MiSTer FPGA Forum

I'm thinking mainly about X68000 or PS1 here. What kind of software is there for playing music or movies (midi, wav, mpeg, etc)?

Video on MiSTer is still tricky. PS1 was able to play VCDs with a modchip, it's possible this functionality could be added to the core, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The Saturn had a similar Video CD Card, so the possibility exists there too. AO486 can theoretically play Cinepak or Indeo encoded video, but my last attempt gave me something that played at about 4 frames per second at 320x240.

As for the x68000, there's some useful info here, which also links to a good resource for encoding video that will play on Saturn. I couldn't tell you if following those instructions will result in something that will play on the x68000 core, or look good for that matter.

Anything smaller than the biggest GBA Video carts (64Mb) will play in the GBA core, if you're interested in watching extremely bad looking Spongebob episodes.

For the rest AO486 is probably your best bet. You can do Midi best with an attached MT-32pi. Play songs in Windows 95 or a DOS Midi player. You'll get similar results with wav files, AO486's Sound Blaster is more than up to that challenge.

Mr. Encyclopedia wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 9:27 pm
For the rest AO486 is probably your best bet. You can do Midi best with an attached MT-32pi. Play songs in Windows 95 or a DOS Midi player. You'll get similar results with wav files, AO486's Sound Blaster is more than up to that challenge.

And MP3's, local MP3 playlists, and Internet Radio from within the AO486 core talking to the HPS side.

Cubic Player could be another alternative for audio playback on the 486.

I don't think a special chip or hardware peripheral is necessary for PS1. The console itself already has an MPEG chip, so we just need a video player that can boot from CD-ROM on a PS1. It may not be enough for VCD specifically, but some kind of video playback should be possible.

As for ao486, we are all probably familiar with Windows and it is understandably the go-to choice for most people. A problem with this route is that ao486 appears to be quite premature. I can play some DOS games on it, but Windows 95/98 gets quite temperamental on this core and MIDI doesn't seem to work right (wrong notes being played). This could perhaps be said about X68000 and PS1 too, but there is active development on those cores.

Mr. Encyclopedia wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 9:27 pm As for the x68000, there's some useful info here, which also links to a good resource for encoding video that will play on Saturn. I couldn't tell you if following those instructions will result in something that will play on the x68000 core, or look good for that matter.

Very interesting, thank you. The thread doesn't name the video player and it appears that the linked harddrive image is SCSI, but I will definitely try and get it running. The M68K CPU core that we got now can theoretically run at 40mhz, whereas that thread was talking about 10mhz. I'll be sure to post if I have some success.

What kind of videos / medias do you want to play ?
To play video games music tracks with emulated soundchips OK, it may be nice, but to play mp3 or mp4 videos, there are probably better platforms.
You can probably have a better experience with a linux distibution for DE10 nano + a compatible multimedia player

I'm going for classic codecs like MPEG-1, Cinepak and WAV, as well as MIDI and a bit of FM music. Video quality will be a bit limited, but it might still be watchable.

Running a desktop Linux distro on the ARM chip is no fun for me. I got desktop PCs for that.

Mr. Encyclopedia wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 9:27 pm AO486 can theoretically play Cinepak or Indeo encoded video, but my last attempt gave me something that played at about 4 frames per second at 320x240.

I had much better results that and even higher resolutions are possible:

--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLNP7y1BjwU&t=484s

Video Info:
Resolution : 320x200
Codec : Cinepak
FPS : 12
Color : 24 Bit
Audio Rate : 22050

Also there is HAM6/HAM8 and CDXL video formats for Minimig(Amiga):

--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C1_7d9bfGc
--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4d1raAzFug&t=320s

Video Info:
Resolution : 320x200
Codec : HAM6 Video
FPS : 12
Color : Compressed 12 Bit

I converted these videos with ffmpeg.

The Laser-Disk games Road Avenger and Time Gal have actually been ported to Amiga in (using HAM6/HAM8 formats) and results look really good!

--> https://pixelglass.org/#roadavenger
--> https://pixelglass.org/#timegal

I was able to transfer files from that SCSI image into an existing SASI image. The short video is in there and it plays fine, but I had to leave out the long video due to running out of space. Unfortunately I was unable to make a clean image due to a parameter error during Human68k's install process.

Anyway, here is the SASI image if anyone would like to try it on the MiSTer: