Now the sequencer has been updated and after a few day where I added additiona file support to the media player it's time to get back to the hardware of OPL Studio!

The media player now supports DOSBox raw OPL (*.DRO), id Music Files (*.IMF) and Video Game Music (*.VGM)

Another All-In-One Prototype

Before my christmas holiday I spend a lot of time breadboarding parts of a new all-in-one design and experimenting with a previous prototype that has now become a Frankenstein setup with many loose wires, replaced components and failed experiments. The goal was to fix the issues that existed with the previous prototypes. Whether this is now the case I'll not comment about. I have been disappointed a few times before after getting excited about new PCBs.

So another round of prototypes is now going to get manufactured where I made some drastic changes that I left out of previous prototypes:

• The LCD screen is no longer a breakout module, but now attaches directly to the mainboard using a ribbon cable. All circuitry to drive the LCD is now also on the mainboard. This is scaring me the most since I couldn't breadboard this part
• The little TDA2822 amplifier is also gone. Now there is an amplifier build out of discrete components
• The status LEDs hadve moved left of the screen
• The power button doubles as panic button
• The line and speaker jacks are now 6.3mm jacks
• There is a real volume knob now and the A and B rotary controls have moved for better looks and operation

In The Mean Time: Software Refactoring

While I wait for the new PCBs I will continue working on the next major update of the software. The code that handles MIDI and controls the OPL3 chips will be refactored to allow for some cool new tricks:

• Pairing two 2-OP channels to make a pseudo 4-OP channel and support for OPL patch files duch as *.DMX that allow this
• MIDI control mapping so you can map any MIDI control to an OPL Studio control. For example to have the volume slider control the output level of an OPL channel, to name something stupid
• More advanced instrument patch effects like those used by various trackers to create more convincing drum sounds or to emulate the sound of the Loudness OPL2 music from games such as Fuzzy's World of Golf