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• Adding C64 SID Music

  1er novembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I have been working on adding support for SID files — the music format for the Commodore 64 — to the game music website for awhile. I feel a bit out of my element since I’m not that familiar with the C64. But why should I let that slow me down ? Allow me to go through the steps I have previously outlined in order to make this happen.

  
  
  

  I need to know what picture should represent the system in the search results page. The foregoing picture should be fine, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  Phase 1 is finding adequate player software. The most venerable contender in this arena is libsidplay, or so I first thought. It turns out that there’s libsidplay (originally hosted at Geocities, apparently, and no longer on the net) and also libsidplay2. Both are kind of old (libsidplay2 was last updated in 2004). I tried to compile libsidplay2 and the C++ didn’t agree with current version of g++.

  However, a recent effort named libsidplayfp is carrying on the SID emulation tradition. It works rather well, notwithstanding the fact that compiling the entire library has a habit of apparently hanging the Linux VM where I develop this stuff.

  Phase 2 is to develop a testbench app around the playback library. With the help of the libsidplayfp library maintainers, I accomplished this. The testbench app consistently requires about 15% of a single core of a fairly powerful Core i7. So I look forward to recommendations that I port that playback library to pure JavaScript.

  Phase 3 is plug into the web player. I haven’t worked on this yet. I’m confident that this will work since phase 2 worked (plus, I have a plan to combine phases 2 and 3).

  One interesting issue that has arisen is that proper operation of libsidplayfp requires that 3 C64 ROM files be present (the, ahem, KERNAL, BASIC interpreter, and character generator). While these are copyrighted ROMs, they are easily obtainable on the internet. The goal of my project is to eliminate as much friction as possible for enjoying these old tunes. To that end, I will just bake the ROM files directly into the player.

  Phase 4 is collecting a SID song corpus. This is the simplest part of the whole process thanks to the remarkable curation efforts of the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC). Anyone can download a giant archive of every known SID file. So that’s a done deal.

  Or is it ? One small issue is that I was hoping that the first iteration of my game music website would focus on, well, game music. There is a lot of music in the HVSC that are original compositions or come from demos. The way that the archive is organized makes it difficult to automatically discern whether a particular SID file comes from a game or not.

  Phase 5 is munging the metadata. The good news here is that the files have the metadata built in. The not-so-great news is that there isn’t quite as much as I might like. Each file is tagged with title, author, and publisher/copyright. If there is more than one song in a file, they all have the same metadata. Fortunately, if I can import them all into my game music database, there is an opportunity to add a lot more metadata.

  Further, there is no play length metadata for these files. This means I will need to set each to a default length like 2 minutes and do something like I did before in order to automatically determine if any songs terminate sooner.

  Oddly, the issue I’m most concerned about is character encoding. This is the first project for which I’m making certain that I understand character encoding since I can’t reasonably get away with assuming that everything is ASCII. So far, based on the random sampling of SID files I have checked, there is a good chance of encountering metadata strings with characters that are not in the lower ASCII set. From what I have observed, these characters map to Unicode code points. So I finally get to learn about manipulating strings in such a way that it preserves the character encoding. At the very least, I need Python to rip the strings out of the binary SID files and make sure the Unicode remains intact while being inserted into an SQLite3 database.

• Grand Unified Theory of Compact Disc

  1er février 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  This is something I started writing about a decade ago (and I almost certainly have some of it wrong), back when compact discs still had a fair amount of relevance. Back around 2002, after a few years investigating multimedia technology, I took an interest in compact discs of all sorts. Even though there may seem to be a wide range of CD types, I generally found that they’re all fundamentally the same. I thought I would finally publishing something, incomplete though it may be.

  Physical Perspective
  There are a lot of ways to look at a compact disc. First, there’s the physical format, where a laser detects where pits/grooves have disturbed the smooth surface (a.k.a. lands). A lot of technical descriptions claim that these lands and pits on a CD correspond to ones and zeros. That’s not actually true, but you have to decide what level of abstraction you care about, and that abstraction is good enough if you only care about the discs from a software perspective.

  Grand Unified Theory (Software Perspective)
  Looking at a disc from a software perspective, I have generally found it useful to view a CD as a combination of a 2 main components :

  • table of contents (TOC)
  • a long string of sectors, each of which is 2352 bytes long

  I like to believe that’s pretty much all there is to it. All of the information on a CD is stored as a string of sectors that might be chopped up into a series of anywhere from 1-99 individual tracks. The exact sector locations where these individual tracks begin are defined in the TOC.

  Audio CDs (CD-DA / Red Book)
  The initial purpose for the compact disc was to store digital audio. The strange sector size of 2352 bytes is an artifact of this original charter. “CD quality audio”, as any multimedia nerd knows, is formally defined as stereo PCM samples that are each 16 bits wide and played at a frequency of 44100 Hz.
  

  (44100 audio frames / 1 second) * (2 samples / audio frame) * 
    (16 bits / 1 sample) * (1 byte / 8 bits) = 176,400 bytes / second
  (176,400 bytes / 1 second) / (2352 bytes / 1 sector) = 75
  

  75 is the number of sectors required to store a single second of CD-quality audio. A single sector stores 1/75th of a second, or a ‘frame’ of audio (though I think ‘frame’ gets tossed around at all levels when describing CD formats).

  The term “red book” is thrown around in relation to audio CDs. There is a series of rainbow books that define various optical disc standards and the red book describes audio CDs.

  Basic Data CD-ROMs (Mode 1 / Yellow Book)
  Somewhere along the line, someone decided that general digital information could be stored on these discs. Hence, the CD-ROM was born. The standard model above still applies– TOC and string of 2352-byte sectors. However, it’s generally only useful to have a single track on a CD-ROM. Thus, the TOC only lists a single track. That single track can easily span the entire disc (something that would be unusual for a typical audio CD).

  While the model is mostly the same, the most notable difference between and audio CD and a plain CD-ROM is that, while each sector is 2352 bytes long, only 2048 bytes are used to store actual data payload. The remaining bytes are used for synchronization and additional error detection/correction.

  At least, the foregoing is true for mode 1 / form 1 CD-ROMs (which are the most common). “Mode 1″ CD-ROMs are defined by a publication called the yellow book. There is also mode 1 / form 2. This forgoes the additional error detection and correction afforded by form 1 and dedicates 2336 of the 2352 sector bytes to the data payload.

  CD-ROM XA (Mode 2 / Green Book)
  From a software perspective, these are similar to mode 1 CD-ROMs. There are also 2 forms here. The first form gives a 2048-byte data payload while the second form yields a 2324-byte data payload.

  Video CD (VCD / White Book)
  These are CD-ROM XA discs that carry MPEG-1 video and audio data.

  Photo CD (Beige Book)
  This is something I have never personally dealt with. But it’s supposed to conform to the CD-ROM XA standard and probably fits into my model. It seems to date back to early in the CD-ROM era when CDs were particularly cost prohibitive.

  Multisession CDs (Blue Book)
  Okay, I admit that this confuses me a bit. Multisession discs allow a user to burn multiple sessions to a single recordable disc. I.e., burn a lump of data, then burn another lump at a later time, and the final result will look like all the lumps were recorded as the same big lump. I remember this being incredibly useful and cost effective back when recordable CDs cost around US$10 each (vs. being able to buy a spindle of 100 CD-Rs for US$10 or less now). Studying the cdrom.h file for the Linux OS, I found a system call named CDROMMULTISESSION that returns the sector address of the start of the last session. If I were to hypothesize about how to make this fit into my model, I might guess that the TOC has some hint that the disc was recorded in multisession (which needs to be decided up front) and the CDROMMULTISESSION call is made to find the last session. Or it could be that a disc read initialization operation always leads off with the CDROMMULTISESSION query in order to determine this.

  I suppose I could figure out how to create a multisession disc with modern software, or possibly dig up a multisession disc from 15+ years ago, and then figure out how it should be read.

  CD-i
  This type puzzles my as well. I do have some CD-i discs and I thought that I could read them just fine (the last time I looked, which was many years ago). But my research for this blog post has me thinking that I might not have been seeing the entire picture when I first studied my CD-i samples. I was able to see some of the data, but sources indicate that only proper CD-i hardware is able to see all of the data on the disc (apparently, the TOC doesn’t show all of the sectors on disc).

  Hybrid CDs (Data + Audio)
  At some point, it became a notable selling point for an audio CD to have a data track with bonus features. Even more common (particularly in the early era of CD-ROMs) were computer and console games that used the first track of a disc for all the game code and assets and the remaining tracks for beautifully rendered game audio that could also be enjoyed outside the game. Same model : TOC points to the various tracks and also makes notes about which ones are data and which are audio.

  There seems to be 2 distinct things described above. One type is the mixed mode CD which generally has the data in the first track and the audio in tracks 2..n. Then there is the enhanced CD, which apparently used multisession recording and put the data at the end. I think that the reasoning for this is that most audio CD player hardware would only read tracks from the first session and would have no way to see the data track. This was a positive thing. By contrast, when placing a mixed-mode CD into an audio player, the data track would be rendered as nonsense noise.

  Subchannels
  There’s at least one small detail that my model ignores : subchannels. CDs can encode bits of data in subchannels in sectors. This is used for things like CD-Text and CD-G. I may need to revisit this.

  In Summary
  There’s still a lot of ground to cover, like how those sectors might be formatted to show something useful (e.g., filesystems), and how the model applies to other types of optical discs. Sounds like something for another post.

• Elacarte Presto Tablets

  14 mars 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I visited an Applebee’s restaurant this past weekend. The first thing I spied was a family at a table with what looked like a 7-inch tablet. It’s not an uncommon sight. However, as I moved through the restaurant, I noticed that every single table was equipped with such a tablet. It looked like this :

  
  
  

  For a computer nerd like me, you could probably guess that I was be far more interested in this gadget than the cuisine. The thing said “Presto” on the front and “Elacarte” on the back. Putting this together, we get the website of Elacarte, the purveyors of this restaurant tablet technology. Months after the iPad was released on 2010, I remember stories about high-end restaurants showing their wine list via iPads. This tablet goes well beyond that.

  How was it ? Well, confusing, mostly. The hostess told us we could order through the tablet or through her. Since we already knew what we wanted, she just manually took our order and presumably entered it into the system. So, right away, the question is : Do we order through a human or through a computer ? Or a combination ? Do we have to use the tablet if we don’t want to ?

  Hardware
  When picking up the tablet, it’s hard not to notice that it is very heavy. At first, I suspected that it was deliberately weighted down as some minor attempt at an anti-theft measure. But then I remembered what I know about power budgets of phones and tablets– powering the screen accounts for much of the battery usage. I realized that this device needs to drive the screen for about 14 continuous hours each day. I.e., the weight must come from a massive battery.

  The screen is good. It’s a capacitive touchscreen, so nice and responsive. When I first spied the device, I felt certain it would be a resistive touchscreen (which is more accurately called a touch-and-press-down screen). There is an AC adapter on the side of the tablet. This is the only interface to the device :

  
  
  

  That looks to me like an internal SATA connector (different from an eSATA connector). Foolishly, I didn’t have a SATA cable on me so I couldn’t verify.

  User Interface
  The interface options are : Order, Games, Neighborhood, and Pay. One big benefit of accessing the menu through the Order option is that each menu item can have a picture. For people who order more by picture than text description, this is useful. Rather, it would be, if more items had pictures. I’m not sure there were more pictures than seen in the print menu.
  
  For Games, there were a variety of party games. The interface clearly stated that we got to play 2 free games. This implied to me that further games cost money. We tried one game briefly and the food came.

  2 more options : Neighborhood– I know I dug into this option, but I forget what it was. Maybe it discussed local attractions. Finally, Pay. This thing has an integrated credit card reader. There is no integrated printer, though, so if you want one, you will have to request one from a human.

  Experience
  So we ordered through a human since we didn’t feel like being thrust into this new paradigm when we just wanted lunch. The staff was obviously amenable to that. However, I got a chance to ask them a lot of questions about the particulars. Apparently, they have had this system for about 5 months. It was confirmed that the tablets do, in fact, have gargantuan batteries that have to last through the restaurant’s entire business hours. Do they need to be charged every night ? Yes, they do. But how ? The staff described this several large charging blocks with many cables sprouting out. Reportedly, some units still don’t make it through the entire day.

  When it was time to pay, I pressed the Pay button on the interface. The bill I saw had nothing in common with what we ordered (actually, it was cheaper, so perhaps I should have just accepted it). But I pointed it out to a human and they said that this happens sometimes. So they manually printed my bill. There was a dollar charge for the game that was supposed to be free. I pointed this out and they removed it. It’s minor, I know, but it’s still worth trying to work out these bugs.

  One of the staff also described how a restaurant doesn’t need to employ as many people thanks to the tablet. She gave a nervous, awkward, self-conscious laugh when she said this. All I could think of was this Dilbert comic strip in which the boss realizes that his smartphone could perform certain key functions previously handled by his assistant.

  Not A New Idea
  Some people might think this is a totally new concept. It’s not. I was immediately reminded of my university days in Boulder, Colorado, USA, circa 1997. The local Taco Bell and Arby’s restaurants both had touchscreen ordering kiosks. Step up, interact with the (probably resistive) touchscreen, get a number, and step to the counter to change money, get your food, and probably clarify your order because there is only so much that can be handled through a touchscreen.

  What I also remember is when they tore out those ordering kiosks, also circa 1997. I don’t know the exact reason. Maybe people didn’t like them. Maybe there were maintenance costs that made them not worth the hassle.

  Then there are the widespread self-checkout lanes in grocery stores. Personally, I like those, though I know many don’t. However, this restaurant tablet thing hasn’t won me over yet. What’s the difference ? Perhaps that automated lanes at grocery stores require zero external assistance– at least, if you do everything correctly. Personally, I work well with these lanes because I can pretty much guess the constraints of the system and I am careful not to confuse the computer in any way. Until they deploy serving droids, or at least food conveyors, there still needs to be some human interaction and I think the division between the human and computer roles is unintuitive in the restaurant case.

  I don’t really care to return to the same restaurant. I’ll likely avoid any other restaurant that has these tablets. For some reason, I think I’m probably supposed to be the ideal consumer of this concept. But the idea will probably perform all right anyway. Elacarte’s website has plenty of graphs demonstrating that deploying these tablets is extremely profitable.