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Broken Bytes
Personal blog · brokenbytes.blogspot.comprogramminghardwaregames
Broken Bytes is a personal blog at brokenbytes.blogspot.com about programming, hardware and games. Since 2015, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for retro Commodore 64 hardware posts, especially a 48 kHz digital music player that plays VQ-compressed audio on an unmodified C64, with decoder code included.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Random thoughts on retroprogramming
Most-linked posts?
- A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 644 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-28
- A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64 (2018)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-26
What Hacker News says?
Careful not to burn anything out... Though the C64 is pretty indestructible - I connected all kinds of things to the IO lines of it back in the day... And a few inadvisable cases of soldering things straight to the user port pins (I'm amazed I never destroyed any machines.... that way) A tip is to turn off the screen during sampling and playback, as otherwise the video chip steals a lot of memory cycles. You might t…
Comment linking /2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html
on “Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?”Submitted A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64 as a story · 203 points
HN discussionVQ is a very well known technique. For something quick, you might be interested to check this blog post about (unmodified) C64 playing high quality audio at 44.1/48 kHz, VQ compressed down to 96-128 kbit/s: https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus... There's some decoder code there as well.
Comment linking /2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html
on “The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers”Submitted A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64 (2018) as a story · 84 points
HN discussion> What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to? Yes, the C64 VIC and SID were just flexible enough, to enable them to do a large number of graphical and sound effects which they were never intended to do, like arbitrary X/Y positioning of the screen, line-crunching/stretching and sprite-crunching/stretching. Because the hardware was so…
Comment linking /2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html
on “How Apple Programmer Sal Soghoian Got Apps Talking to Each Other”- ot · 2015-04-10
Submitted The Making of P0 Snake – Part 3: Audio Compression for Poor CPUs as a story · 22 points
HN discussion The craziest c64 thing I've seen recently is this 48Khz audio player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAf_awh5XA , blog post here http://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-musi... . Its quite outstanding what you can do with the SID chip.
Comment linking /2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html
on “Sinclair Zx Spectrum: absolutely better than Commodore 64 (2005)”- ot · 2015-03-16
Submitted The Making of P0 Snake – Part 2: It Talks as a story · 8 points
HN discussion Submitted A 48khz digital music player for Commodore 64 as a story · 1 points
HN discussion