CFSound Fun with William

Tonight William Miyamoto stopped by for an assist with the one and only thing in which I have a decent degree of expertise, programming the CFSound III sound card. The goal was to assign dedicated sounds to inputs 1-12, and a sequential rotation of 32 sounds that can be played manually using input 13, or played automatically at random intervals on input 14.

I was able to code up the support in short order, and William hooked up the inputs.



I used a computer to review the diagnostic messages in the code, and everything looked A-OK.



There was one fly in the ointment though. There is a bug in the firmware of versions of the CFSound III card prior to revision 1.10, where automatic sound play can halt due to a bug with the WAIT command, so we needed to upgrade the 1.04 version of firmware on William's card. This entails opening up the system and removing the jumpers in the middle.



After reflashing the image, we were unable to get the system to boot. I was trying to figure out what went wrong. Two laptops make it look like I'm trying really hard.



In the end, it turned out that I had missed the fact that William's CFSound III predates revision 3, so we needed to download an image specifically built for revisions 1 and 2 of the card. Once we did that, all was well.

William also brought over the fiberglass dome that he's working on. The chrome paint is a pretty decent match for real metal, as I set my dome next to his to compare.