Nestronic Video Game Music Synthesizer (Alarm Clock)

[dkonigs]

So this is a project I've been working on for most of this year. Its a crazy attempt to build something that combines a retro CPU with modern hardware, and its also my first foray into no longer being afraid to work with surface-mount components. I figured it was time to start sharing it more broadly, so here goes...

The Nestronic is a hardware VGM (Video Game Music) player for the NES APU (Audio Processing Unit), with a real-time clock. It is based on the ESP32 microcontroller, combined with an original RP2A03 (6502-based NES CPU). The two processors communicate with each other over I2C.

For more information about the project, at least through revision A of the hardware, please see these blog posts:
http://hecgeek.blogspot.com/2018/02/nestronic-1.html
http://hecgeek.blogspot.com/2018/03/nestronic-2.html
http://hecgeek.blogspot.com/2018/05/nestronic-3.html
http://hecgeek.blogspot.com/2018/07/nestronic-4.html

I just finished a video covering the complete assembly process for the revision B hardware:
https://youtu.be/UlO0NQTAaJU

All of the project designs and source code is here:
https://github.com/dkonigsberg/nestronic
(Yes, I even used issue reports to describe hardware changes between revisions.)

If anyone is curious to learn more about the VGM format, it is described here:
http://vgmrips.net/wiki/VGM_Specification