“Eye of the Tiger” is a song the by American rock band Survivor. Released in the spring of 1982 as a single from their third album, the track was written at the request of Sylvester Stallone for the film Rocky III.
According to Wikipedia, “Eye of the Tiger” was certified platinum in August 1982 by the RIAA, signifying sales of 2 million vinyl copies. Since then, the song has sold over 3 million in digital downloads in the United States (by March 2012) and was voted VH1’s 63rd greatest hard rock song. Combined sales of original vinyl release and digital downloads total over 9 million copies, making “Eye of the Tiger” one of the best-selling singles of all time.
Recently, the MIDIDesaster crew modded a Dot Matrix printer to play everyone’s favorite theme song as a MIDI compatible sound generator.
According to HackADay, the DMP is equipped with a stalwart ATmega8 microcontroller (MCU) and an FPGA connected to various sectors of the original printer’s circuit board.
“The Atmega8 takes the incoming MIDI data and communicates it to the FPGA, while driving the stepper motors for both the paper feed and print head,” explained HackADay’s James Hobson. ”The FPGA on the other hand is responsible for the PWM to drive the individual printer pins.”
In addition, the Dot Matrix turned MIDI machine is capable of playing up to play up to 21 notes simultaneously, while taking in up to 16 MIDI channels, all with individual volume, pitch and key velocity.
Pretty cool, eh? You may also want to check out several other MIDIDesaster videos of its printer in action, including the eternal Duke Nukem theme, Hysteria by Muse and the Wallace and Gromit theme.
All we can (humbly) say is “Hey, I didn’t hear no bell!”
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