Emulating 20 year old hardware on a phone

Mickey · February 21, 2007 · 1 min read

Due to my preparations for the thesis defence — soon over, since tomorrow is “judgement day” — I have almost zero time to work on OpenMoko. Yesterday though I got one of the very few models with a case prototype, that means I can finally work with the vibrator and the speakers (which sit in the case and not on the prototype boards).

The first thing I did is to compile sidplayer and mikmod to play .sid / .mod. It’s kind of fun using brand new hardware to emulate 20 year old hardware :-)

For the interested:

• .mp3 takes about 25% CPU load — size is usually between 2 and 4 MByte
• .sid takes about 10% CPU load — size is usually between 1 and 20 KByte
• .mod takes about 3% CPU load — size is usually between 20K and 2 MByte

So that makes .sid the preferred format for ring tones, right?