Playing Samples on your Atari 2600

The Little Girl is having a Shining moment over samples.

BOOdAw posted a link to interesting code for adding samples to your 2600 tracks. From the TROGblog:

I have a habit of checking out the 2600 programming forums every week or so, and two weeks ago I started commenting on the topic Advanced sound techniques: how do they work? My interest in this topic was mostly in sample playback. I’ve been messing with digital sound samples since 1990, and I was very impressed when I found out a couple years ago that the 2600 was capable of playing back decent quality sound samples. My only exposure to this was the Berzerk Voice-Enhanced, which is a thing of beauty (and a joy forever.)

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If I get the time and energy, I’ll enhance wav2atari to work on 16-bit samples, and add a downsampling option so you can specify the output sample rate. I also need to clean up the playback asm so the delays are balanced.

The zip file I’m including below contains the wav2atari.pl script, the HELLO.BIN Atari binary, the hello.asm dasm assembly file, and the original hello.wav file for comparison. Enjoy!

HelloWorld.zip ( 11K ) Number of downloads: 29

Here’s another demo that varies the pitch of the sample:

HELLO2.BIN ( 4K ) Number of downloads: 22

Here’s the modified source code:

hello2.txt ( 45.82K ) Number of downloads: 21

While you are there check out his hilarious Lehman Bros. game, and the sadly stuck in turnaround, Nort.Exe.