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Mixed Atari 2600 MIDI Sample Playback

little-scale’s done it again by being crafty as hell to upgrade the capability of his MIDI interfaces; this time for the Atari 2600.  We showed you before that the Atari 2600 was capable of 8-bit PCM earlier via TROGdor.  He’s taken this technology and melded it into his MIDI interface.

I wonder if he’s also added the capability to speed up or slow down the playrate of the samples yet. ;D

6 comments to Mixed Atari 2600 MIDI Sample Playback

  • Woah that is just insane! Didn’t know the Atari could handle such sick drums.

  • Holy mary! This is awesome!

  • Hi guys. It’s 4bit not 8bit (the first channel is still available for normal TIA synthesis :D), but yes the user has the ability to change the playback speed of the drums via a MIDI CC command. Thanks for the support!

  • B00daW

    Nice. :D Do you have bankswitching set up? I’m pretty sure samples can be sped up pretty fast, and filtered before being encoded. With 8bit PCM, I can get a kick into about 512-768B. How big are your samples?

  • Hi B00daw, samples are about 2k each, however this is way overkill obviously, and I am looking at about yeah 500 – 1k ea, so as to fit more in. I am currently only using the lower four bits of each byte, I haven’t put two four bit samples into each byte yet, although that is an option of course and can be quite easily done.

  • Also – good idea about the filtering, I will have to try that out :)