I've decided to try to make an 8-bit style music player out of a microcontroller. There are some really cool arduino versions of this project, but they all seem to require a very confusing custom file format to describe the song. My goal is to use a simple format that can be easily generated from a midi file. As a proof of concept, I wrote some code which plays a midi file converted to a list of note data in the format "start time, duration, pitch, volume".
This version has a known issue with high pitch notes. If a note requires a duty cycle of 80.5 DAC cycles, it will just round down to 80 cycles, which makes it sound flat. Instead, it should alternate between 80 and 81.
Eventually, I plan to add more sounds and effects other than "square wave with 50% duty cycle", but for now, that's the only choice. The plan is to make each instrument kind of like a script. Each instrument would have an array of function pointers and arguments which get executed in order. Functions could do things like "delay 20 instrument cycles", "set output to triangle wave", "increase pitch by major third", "do a vibrato effect", or even "move function pointer array pointer back n steps".
I plugged the DAC into my computer's line in port, and recorded this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGQ_Zj2jo8s
