Audio playback is a trivial activity for any trendy pc, but when a microcontroller options sound output, it’s often within the type of beeps and boops, or maybe easy melodies. Nevertheless, as famous in this ModPlay RISC-V challenge writeup by creator Tim/cpldcpu, a contemporary microcontroller is able to way over that. In reality, a single-cycle 32-bit RISC-V is comparable in some ways to an 80486 or 68040 from the early Nineties.
For this challenge, cpldcpu determined it was time for microcontroller sound output to progress to the fabulous MOD-format music of the late ’80s and early ’90s. This musical paradigm takes numerous saved samples and performs them on separate tracks like a sequencer, which permits useful resource and storage-limited machines to play reasonably attention-grabbing tunes with out the necessities of absolutely recorded songs. This ends in actually attention-grabbing music, paying homage to video video games from that period.
ModPlay RISC-V permits playback of four-channel MOD recordsdata, lots of which can be found on The Mod Archive. Amazingly, the participant takes up solely round 4kb of flash reminiscence, and makes use of between 15 and 25% of the CPU’s processing energy throughout playback.
Whereas there’s probably nonetheless extra to do on this challenge, cpldcpu is stepping again from engaged on it in the intervening time. You, nonetheless, can try — and even perhaps proceed — his work, discovered right here on GitHub. For now, hearken to his wonderful outcomes from a MOD-enabled microcontroller and filter setup!
