-8bit offsets.. thus, every sprite bit (typically) will consist of at least 16 'ands' and 'ors', along with a lot of shifting.
I'm also thinking of including a 64-character 8x8 pixel charset in there, which will take 512 bytes.
Comments are appreciated.