Dreamcast Microphone Hacked

[Darksaviour69]

BlueCrab has successfully hacked the Dreamcast microphone, he posted in this (http://www.dcemulation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=69600) topic at dcemulation.com
<blockquote>
Well, this evening (heh, evening), I've managed to successfully hack together some code to access/use the Dreamcast Microphone (the one you'd get with Seaman). More info will be forthcoming in the morning, when I get up.

I'd like to leave you with this little sound clip I recorded off my mic:
http://www.ljsdcdev.net/dcmic2.ogg
This sound clip is what I believe to be the 2nd ever thing recorded off of a dreamcast mic using homebrew code.</blockquote>

[Christuserloeser]

This guy's a magician :D

[quzar]

Not to bash him, but he had someone else tell him what the commands were (although he had reverse enginnered a few, he wasn't able to do anything until the other person told him all the known commands).

[DCDayDreamer]

Not to bash him, but he had someone else tell him what the commands were (although he had reverse enginnered a few, he wasn't able to do anything until the other person told him all the known commands).

Sounds like team spirit to me, nice to know that coders are helping each other out with these things.

[quzar]

Yup, most definetly, just making sure to point out some more credit where it's due (but i'm not sure if the person wants to be known)

[wraggster]

Well a big thanks to Crabby and the unknown helper :)

[BlueCrab]

Rest assured, I plan to give full credit to the "unknown helper". As soon as I make sure he wants it.

As a side note, I actually did find the enable command, I just had no idea what it did prior to this person helping me out.

[quzar]

Ah, yea, I didn't mean any offense by it, just wanted to make sure it wasn't a point of interpretation that it was pure reverse engineering. Also, I think it should be known that he is helping out (as long as he is ok with people knowing) since so many think he's full of it (misguided fools).

[BlueCrab]

Ah, anyway, since he's given me the Ok, so to speak, I'll tell who this unknown helper was.

It was none other than ZeZu of Icarus fame. He pointed me to the fact that putting 0x80 in the 2nd byte of the 2nd command word sent to the mic would enable it. As I said, I had previously determined that this command did SOMETHING, but never knew what until he had told me.

[RockinB]

Congratulations for this breakthrough!

For homebrew software, it's always a big plus to use rare peripherals.

Is there some information on the web how to access the samples recorded, it's format, bitrate, samplerate,....is it compressed, maybe?

[BlueCrab]

As long as you don't fool around with too many settings on the microphone, the samples put out are 16-bit PCM @ 11025 hz, all uncompressed (i.e. very easy to work with).

There are settings to change it to putting out uLaw, I believe, and to change the bitrate and sample rate, but I'm not dealing with them at the moment.