A nice tool to convert PC sounds (samples) to run on MSX PSG. Digitize voices and insert into your app!
1. Introduction   Some games included digitized voices on it in the 80's and 90's. The MSX had also some games with digitized sound like Snake-it, with the phrases “welcome to Snake-it”, “next screen” and “game over”; Bosconian with “Blast Off”; Macattack with “welcome to macattack” and “prepare your hamburgers”; and the game Oh Shit with “This is Joey, Paul, Willie and Frankie” and “oh, shiiiit!”.
  Thus, some programs to digitize and reproduce sounds were also created. In Brazil, the CPM group created Video Hits, a 1-bit PCM player that could play up to 24 seconds of digitized musics. In France, the Digivoix was created and published on a French magazine. This tools is able to digitize sounds from a microphone attached on a MSX tape recorder, play digitized sounds and save/load the digitized sounds.
  This project aims at demonstrating how to digitized sounds works on MSX, how to convert sound from PC to MSX and how to create MSX players. We also present a tool to help on convert unsigned 8-bit PCM data to a MSX file format.
2. Technical documentation   In this section we present a technical documentation on how to digitize sounds for MSX. Here you'll see how to convert MP3 and WAV to MSX, the MSX sound formats and how to create players.

  Docs:

• How to convert MP3 and WAV files to unsigned 8-bit PCM RAW format
• 1-bit and 4-bit PCM format players description
• Article on how to digitize sounds on MSX

3. A tool to convert 8-bit PCM to MSX   A tool were developed to help on 8-bit PCM sounds to 1-bit or 4-bit formats.   In fact, this tool is able to load and convert to the following sounds formats:

• Unsigned 8-bit PCM
• 1-bit PCM - Video Player SND
• 1-bit PCM - Digivoix FRED
• 4-bit PCM - S4b

  This tool is quite simple to operate, once you select a sound format to load, load it, select the output format and then save. It can convert from one type to any type described above.
  Also a MSX player panel used to help user to determine the correct sound frequency and time duration while converting data on a PC tool, based on the MSX player delay.
  On PC command line, type:

java -jar dsg.jar

4. MSX players   Two players were developed based on known players, in order to illustrate how to generate digitized sounds on MSX.
  The first player is the 1-bit format player, compatible with Video Hits and Digivoix. The second player is a 4-bit player.
  Both players has some stuff on common:

• Load a binary sound file at ROM address &h9000, with a maximum 16 KB size.
• Operate on data starting at RAM address &h0000 (can be modified).
• Have a routine to move data from &H9000 to &h0000 to &h4000.
• Adjust sound frequency through a delay.

  More details on how to operate players can be found here.
5. Downloads   The conversion tool was developed in Java. Java binaries runs in any PC and operating system compatible with Java.


  Author: Marcelo Silveira
  License: GNU-GPL v. 3.x - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt.