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The Family Bass - Music with an NES
I connected a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live. Here's a short technical presentation: And here's a performance of my NES-style tune Platform Hopping, originally composed for the music compo at X 2023: Download - Linus Akesson - Platform Hopping (Family Bass).mp3 (MP3, 5.7 MB) How the adapter works As outlined in the presentation video above, the Family BASIC keyboard is designed to plug into the expansion port of the Famicom, but I wanted to hook it up to one of the controller ports on my NES.
I connected a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live. Such automatic CLK generation is handy when interfacing standard controllers, but it's a bad fit for the protocol used by the keyboard, so we can't really make use of this signal. The code is implemented in assembly language, arranged to make each data bit exactly six cycles long, which comes out to 6 μs.
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