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from the help!-the-bots-are-colluding-on-submissions dept.
As readers of these pages know, I've always been obsessed with audio and video compression for humble machines. My game Planet Golf for the Commodore 64 even includes Full Motion Video running from a floppy disk. The problem with this stuff, though, is that, as much as it's interesting to see these experiments run on such a limited piece of HW, and as much as it feels like an achievement to the programmer, that doesn't change their gimmicky nature. In other words, let's be honest, no person in their right frame of mind would waste a second of their time listening to those scratchy sounds, unless deafened by unconditional love for the machine. Spoiled as we are with high quality sound coming from all kinds of devices around us, poor Commodore 64 cannot be our to-go solution for our aural pleasure.
Or can it?
Mission
To build a C64 software player that can play a whole song at 48Khz (higher frequency than CDs' 44.1Khz) using a stock Commodore 64 and a regular ROM cartridge, which is your typical 80s setup.
Now, there are all kinds of devilish pieces of hardware available for your Commodore 64 nowadays, such as 16Mb RAM Expansion Units, or even mp3 hardware players. Of course, this stuff was not around in the 80s, and it therefore does not appeal to purists. In other words, any reliance on these monstrosities would get me disqualified. You might as well run a marathon riding a motorbike. The largest "legitimate" ROM Cartridges are those that Ocean used for their games. You can store a whopping one megabyte of data onto them. We are going to need all of it!
Original URL: https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday March 30 2018, @06:25PM (6 children)
If Mozilla were to hire this guy, then perhaps the Youtube HTML5 shit wouldn't be so laggy on "older" machines.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday March 30 2018, @06:36PM (3 children)
I didn't know you could do HTML5 on a Commodore!
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Friday March 30 2018, @07:46PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Saturday March 31 2018, @04:05AM (1 child)
Coding 6502 assembly and addressing the VIC-II chip *now*... 1M is a shit ton of RAM, and are computers *really* doing much more now?
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(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday March 31 2018, @08:18AM
One area you could legitimately need so much RAM is for the display. If you limit your video to 800x600 pixels in 256-color mode, you'll still need to have ~470 kilobytes of video RAM.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday March 30 2018, @07:48PM (1 child)
Then youtube would work perfectly on a 1GHz P3, but the videos would play too fast on anything newer ;)
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Saturday March 31 2018, @10:02PM
MoSlow.
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