cheeseburgerjoe

Hi everyone! This is my first post here, so let me say you guys are doing AMAZING stuff! I have been lurking a while but never got around to building a box. The MidiBox Sid has been my favorite drool worthy MB, although the SEQ is pretty cool too. The only reason I have not build a Sid yet is because of the price of those chips, and wanting 8! I had one in a working c128 and didn't have the heart to pull it. Now we're getting closer to my point. I have been working with the Parallax Propeller Chip for a while now and absolutely love it. I have several iterations of HW in testing and I believe I'm close to having a run of boards printed! The hardware is based on a 3.2" touchscreen tft lcd, with SD socket on the back of board, 512k x 16 bit "FAST" SRAM. 19 expansion I/O + 12 Dig I/O, 2 audio, Midi I/O and more! Now a bit about the propeller chip, for those unfamiliar. Its eight processors (cogs) can operate simultaneously, either independently or cooperatively, sharing common resources through a central hub. The developer has full control over how and when each cog is employed; there is no compiler-driven or operating system-driven splitting of tasks among multiple cogs. A shared system clock keeps each cog on the same time reference, allowing for true deterministic timing and synchronization. Two programming languages are available: the easy-to-learn high-level Spin, and Propeller Assembly which can execute at up to 160 MIPS (20 MIPS per cog). There are also third party languages available. We're very close to my point, but here's the kicker... One of the objects available "and tested on my HW" is SIDcog. It is a sid emulator that runs in one cog. And sounds pretty darn close! I do not have OS implementation on the posted version of hardware but am working in a more primitive environment for the moment. From what I can understand, the propeller chip SHOULD let me run at least 4 copies of SIDcog. I am planning an expansion module with another propeller chip, but still trying to grasp the concept. So, from this lengthy explanation you are probably guessing that I'm interested in porting the midibox software into my project. I'm not a very strong C programmer, and not sure how to go about porting code over. There are C compilers available for the propeller chip, but hardware variation is going to make things more difficult. I'm entirely sure this can be done, but have no clue where to start. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Attached is pdf for the hardware I'm working on. Parts are on order. I am also attaching a recording directly from my hardware of the cheesy demo song the object came with. Midi implementation is next, and finishing hardware is awaiting results of a colleague's research on similar hardware. Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions? controller_forDrac.pdf SidCog.mp3