A SID Player for the Qt Palmtop Environment
by Markus Gritsch (gritsch@iue.tuwien.ac.at)
SIDPlayer is a small application capable of playing SID tunes and runs
unter the Qtopia and Opie environment. It uses the
SIDPLAY
library to render the music. SID tunes are special files which
contain the music data and the 6502 assembler routines, which were
natively used to play music on the famous Commodore C64 sound chip
(Sound Interface Device - SID). More than 20.000 SID tunes can be
downloaded from the HVSC.
The program is designed especially for the limited screen space
available on a handheld device running Qt/Embedded.
It would be a quite simple task to link the player against Qt/X11,
however there are already existing
players for almost every other platform including X11.
SIDPlayer is free in the sense of freedome and is licensed under the
GPL. You can
download the
Sourcecode
Tarball which already includes the SIDPLAY library.
SIDPlayer is also free in the sense of free beer and can be downloaded
as a precompiled
Binary Package for the iPAQ and
Zaurus running Qtopia or Opie.
SIDPlayer depends on the
libsidplay-package. Download and install the
libsidplay Binary
Package which has been borrowed from the OpenZaurus 3.2 stable feed. It
has been repackaged using tar and gzip to be
compatible with Qtopia.
HVSC (High Voltage SID Collection) - contains over 20.000 SID tunes
Applications for Qtopia - not very comprehensive, but SIDPlayer leads the list ;)
Zaurus Software Index - use this if you are looking for programs
Familiar Linux - a Linux distribution for the iPAQ
OpenZaurus - a Linux distribution for the Zaurus
If you are adventurous, you can tweak the configuration file and modify
the parameters in the [Audio] section. For users of a Zaurus
for example it is advantageous to change fragSizeBase to
11 and fragments to 32 to make the GUI of
the player snappier. Reducing fragSizeBase on an iPAQ from
the default value of 13 to a smaller one is not recommended,
since this leads to some audible deep-frequency buzzing. A smaller
fragments value decreases the audio latency (e.g. when
switching the song-speed) but will lead to interrupted sound when the
CPU is busy doing something else. However, if you feel like it start
your own experiments, and if you messed things badly up, just delete
the line containing the modified entry, or delete the whole
[Audio] section or even the whole file to restore the default
values. The configuration file is located at
~/Settings/Sidplayer.conf.
Have fun!
