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ChipMusic.org / Forums / Posts by arfink
No big deal. I'm busy as hell too.. i know how shit gets. it ultimately comes down to communication which is always lacking on both sides.
RE: nullsleep, no conspiracies that i know of.
Ain't that the way it goes for everyone?
By the way, there is a conspiracy. Our founder is the dear Baron. 
Huzzah! Now my serial link is working too. Now to work out some noise issues and other junk like that.
Nice stuff! I have always been curious about Amiga since I saw a friend's machine once, but never got into it. Great to see you're taking it into the online age though, it's a great thing to do with the old-timer machines.
Well, this may come as a slight dissapointment to some folks here, but the Munchausen cart isn't going to have 100% MMC1 support. (as I mentioned in the first place, I believe) Some functionality of the MMC1 is most definitely going to need to be dedicated to controlling the write enable lines for the Flash and RAM chips, which means some control lines will be re-purposed. Alot will remain, but programmers who want to use the MMC1 in the Munchausen will have to work around the missing registers. It just isn't possible to manage the Flash chip without doing this (or increasing the component count, thus increasing price.) A future revision may be able to fully support MMC1 properly, but at this point the first revision cannot. We will try to provide documentation detailing which registers have been changed so that developers can tell if their code will still work or can be modified to work.
However, some good news: the prototyping has begun in earnest as I rip some donors boards apart today, and Blargg thinks we ought to be able to support a multi-cart menu interface for NROM games. Blargg has got a new version of the controller-port cable working correctly as well, using a Poviant USB to serial port adapter, which is super cheap, and I'll be following suit as soon as my parts come in.
I'm not much for gigging, but from my experience with on-the-road computing and Lan partying, I'd say there isn't much reason not to do a desktop machine. I'd say build inside of a tough old case you don't care if it gets beat up, and if you want to have some convenience just bolt a strap handle on the top. For gigging, I suggest getting a small 10 or 12 inch VGA LCD and a keyboard with a touchpad built in. Conect them to the PC and zip tie their cables together at regular intervals to make them less unruly and easier to transport. Add velcro to the back of the kayboard and back of the LCD panel and you can make it very easy to transport. Just grab the tower's handle in one hand, the pigtail of the monitor/keyboard wad in the other hand, and away you go. Everything else can just be transported normally and plugged in when you get there.
Yes, that's the other emphasis of the cartridge besides the flash is the onboard RAM banks which allow for lots of flexibility for quick rewrites etc. NROM support is probably going to be coming from the SRAM anyways, with Flash writes being reserved for MMC1 games.
herr_prof wrote:I really think the key is having tracker tables run ON the cart. You then just have midi only controll patch changing and midi notes and light cc.
That's kind of similar to what I said xD
If you can make instrument definitions, say, with an editor on the computer, then save it and UPLOAD this to the cart, and you can upload, I dunno, 128 instrument definitions, you can change them on the fly using program change and adopt tracker-like functionality without wasting cycles with unnecessary MIDI data being sent.
This, to me, doesn't seem like it'd be too big of a deal. Now, I'm not the programmer, so I'm not certain, but this kind of thing would already have to take place for stuff like NSF playback anyways, so setting up some presets and then having a way to quickly trigger them seems like it'd be perfectly doable.
Oh, yes maybe that wasn't so explicit on here. Thanks for that egr. If you want to see a nice practical example of how cool this kind of thing is, look at No Carrier's new GlitchNES 2 (not released quite yet) which allows for pattern/pallette/nametable/strobe etc. changes on the fly because it's constantly polling the cable for new data to insert into the system.
What do you think about the machine receiving a full MIDI instrument dump on each sequencer step, for each channel?
Yes, I am extreme
Uh, that'd make alot of MIDI stuff choke, just saying.
He payed for the parts and built it himself and he's not a commercial operation, so they can't stop him. Notice that the copyright holders want this to be a non-commercial thing, right? He's not producing them for sale, but he can sell his personal unit. This is just like selling your old DVDs. Not a big deal.
OK, actual chopping and hacking begins today on the prototype. I got a donor board that needs to have the PRG desoldered and I found a flash chip in an old computer BIOS that looks compatible. Hopefully my rather brutish extraction of the chip hasn't damaged it! Also, cable construction can soon begin as well, since I have got some broken controllers to hack cords off of.
arfink wrote:Now if only it was plain microcontroller code instead of Arduino it'd be less expensive.
http://www.moderndevice.com/products/rbbb-kit
RBBB's are $12.50, man.
Ohhhh, nice stuff! Welp, the Munchausen may have to ship with one of these, since it's so awesome.
Cool beans! Our devcart really needs to be able to support this new hardware. Our current read/write mode is done with a passive cable or at best a MAX232. A bit slow. However, with the Munchausen cart, having too high a serial transfer speed actually makes writing to Flash a pain in the butt, but for other thing this looks like it would be pretty cool. (edit, not true, a misunderstanding on my part from something Blargg said to me earlier. This thing could make flashing the Munchausen 10x faster.)
Now if only it was plain microcontroller code instead of Arduino it'd be less expensive.
And so the UK continues it's ever-increasing race from tyranny unto tyranny. I pity you guys. I really do. I'm sorry.
Arfink, you are definitely a hero amongst men. Once this product matures a bit more, I will definitely snap one up.
You're too kind. However, I'd like to specially point out a real hero- node has very generously made a donation to help get this project going. Thanks so much node! I'll have to send you some special goodies as thanks!
I would suggest seeking out a certain ChannelManiac, who frequents places like the Neo-Geo.com forums. He may be able to hook you up with something.
ChipMusic.org / Forums / Posts by arfink