Monday, July 20, 2020

What to do with a Adafruit NeoTrellis M4?

I have a NeoTrellis winging its way to me. It has an amazing amount of capability including a 120 MHz Microprocessor, 2 x 12 bit A/D, XYZ accelerometer and 8 x 4 RGB push button matrix.
The question is what to do with it. My initial intention was to use it as a MIDI controller but the onboard sound production makes me think it should really be an instrument. This could be quite fun in a constrained minimalist sort of way. I think the main problem is that there is only 8MB of flash storage onboard and 512kb of flash ram and 192kb SRAM.

But that made me think ... what about what they used to do on the Amiga. That sounded great and should be fairly resource light.

This lead me down a nostalgic rabbit hole that turned up two gems.
  • ProTracker has been reborn as OpenMPT which can load old Amiga MOD files, edit, extract MIDI and sample or stream the file to modern audio formats.
  • The Wayback Machine has 18,000 MOD files in an 4 ISO's (CD1, CD2, CD3, CD4)
I think I can do something with this ... not exactly sure yet but I think some sort of retro 8bit MOD player should be possible with a extension goal of making it a stand alone Tracker type sequencer.

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