Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Zipit2 mikmod

Due to the projects I've done with the first iteration, curiosity did bring me to buy a Zipit2 eventually. I loved the free IM forever, or similar text on the box even-though they're selling the services now for $100 a year or so.. that makes the initial impression somewhat negative. :-) Anyway, Aeronix kinda supports re-purposing the device this time around. There's some licensing debacle that's keeping the DIYer community away from the device. There does seem to be progress though. I've done two small projects with the Z2 before selling it. (Yes, I don't actually have it anymore). The first one was trying to get mikmod and mad player to work. Basically nothing compiled for the ZipIt1 worked well on the Z2. Nothing that had to do with audio anyway. I don't really know that much about the intricacies of playback on DMA based audio interfaces, but it seemed to have all kinds of buffer problems if I just dumped data out on /dev/dsp (that worked fine with the Z1). I did somewhat manage to get mikmod playing after trying random buffer sizes for about an hour.. but I think it was mostly luck that it worked, and it still hiccuped from time to time. (Then again, so does the stream player in the official software, so maybe it's a general driver bug? or maybe they didn't fully grasp it either..)

Here's a video of mikmod working on the Z2. I won't release anything because I have no idea where I put the files anymore :-) You'll probably need to crank up the volume to hear anything, sorry about that.

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