I'd love to have a physical version of this: an NES with CV and gate outputs to drive a modular synthesizer, instead of using the onboard sound generator.
I'd love to have a physical version of this: an NES with CV and gate outputs to drive a modular synthesizer, instead of using the onboard sound generator.
In place of those, I'm imagining something that takes the instructions for the sound chip (or whatever the NES has) and instead output control voltage using the eurorack modular standard of 1v/octave for pitch, and another control voltage signal that goes from 0 to, say, 5 volts depending on volume that can be fed into the conrol signal on a VCA/mixer.
Gate outputs could be similar to the volume outputs, but digital: off when volume is zero, on when volume is non-zero. This could be used to trigger an envelope generator.
It might be doable with an R-pi doing all the audio generation digitally. If you want to output real CV to drive a modular synthesizer, though, you'd need some kind of multi-channel precision DAC. Or maybe just a usb-to-midi adapter and a midi-to-cv module.