Re:Reverse engineering a Hit Clip (2013)
by phire on Monday September 28, 2020 @10:15AM
(#24616812)
There is no way it's anything as advanced as MP3.
It's probably a simplistic codec that was originally designed for speech and not music, which would explain the crappy audio.
There are a bunch of specialised microcontrollers designed for toys with like a 4bit CPU, a few GPIOs, 64 bytes of ram and a big massive mask ROM (like a few hundred KB) to hold audio data. They are designed for toys were you press a button and the doll speaks a random catchphrase. One of the common chips in the era was the Winbond "PowerSpeech", which used 4-bit ADPCM at 6khz, 8khz, or 12khz
I think Tiger just took one of these MCUs, picked the biggest mask ROM available and put a single 60 second music clip on it.
It's probably a simplistic codec that was originally designed for speech and not music, which would explain the crappy audio.
There are a bunch of specialised microcontrollers designed for toys with like a 4bit CPU, a few GPIOs, 64 bytes of ram and a big massive mask ROM (like a few hundred KB) to hold audio data. They are designed for toys were you press a button and the doll speaks a random catchphrase. One of the common chips in the era was the Winbond "PowerSpeech", which used 4-bit ADPCM at 6khz, 8khz, or 12khz
I think Tiger just took one of these MCUs, picked the biggest mask ROM available and put a single 60 second music clip on it.