TRAXMOD

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Nectarine Demoscene Radio The Mod Archive

History

Back in the early 90's, I wrote a multichannel digital audio library in 100% assembly language on my 40MHz 386 running DOS. OmniPlayer was my standalone module player and BWSB was the development kit. It was pretty good at the time, and I even made a few sales of the development kit. A few years later though, Microsoft released Windows 95 and rendered all DOS software obsolete.

Back then, I had wished I could make a dedicated hardware board that would handle all of the audio processing on its own. Of course, not having any electronics engineering knowledge, this was beyond my abilities at the time. Today, technology has advanced and brought us cheap, easy to use microcontrollers with DSP capabilities. It is now possible to build a dedicated hardware device for playing modules without costing an arm and a leg. A single SD Card can now hold more data than my 386's hard drives ever had. This project's goal is to make a small, standalone, digital audio player using low cost components.

Why?

Some might wonder why anyone would want to make a digital module player when small portable MP3 players are available everywhere.

I think the number one reason is for nostalgia purposes. The original Atari game system is totally obsolete by today's gaming standards, yet people were still ranting and raving at the release of the Atari Classics 10-in-1 Joystick. Nobody made a small standalone module player back in the day, but it sure would have been cool. Why wouldn't it be cool now?

Remember those old "chiptune" modules? Now imagine if you really could have a "chiptune" playing out of a single dsPIC chip!

Others might say, why not just buy a PDA with a StrongARM CPU and compile a mod player for it? That might be a workable plan, but PDA's cost a lot and are constantly changing. If I write software for playing MOD files on a PDA, I'm going to have to waste time continually updating my software to support the latest PDA models to keep up with older models being discontinued. If I can write firmware for the dsPIC and design the hardware myself, I can cut out all of this upgrade madness and concentrate on actually improving the features.

Other Uses

Once we have firmware that can mix multiple channels of digital audio on a cheap dsPIC, a lot of other possible products open up as well. You could use it for a MIDI instrument expansion module, a digital keyboard, maybe even add an LCD to create a cheap Tracker "laptop."

A single chip music player costing $5 could be used to replace mechanical music boxes, while allowing much more varied music than previously possible.

The RIAA will throw your ass in court if you even think about sharing MP3 files with your friends. Why not do MODs instead? The RIAA doesn't produce MOD files at all, so they should have no interest in people copying MODs. We might be able to add a (wireless?) transfer mechanism to let players swap MOD music files with another unit on the fly, no PC required. How cool would it be to compose your own MOD music file, then zap copies out to all your friends at school the next day?

With a little extra coding and some hardware for interfacing with a phone line, you could make a cheap SD Card based answering machine or voice mail system. Heck, maybe even a Telemarketing Interception System!

Preassembled Kits?

Will there be a preassembled kit available for purchase? Hopefully, but it really depends upon how much demand there is. Let us know what you think in the TRAXMOD Forum!

Current Status

Please go to the main TRAXMOD page to read about the latest news and work being done on this project.