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SNES Audio Unit As Stand-Alone Player
An anonymous reader writes "Raphael Assénat successfully turned the SNES' audio processing unit into a stand alone unit which can be controlled through a parallel port, allowing people to play SNES music separate from games and the SNES' main unit. Elsewhere there is also a tutorial about adding S/PDIF digital sound output to the SNES."
I'm torn though - do I want to listen to Shitty Beep Concerto, or Tinny Licensed Song in G minor
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In the first 10 posts, the poor SNES/Spdif page is slashdotted... Maybe hosting on his dreamcast might've been a better idea?
I SO don't need this.
I got SNES tunes playing in my head since I'm young, and can't seem to stop. Damn you, Final Fantasy!
(For the curious, I do have voices in my head too, and they're telling me to do nasty stuff. To hurt curious persons. That would be you.)
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I'm sure some people know about listening to old videogame software without out this hardware hack. You won't be as leet as this guy, but you can still enjoy the music.
You can find a player at http://www.zophar.net/utilities/music.html, a huge archive for just about every platform.
After you get a player for your choosen platform, you can click through to a song database. For example, here are the SNES songs available: http://www.zophar.net/zsnes/spc/
Have fun.
Any music of any SNES game has been available for many years with the .spc file format. The audio files sound exactly as the music would sound on the SNES console. .spc database can be found here: http://www.snesmusic.org/spcsets/#so
A really large
i think that's very cool. i love to see new efforts being drawn on retro hardware.
but i do wonder why one would bother building a parallel port unit to play the music when there are software emulators doing that work for us already?
if it were truly *standalone*, then it would be a fun, useful way to incorporate it into music projects or just have fun - but as it's tied to the computer already, why not just use the software?
...like the SidStation based on the legendary MOS 6581 (aka. SID) chip from the Commodore 64.
The SidStation is essentially a MIDI synth expander that uses the SID chip as it's main sound source. It'd be interesting to do the same kind of thing with a SNES sound source, although from memory, it wasn't a sound chip worthy of any merit.
Here are some other places to listen to videogame music in nontradional ways.
First there are the minibosses http://minibosses.com/ They are a cover band of videogame music that preform live shows. They even have a few MP3s on their site.
Then there is djpretzel's remix.overclocked.org http://remix.overclocked.org/ Here you can find tons of songs set to a beat. For the true emulation nerd, check out the original overclocked.org http://www.overclocked.org/ comic strips. They are well dated, but still bring a smile to my face.
Some old nes music has been remixed by a few talented people. For game music in general, and a fair amount of nes remixes in specific, take a quick trip to http://www.ocremix.org/
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
I don't know if it was a typo, but that is a PERFECT word for the people I see around here.
OC Remix
There is a lot of game music out there that's amazingly good, especially from the PSX era onwards.
A lot of the Squaresoft RPGs on the SNES had awesome music as well. RPGs in general tend to have pretty good soundtracks, in fact.