Hackaday Links: March 25, 2013

Illegal, yet impressive

cans

Want a soda? Just grab a robot, shove it in a vending machine, and grab yourself one. This video is incredibly French, but it looks like we’ve got a custom-built robot made out of old printers and other miscellaneous motors and gears here. It’s actually pretty impressive when you consider 16 ounce cans weigh a pound.… Read the rest

Creating a MIDI synth from a Commodore SID

The Commodore SID was the audio chip in the venerable Commodore 64 and in the 30 years since release has attained classic status and become one of the best ways to get your chiptune on. Designed by famous synthesizer designer [Bob Yannes], it was only a matter of time before we saw a real, homebrew MIDI synth based on the Read the rest

Propeller turned into chiptune player with a software SID

If there wasn’t reason enough to love the Parallax Propeller, now you can listen to chiptunes with your own pocket SID audio player.

This chiptune audio player uses the very unusual and very cool eight-core Parallax Propeller microcontroller. After soldering a few caps and resistors to a Propeller dev board to allow for audio out, the only thing necessary … Read the rest

Making chiptunes with 32 bytes of RAM

Ah, chiptunes. One of the few remaining human endeavours where less RAM, less storage space, and fewer capabilities are actually considered an improvement. [dop3joe] over at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace sent in a tiny chiptune playing circuit using the most bare-bones hardware we’ve ever seen.

The Noiseplug, as [dop3joe] calls it, is based on a very, very small 6 pin … Read the rest

Chiptune player uses preprocessed .MOD files

[Kayvon] just finished building this chiptune player based on a PIC microcontroller. The hardware really couldn’t be any simpler. He chose to use a PIC18F2685 just because it’s big enough to store the music files directly and it let him get away with not using an external EEPROM for that purpose. The output pins feed a Digital to Analog … Read the rest

Putting an Atari POKEY in your pocket

The Atari POKEY served as the main I/O chip on the venerable Atari 400/800 and XL/XE 8-bit computers. While a chip designed to get voltages from game paddles and scanning a matrix of keyboard switches wouldn’t normally be remembered 30 years later, the POKEY had another function: generating very, very distinctive music and sound effects for those old Atari games. … Read the rest

Putting every chiptune ever in an FPGA

Finally one device combines the power of the Commodore 64 SID, Atari ST YM2149, and Amiga MOD audio into one awesome box. It’s called the RetroCade Synth, and there’s a Kickstarter that is perfect for starting your chiptune composing journey.

[Jack]‘s RetroCade synth is connects directly to the Papilio One 500k FPGA. All the classic chiptune ICs can be … Read the rest