My Stylus

My stylus, currently, is a shard from a SNES, harvested by a combination of hammering, levering, and just pulling really hard.

One day, you'll get pissed off that you don't have an inline head bit, too, and you'll resort to this for opening up your Nintendo consoles.

On this occasion, I had smashed open the yellowing grey box to extract it's Audio Processing Unit, a small metal box manufactured by Nintendo's favorate hardware partner, Mitsumi, which features the SPC700 processor (S-SPU), a special purpose DSP (S-DSP), two 32K SRAM chips by Sharp and Hitachi, and a NEC Digital/Analogue converter. It's rather hard to believe how unusually sophisticated and advanced the SHVC-SOUND module is.

The SPC700, specifically, is an interesting piece of hardware. It's a somewhat simple microprocessor with six registers and 250 opcodes, with addressing for at least 64K, and running at 1024Hz. It's part in the APU team is to load instructions into it's internal RAM and execute it. Since the SNES' APU is just a glorified wavetable MIDI device, it's one megahertz speed is on par (most MIDI data transmission rates are set to 1MHz by default).

Most people will hear "the SPC700 was designed by Ken Kutaragi" and instantly turn into a Sony fanboy. For those of you who walk this path, I kick you. The SPC700 is, in essence, a really fancy sequencer. It takes note data and delivers it to the S-DSP when it needs to be played. The real genious is the DSP itself.

The S-DSP was, apperently, not designed by Ken Kutaragi, but by some poor peon who got backstabed by Kenny when he decided to hide the poor man's name from the public (and maybe kill him. I wouldn't doubt it if he did, too; he's just that freaky). The S-DSP is capable of storing its samples in a compressed form, making the minimal amount of SRAM three or four times more useful; it produces eight seperate channels of independant pitch, pan, and gain, all being controlled by individual ADSR envelopes, echo, and various digital filtering effects. The S-DSP is, in a single word, "Bomb."

So, I smashed apart my SNES (don't worry, it was broken anyway) for this litttle box. My plans for it? A PC interface for hardware sound synthesis (or is it sequencing? the line is somewhat vague there) Now, I can use those SPC music packs that have traversed the web to play awesome music, like the soundtracks to Chrono Trigger and Actraiser. If I can learn anything about hardware design, I may even be able to make a standalone music box out of it. The box only needs 5V, and (supposedly) Basic Stamps are easy to program. Now all I need is money and time.

SUMMER VACATION!