I just think it would be cool to add a lil sound clip to a boot logo. nothing like a full song but a second or two long clip just to go along with the logo to give it a lil more umph. I dont know if its possible but just thought Id share my idea. knowing my luck its not..

There are already third party programs which can play a sound during boot up. Do a search on the BBS to find them.

However, they cannot coincide with the boot animation. They can only happen after the boot animation. Here is why:

The boot animation and boot logo are loaded from flash memory so that they can give you something to look at while the player's disk drive spins up. The third party programs and the stored sounds only run from the hard disk, and therefore sound can only happen after the boot logos are done playing.

If you were able to write a version of the kernel that could play sounds, then it would be theoretically possible to load those sounds from flash and do what you are suggesting. But the flash memory is very scarce and does not have room for much of anything except the kernel, the boot logos, and the player settings. So even if you did get a version that could play the sound from flash, it could only be the shortest, simplest, lowest-quality sound imaginable.

Sound from disk can overlap with the boot logo. For me, with two drives, TTSClock normally overlaps frames 50 or so onwards of my boot animation. It does depend entirely on your hardware (in particular, what kind of drives you have and how long they take to respond). You certainly can't expect to synchronize sound and vision.

With a long animation, you have to take care with its size. JEmplode won't upload anything longer than (I think) 64 frames in length (regardless of how many distinct frames there are). I recommend making a boot animation that repeats frames, keeping the number of distinct ones down to a minimum. You'll need to use Mark Lord's aniwrite on the player, or use some other means to upload a long animation that JEmplode refuses.

Alternatively, with some kernel hacking, you could probably do a simple tone-generator to do simple tunes (probably of similar complexity to a mobile phone ring-tone) from flash.

TTSClock normally overlaps frames 50 or so onwards of my boot animation.

But since you're not supposed to make your boot animation more than 28 frames or so...

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you're not supposed to make your boot animation more than 28 frames or so...

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For two reasons, which I addressed:

1. Large animation files may hit the kernel in flash - repeat frames so that there are fewer than 30 or so distinct frames
2. Long animations overlap with the player's boot display and cause flickering - not an issue if TTSClock is running for another 5 seconds before the player gets a chance

I'm not sure whether the second one is still an issue since Mark re-wrote part of the display code. Trying it now with an overlap, I get one frame of flicker, otherwise okay. So not completely solved, but certainly improved.

AFAIUI, flash space wouldn't be the limitation*. Remember that the whole root partition is on flash and that paritition is not 100% full. The problem would be that for the sound to play ASAP upon boot, the (presumably) .wav would need to be embedded within the kernel. as would the equivalent PlayWav routines. I don't think that the memory used could be kfree'd up again afterwards. (I could be wrong about that.)
If you're not too bothered about 'ASAP' and can live with a little delay then it might be possible to do it using a userland application on the root partition and the old preinit scheme to launch it before the player.

* The flash space that is limited is the small block that is allocated to store dynamic parameters upon powerfail/shutdown. A chunk of flash is split into many n blocks of this small size, the idea is that by using a different block each time we wont wear out the flash. (Remember that the flash has a limited write count, this effectively extends it n times.)
The root parition is only written to when we upgrade the player software or kernel, ie not (relatively speaking) often.

Whoa!
So does this mean by me testing my animated boot logos on the player, I will eventually kill my flash memory!!!!

So does this mean by me testing my animated boot logos on the player, I will eventually kill my flash memory!!!!

Yes, eventually. If you write a new kernel, or a new boot logo, to the flash frequently, you are shortening the lifespan of those memory addresses. However, we worked it out once and I don't think it was enough to worry about.

Well it's a good thing I got the whole image conversion to the VFD display values down pack to where I really don't need to test them on my player.

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Alternatively, with some kernel hacking, you could probably do a simple tone-generator to do simple tunes (probably of similar complexity to a mobile phone ring-tone) from flash.

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That would be really cool if possible.. I currently use the boot logo with tux sliding by turning with sunglasses on and the empeg logo showing up and at the bottom is the digital audio streaks by, I just think it would be cool to have some sound playing with that flash. If all else fails I could just make the sound up in my head and pretend