And what I mean by that is, “default all audio output to a USB device, not unlike an O2+ODAC kit from JDS labs”.
Step 1: Install OSMC, which is a Kodi-based media entertainment distribution that can run on Raspberry Pi (https://osmc.tv/download/)
Step 2: Configure ALSA audio to use the USB audio device as the default (this way, I don’t always have to keep the USB device powered).
dmesg output when connecting the USB soundcard
Check which cards are identified by asound
“cat /proc/asound/cards” output
I have to make the USB audio device the default, in slot 0. Edit the file /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and change the default device to be “1”, thus, USB audio will become “0”
defaults.ctl.card 1 defaults.pcm.card 1
Reboot the device, run “cat /proc/asound/cards” again and check the order has changed. Regardless of whether the USB audio amp is actually plugged in on power up, whenever you do plug it in, it will come up as the default device and audio will be routed to it.
So glad a colleague at work pointed me to what Goldfinger were up to – making the most of social isolation in times of Covid-19! This video, “Here in your bedroom”, is a nostalgia trip.
I recently got my music bug again, and with my recent trip to Australia was able to bring back my original Gameboy. Combining the two, I thought I’d check out what music-making capabilities the Gameboy had. The most popular software was “Little sound DJ” (https://www.littlesounddj.com/). I purchased the full version of that, and while I could run that on an emulator, I wanted to run it on the real deal. To do this, I purchased a Gameboy flashing cartridge, “Flash BOY” ( https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/223590080458). This came with few instructions however. I was able to plug it into my laptop’s USB and see that it displayed as a FTDI device, but would need drivers. I installed some from here: https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm but after more googling for flashing software, found that this also provided some drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gbcf/
Starting up that tool, I put the flash boy cartridge into the flash boy itself and was greeted with this:
TMNT3? I put the cartridge in my gameboy just to check and – yep! There was TMNT3! I guess they used it as a test ROM.
Anyway, that was soon replaced with the LittleDJ software. I first hit “Erase FLASH” and then “Write FLASH” which gave me a file choice dialog box, where I chose the little sound DJ .gb file. It took a few minutes to flash. I put the cartridge in and was greeted by the text “”CARTRIDGE TEST SRAM FAIL TRY CLEANING PINS OR REPLACE BATTERY”.
I didn’t really know how to fix this, so I reset my FLASH size to be 2048 KB (16 Mb, which is what the Flash BOY supported), and upped the RAM to 32 KB. I did a full erase FLASH and RAM, then reflashed the DJ file, and read back the results:
Success! (Previously I was getting a bad game logo signature and a “Flash chip manufacturer name” of “Xilinx”).
…. or was it? Although this now wrote to the cartridge correctly, the ROM was not that of the DJ software. Looks like I will be needing a part 2 to this post!
