[Coco] CoCo SDC Media Player development

[Zippster]

Hello everyone,

Over the last few days I’ve been writing a little assembly, working to tie together the
various player routines I’ve developed for playing streaming media from the CoCo SDC.

I’ve come up with a system that should allow for easy use and quite a bit of flexibility
in the formats used.  The media player system (aside from the media data itself) consists
of two major parts.  The first part is a file browser app that allows selection of media files
from the SD card as well as provides the basic framework needed (buffers, common routines, etc.).

The second part is the player routine specific to the media type being played back, which is embedded
in the media file itself.  This will allow for the flexibility needed to support many different formats, which
all have their own specific needs when playing back the data.

It requires a 64K machine, lower 32K is where the file browser and all the needed buffers, common
routines and other framework is located.  On selecting a media file, the first 32K is loaded into high
RAM, and execution is passed to the specialized routine there, which takes over for the playback,
and display of any other data, background pics, vu meters, etc.  Whatever is desired for presenting
the particular media; video, audio, chip tunes, slide shows, whatever.  This allows for large specialized
routines for handling a file type as needed and gives a lot of flexibility.

Anyway, it’s coming along quite well.  So far I’ve adapted one player routine to the new system, which
is specialized for playback of 33.4KHz, 8-bit stereo audio on .89MHz systems (using Orch90 compatible DACs).

Here are a couple of videos I posted about it on Facebook recently to give you an idea…

<https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1sgl615FlGnYnRHb29MbjA0V1k>
<https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1sgl615FlGnY2ZoMHlheU13bVk>

Yes, I’m having fun.  :)

- Ed