On Sunday 19 January 2003 18:56, Adam Wozniak wrote:
> As you probably know, MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm. Better to
> store them as .bin and convert them to WAV on the fly; .bin is the most
> "compressed" format you'll get for the data.
Yeah, I think we've been over this before. Look, I'm a musician. I've been
using MP3 since early 1996, probably before most of you even heard of it, and
was using MPEG layer 2 compression for 3 or 4 years before that. (MPEG
compression using a 386.... now that was hilarious.) Of course it's better
to use .bin and convert them on the fly, but my Atari and my PC will always
been in different rooms from one another, so I was and still am looking for
alternatives to that approach.
Shortly after getting my Cuttle Cart I made a CD with the 1500 or so rom
images I had at the time, converted to mp3 format (courtesy of makewav, the
LAME mp3 encoder, and a little perl script I wrote), and used a cheap MP3 CD
player (which I still use as a car MP3 player) to make a cuttle jukebox,
basically. The vast, vast majority of the MP3's worked, despite the number
of people who suggested I not try because it couldn't possibly work at all
and I could get much better sound from my CD's if I just color in the bottom
with a green magic marker. (Sorry, that was from another newsgroup.)
Converting the MP3's back to WAV and looking at the waveforms side by side,
it's very apparent which transitions have been smoothed or eliminated by the
codec even at the highest bitrates and I'm amazed more games weren't
affected. It's really a tribute to the Cuttle's design and/or the
Supercharger encoding format.
Nonetheless, I've given up on MP3 for this (I want it all to be on a single
device or piece of media, and no small, cheap audio player exists that can
mix MP3's and uncompressed mono WAV files or even red book audio tracks) and
have been looking for a small computing device with enough capacity to store
every Cuttle Cart compatible rom image out there and feed them to the Cuttle
using some version of makewav. I know people are using 486 laptops and the
like for this, but I'm looking for something that can sit comfortably on top
of my 4-switch 2600. And only after Glenn made his post last night did I
realize I have such a device, namely the Helio, in my possession already.
Now, if I don't get that to work (if the Helio's combination
headphone/microphone jack is of too poor quality or its DAC isn't up to snuff
or for some reason its audio device can't handle taking output from makewav
through a pipe, since there's certainly no RAM space for an uncompressed
waveform on that thing) I'll keep looking for either a compression format
supported by small, cheap devices that doesn't freak out the Cuttle, or a
small, cheap, high capacity device that will let me mix and match MP3's and
uncompressed WAV files. Or maybe I'll get one of the first generation Wince
devices that you can load Linux on from ebay, and do it that way. I dunno.
But MP3 does work for more than 8 out of 10 games, and there's no reason some
other similar method (like Ogg) might not work for some or all of the
remaining ones.
Sorry for the recap, but it seems every time I mention my Cuttle experiences
and aspirations on the list I get a post like yours back, and feel the need
to dump the history.
Rob
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
