NokturnFM

As I’ve hinted it on my Mastodon profile, I’ve came up with new name for Atari ST OPL FM carts I’ve made, so they will be hopefully more recognizable. Atari ST OPL2 cart version is now called “NokturnFM2”, OPL3 variant will be “NokturnFM3”. Nokturn has musical meaning in polish (meaning “nocturne” or “music of night”), fits with my domain name partially and was developed mostly during rather late hours, FM is from frequency modulation used on both chips, so 2 stands for OPL2, 3 is for OPL3. Player is now called “NokturnFM.play”, old name was little misleading, because I derived it from OPL2.play at first (,which was part of ArduinoOPL2) player, but I had to rewrite everything in C99, I’ve added Windows / Linux support (preliminary) and Atari TOS of course (,which is first class citizen in this project), I’ve added support for OPL3, which was missing, OPLL (present in FM Melody Maker cartridge) and I’m still adding more replay formats and features. Due to driver approach more devices and operating systems can be supported like YM2203 hardware expansion for ST ;) or real Sound Blaster cards via VME->ISA adapters (have hardware, but still lack time to properly handle this).

In last weeks I’ve made some fixes to production pcb versions, mostly related to placing mounting holes, so board can be inserted into case and enlarging throughholes for potentiometer in OPL2 variant. I’ve made also small pcb test run. OPL2 version needed slight adjustments, chip position prevented use of a case.

When everything was nailed down, I’ve submited another batch of final pcb versions, rebranded them as NokturnFM, removed all trademarks to distance myself from new “Atari” and produced them with nice blue pcb colour, which fits nicely.

New PCB’s arrived last week:

and I’ve assembled and tested very first samples:

NokturnFM2

NokturnFM3

On software front (beside those purely cosmetic changes), I’ve added some improvements like skipping tunes, when playing more than one tune (handy on those large playlists) and I’ve added display of GD3 tags, there is also preliminary RAD tracker replay, but it has still some bugs related to RIFF handling.

Replay is good enough, but I plan to make it interrupt driven, I also want to add possibility to load instrument banks in known, popular formats to have possibility to use them with midi data (either sent via external midi ports or read from midi file) and integrate it with BadMood at some point and / or other game ports. I’m also thinking about doing some kind of Atari OPL information page, so anyone will be able to use OPL sound chips in their games / programs using various devices available on market (still not sure if it will be for mass market of 1 person ;-) ).

Also on logistic side I had to do some housekeeping to figure out costs of production and prepare part lists for each model, which takes more than I’ve anticipated.

Check out my YouTube channel (if you didn’t subscribe and send likes), because I will be adding more samples recorded from both cartridges soon.

If you like this project or others feel free to donate to help cover partially my development time and expenses related to hardware / electronic parts. Thank you!