panzeroceania wrote:you've mentioned that the digital audio the gamecube produces isn't a common frequency that could be simply converted to SPDIF without altering the signal to make it standard compliant.
It's 48042 Hz instead of the usual 48000 Hz, but as far as I can tell this is still within the allowed tolerances. "Normal" clock accuracy in SPDIF specifies that the sampling frequency should be within 1000ppm of the nominal value, the difference for the Gamecube is 875ppm.
This is true of a lot of console's internal console's I2S frequency.
I think most of them have a much larger difference, the situation on the Cube was likely caused by an off-by-one error when the chips were designed.
wouldn't it be possibly to bypass SPDIF standards entirely and simply get a DAC that accepts I2S and generate an analog audio signal without touching the console's native audio frequency?
I think you will find that most consoles already have some kind of DAC internally that generates an analog audio signal. ;) Why would you want to add another DAC?
If you want to add a digital audio output to a console that uses "weird" sample rates but has digital audio available internally, you could try to solve the problem with a sample rate conversion chip. TI has a few, for example the SRC4190 or SRC4382, but I have no experience with them except for looking at the summary page of the datasheet.
Booted up the GameCube to make sure it still works and it indeed does.
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