[Silverpill] sent in this interesting Super Nintendo mod. [Raph] interfaced a SNES audio processing unit to his parallel port using a logic gate and a few resistors. The project looks like it probably died off, but the goal was to use a APU to play authentic audio from emulated games. Schematics and code to get the thing working are all available on the site.
You can convert the various sound files into the SNES’s format. I’d really like to see some people write music with this. But then theres always the Midibox SNES thats in development!
http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/midibox_snes_apu
It’s not exactly a dead project… in fact, Caitsith has created an Arduino shield that interfaces with the SNES APU. In fact, I have one of his early versions sitting on my desk right now.
He posted about it on the Lady Ada forums, you can check it out here:
http://forums.ladyada.net/viewtopic.php?t=5195
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Wow, there’s a blast from the past – I built one of these 5 years ago from the same diagram! Worked perfectly with Caitsith’s program so I never fiddled around with it too much.
It’s an awesome project, but if you’re planning to do it yourself be aware that not all SNES consoles have the sound unit as a removable module like this – no PAL consoles do, and only some of the earlier American and Japanese ones. Don’t go buying a European console for parts!