SimH PDP-8 simulator plays music

[SPC]

Impressive. At least for me :-0

Regards
Sergio

2017-04-05 16:43 GMT+02:00 Kyle Owen via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>:
> I suspected that I could somehow get some music out of the SimH PDP-8
> simulator for a while now, if I could only make it run real time and toggle
> a GPIO pin fast enough say, on a Raspberry Pi. That may still be doable in
> the future, but I also had a suspicion that I could generate music not in
> real time.
>
> I finally got around to trying out my idea last night. A few lines were
> added to pdp8_cpu.c to spit out the elapsed instruction cycles every time a
> CAF instruction is executed, the default "noise" instruction in the MUSIC.PA
> program.
>
> That's all I did to the simulator. I then ran MUSIC with a given .MU file
> and watched as many integers are spit out onto the screen. These were
> copied and pasted into a new text file and saved.
>
> The rest of it is in a single C program that I cobbled together. It reads
> in this new text file and generates a series of pulses as an array of
> floats. Each interval is about 1.93 microseconds, which I calculated to be
> the average number of pulses for the music program to be "in tune" with
> A=440 Hz, plus or minus. This value is subject to change, particularly as
> the notes get higher in frequency, but only by perhaps 6% or so from my
> experiments. One detail to note is that per the recommendation of the
> MUSIC.PA manual, these pulses are extended to roughly 6 microseconds, or
> three time intervals in my program.
>
> This array of floats is then downsampled use libsamplerate to 44.1 kHz
> (from 1/1.93 microseconds, or roughly 520 kHz) and output to a canonical
> WAV file, 16-bit single channel.
>
> What do you know, it worked! Here's a sample:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_urDcyluX9c
>
> My code can be found here, for those interested:
> https://github.com/drovak/music
>
> Presumably, this technique could be used to generate music from any given
> computer simulator.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kyle