Slashdot Mirror
Songboy Turns GameBoys into MP3 Players
farfisa sent us linkage to
Songboy which is a $99 addon for a gameboy which allows it to play MP3s. I just used my to play B mode tetris (Start at level 9 with the blocks all the way up and try to get 25 lines: total adrenaline). Its pretty amazing how general purpose these ancient little devices have turned out to be.
16MB is not enough. You could store what, like 3-5 songs on that? Woo-freakin-hoo.
I'm waiting for MP3 players w/ a whole lot of space. There are digital cameras w/ 320 megs of space. If I could get an MP3 player w/ that much space, I would be happy.
It might be nice if one could pry into the flash memory of the more exotic sound cards to program the DSP into playing things like mp3's. When I find a site that shows more detail on how sound cards are constructed, I would like to try programming one of those things.
Right now, I just have a few simple sound cards and am not sure if they can be reprogrammed. I do know that looking at my RIO that uses only 1 AA battery, nothing is more effecient or flies like assembly on a DSP!
I'm waiting for the springboard based mp3 module for my Visor to become cheaper.. Cant really afford anything more than 99 bucks for a mp3 springboard..
:)
Then again, I'd love to own a GPS, Wireless or bluetooth module
--
Songname: whatever.mp3
First image: whatever.1.bmp
Second image: whatever.2.bmp
You can do text somehow too. (probably "whatever.1.txt") I've already got a few bits of artwork copied off MP3.com and epitonic.com that come up when the appropriate tracks are selected. Hopefully the hardware version will also allow for this...
BTW: I also submitted this story, based on an article at MP3.com.
My bet is that the add-on uses the Gameboy as a sort of dumb terminal and power supply.
If that's the case it seems like it should be possible to leave the Gameboy free to play games while the Soundboy plays music. It might require some sort of pass-through connector for the game cartridge, but once the Soundboy has received its instructions (playlist) there shouldn't be any need for it to use the host's I/O or processor.
Hmm. An alternative to a pass-through would be to store games in part of the Soundboy's memory and allow the Gameboy to read this direct. Of course, that would make the Soundboy an ideal way to pir^Wbackup commercial cartridges (you'd need a way to read a cartridge into a file first, but that can't be too difficult).
Being able to play games and mp3s simultaneously on the same handheld would be very nice.
Aside: I wonder what using the Soundboy does to battery life?
Nintendo just won a permanent injunction against Bung last month. A US court ruled that the Bung carts were intended for piracy, not development, and ruled that Bung must pay Nintendo some $7 million as well as cease selling its flash carts in the US, Canada, Mexico, and (I believe) parts of Central America that the court has jurisdiction over.
As a GB Developer myself, I'm upset about the ruling - I was planning on buying a cart soon. Now you either have to have them purchased and imported by someone outside the Continent or win one in the current Bung Amatuer GB developer contest. Frankly, I doubt Bung can stay in business now, with a hung debt and a huge market dead (then again, Hong Kong is where they make all their cash off of software pirates anyways).
I think that a large percentage of the people who purchased these ARE using them for piracy, but now I have to and either continue to use an emulator or wait for my "studio" to become Nintendo licensed (soon, I hope) and purchase a several thousand dollar cart =(
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
The page said it's coming out in 16, 32, and 64 meg versions. 64 megs is enough for 8-9 normal quality mp3s. :/
That thing has only 16 megs of Ram, meaning about ... :(
.. :)
1/4 hour of mpeg music
It looks that they use the gameboy only as "display" for the song titles, etc, so I think
this is a pretty useless invetion.
I think I stick with my RIO
This comment is *not* insightful, it's just plain wrong... the device can play both mp3's and mpe's... you just get some extra features with mpe's (lyrics and copyright info).
there is a psx device that fits into the parallel port that allows mp3 cds to be played on it.
it's not a program on the cd, but it works nonetheless.
'Mullethead. A hairstyle that's a way of life'
Wow man.
With enough of these babies clustered together you could probably get the processing power of a 386-SX 16!
Cool!
Songboy has licensed the .MPE file format from Destiny Media Technologies for use with the SongboyTM portable and Songboy PC PlayerTM.
The .MPE or encrypted multimedia format enables artists to release music tracks that are encrypted for the purchaser.
As far as I can tell, users (who would like the fancy-shmancy liner notes and the like) will have to purchase .mpe's from songboy.
Until, of course, some geek builds mpe2mp3 (if it doesn't exist already).
The baby little processor (z80 or 8051, don't remember which) in a gameboy could not handle the decoding by itself. However, Micronas makes DSP chips that will do the decode in hardware, taking in blocks of data, and then dumping out a PCM stream that a D/A can handle. This is how the MP-Man works. I looked into making one of these for a senior design project in school. All the processor needs to do is dump the mpeg data into the buffer of the dsp. The Gameboy could be doing as little as sending control signals to an fpga that dumps the data from memory into the decoder if the processor couldn't handle it. We were looking at a 20Mhz PIC to do the data handshaking for us, along with some other things.
I sure would feel weird about bringing a "Songboy" with me while I went on my jog during lunch break. Imagine what girls in the weight room will think when they see you with one of these...
... Needless to say, you know how that encounter ended up.
"What's that?" the pretty brunette doing sit-ups asks flirtatiously. "This? This is my Songboy!" I reply smoothly.
At $99 it is an add-on that's twice the price of the original product. Probably not gonna do too well, me thinks!
This "pluggable" MP3 player for the Gameboy reminds me a whole lot of the Handspring "Springboard" MP3 player from Innogear. The MiniJam Player uses the same approach as this Gameboy product uses of inserting a module with a DSP, stero-out, and memory; and leaving the "host" hardware to do management functions.
I might actually buy the player from Innogear: I just love those buttons on the top (ala MiniDisc)! It is just too bad they had to go with a proprietary flash memory spec. Bummer.
For the MiniJam spec in PDF, click here.
-AP
I think the fish finder's a cooler hack. At least that uses the gameboy as a something more than just a display.
i pherals/pocketsonar.html
http://members.xoom.com/nintendorep/gameboy/per
-=- SiKnight
I got a Rio PMP300 for $99 about a month ago... I can certainly see the geekiness of a gameboy that plays MP3s, but I think the costs outweigh the benefits in this case... it's less portable, it has less RAM, there is not, AFAIK, a good solid codebase of open source to support it, there's no reason to believe it's going to use anything but a proprietary memory expansion (ie probably not compact flash or smartmedia) and of course it presupposes you already own a game boy, which I don't. Since the Gameboy's CPU doesn't have the strength required to do this on it's own, we assume that this thing will have a processor on board, so essentially it's just a slightly dumbed-down Rio that's permanently tethered to a Game Boy, for the same price... the ONLY benefit I can see is that it can use the display for visualization or some other optical goodies (the page lists album covers, lyrics, etc), and this is not a good enough reason to warrant the drawbacks, IMHO. Game boy owners, just buy a Rio and have two excellent devices that are specilized to their respective tasks, and do them well.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
... in the gbdev mailing list. I run the archive at mixdown.org/gbdev.
:-)
The add-on would be a DSP or fast processor because, as one poster correctly put it, the GB processor (a bitched-up Z80) simply does not have the balls to decode an MP3 stream at any usable rate.
I too consider a GB MP3 device totally useless. A RIO gives you all that, has more memory (IIRC) and is better on batteries, to boot. The GB can't even be used as a (proper) audio output because there is only a single pin on the GB cartridge you can inject audio on, so that leaves stero operation out. Unless they've somehow used the GB sound chip in its digitized mode.
The people in that list have a lot of great ideas, but some seem to want to push the platform too far (read: beyond something economically worthwhile). Things like MP3 addons, PDA software, raycasted 3D graphics and <cough> a multitasking OS are, IMHO, a waste of effort and brainpower for otherwise bright minds. However... full-colour imagery, robotics and a multitude of cheap computing projects are well worth the effort.
If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB.