Well stuff
is happening. I have been investigating different lossless audio schemes and at the moment the most likely ones are going to be:
FLAC
Bonk
Shorten
ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec)
Shorten
I have gone through ALAC & Bonk and got them going under MSVC using very cut down interfaces that will be suitable for an embedded enviroment. I have also started putting togther some of the core classes for talking to the peripherals on the board. I intend to initially implement stubs for most of the stuff in C++ then if required we will recode bits in Assembler. The processor has some quite neat bit addressing schemes that may speed up some of the interesting bit manipulations that are required for the Rice compression schemes used by most of the lossless codecs.
The hardware has also progressed slightly with the demo board now attached to a sort of motherboard. I have also invested in a extra display that is off a Nokia phone. They are very cheap for what you get and good resolution, 128 x 128 with an SPI interface. I am starting to think that i am going to need to implement this as two fairly tightly coupled processors as even if the core is fast enough i think that we are going to fall off the end of the world with pins! The other option is going to be a PLD or possibly an FPGA. I have a couple of devices that could do the job but i would rather not do it that way...
Well this is what the demo board looks like mounted on the motherboard. It really just breaks out the lines to some connectors and it may have the PLD on it if we are forced to go that way. This is just running the Timer test that is one of the demonstration files on the CD.
