An Amiga Protracker music module I wrote 30 years ago under the guise of BrokenARM Music for a game called !Phaethon on the Acorn Archimedes playing live out of one of my new prototype MODjack hardware Amiga module players in glorious 8-bit audio powered by a single AAA battery.

If someone was to tell me back in 1987, when Karten Obarski released his groundbreaking 4-channel 8-bit sample based Ultimate Soundtracker program for the Amiga, that one day it would be possible to play back my music modules on a single 8-bit embedded processor chip costing $1 running off an AAA battery using a playroutine written in C my jaw would have hit the floor.. but here we are now 37 years later thanks to Jarkko Lempiainen's nifty embedded playroutine and a world full of remarkably inexpensive little processors.

This is literally nothing but an 8-bit ATmega328P running at 16MHz and a bunch of resistors making up a 1R-2R DAC powered by an AAA battery from a high-frequency DC-DC convertor.. and it doesn't even sound at all bad.. TBH I'm pretty surprised.

The only downside is that the ATmega328P only has 32K of FLASH so you have to be a bit selective with the modules you can run on this thing..

I keep grabbing these things as convenient audio test sources so one day I might re-develop this concept for a wider audience using one of the new high performance embedded ARM processors.

Composition & Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio 1993/2023.

MODjack: !Phaethon Interlevel (Tiny Amiga MOD Player on a 1/4" Jack)

D.A.Wilson is an Electronic Engineer, Sound Designer & Vintage Synth Specialist with a particular interest in combining vintage tube, classic analog and modern digital technologies working as a synth engineer looking after a very considerable amount of vintage studio equipment for Will Gregory (Goldfrapp / Moog Ensemble) and a number of other internationally celebrated electronic musicians and producers.  Having undertaken several major restorations and produced custom electronic designs for a number of major artists including Jean-Michel Jarre, Dani is also known for fully restoring two out of the world's four remaining 1979 Crumar GDS and partially restoring 1938 Novachord 346 (the only known operational Novachord in the UK) to playable order along with developing and producing the new Elfin family of 8-bit polysynths and the popular MIDI Front Panel Animator (FPA), Filter Defeat Module (FDM) and XD-280 Drive Emulator upgrades for the AKAI S612 sampler.

Demos of the S612 Upgrades in Action: 

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/sets/hideaway-studios-s612-front


Hideaway Studio Kontakt Sound libraries may be purchased directly from: 
https://www.lootaudio.com/category/kontakt-instruments/hideaway-studios
 

..and a nice introduction by Cory Pelizzari to the Hideaway Studio Kontakt Libraries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C7a3ChC9U&feature=emb_title


For more on releases from Hideaway Studio for Kontakt please visit the blog at:  www.hideawaystudio.net