You may think the likes of MAMEdev and MESSdev are weird because we have a hobby that somewhat mirrors what many of us also do professionally. You’re probably also looking for good new music. And now you’re confused as to how I put those things together.

For the last few years, the moderators of a popular message board for musicians have staged something they call the “Collaborative Audio Production Experiment”, in which a virtual band is assembled from a pool of interested people and given around 3 months to record and mix an original song. Participants range from bedroom amateurs to Grammy-winning session musicians and producers (seriously), but the output is almost always somewhere between “worth a listen” and “instant classic”.

I’m mentioning this now because the tracks for CAPE 6 were recently released. Click here to go to the forum. Then you can either click on each of the “CAPE 6 reveal” threads to see how to download or stream each song, or click up top on “Radio CAPE” in the header where you can listen to and download nearly all of the songs from all of the CAPEs. (Quick instructions for the radio: you’ll need the Flash plugin. Once it loads, click a song title then click the “Play/Pause” button to stream (not recommended on dialup) or the “Download” button to get the MP3.

Some small progress. Big thanks to the hero of Chankast, the man they call ElSemi for some technical details. (You’d think Sega would have given up on throwing random weirdness into their hardware by this point. You’d be wrong).

It turns out that Samuele Zannoli, who’s been fixing up the SH-4 CPU core, had a little something extra to go with it…

Don’t get too excited, we’re still a long way from playable games, and the speed is pretty bad.