New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[wawrzon]

Why does the existence of Vampire make offloading audio decoding from the CPU a bad idea? :confused:

offloading compressed audio streams that only works with certain formats and if software provides support for a dedicated and expectedly rather expensive device doesnt make so much sense f you have a cheap general purpose accelerator.

[wawrzon]

Let's hope that they're not doing it on purpose.

what purpose would that be? to alienate the user base? cmon. thats simply the reality of the situation and the question to admit this reality to yourself.

What all this mean is that if you pay good money to good developers they deliver.

i think its pretty incomputable alas. in a real world if someone is not up to task he might be replaced. there are people writing drivers in question of days, but they need to be enthusiastic or at least genuinely interested. also the amiga hardware may have some additional quirks only few people suspect or know about, or even them need yet to discover those. this was the issue with deneb and dma on zorro3 bus. even m.b. who was also in charge of the hardware here, wasnt aware of some corner case/bug in zorro3 implementation until it was debugged in practice with my very modest involvement as an early adopter and tester (among others).

apparently this is not the situation here. according to amigakit the replacement coders have been appointed months ago. at his time novacoder reported unresolved stability issues before he left. bugs like that remind me of the initially apparently random dma lockups with deneb, but it needs skilled people with amiga experience to get hold of such indices. personally i would declare this project dead/obsolete. it likely wont even pay back, the insistance on it is futile. better councel next time and some applicable feedback with the community (not just a symbolic one) would solve a lot, but i doubt can arrive yet.

[wawrzon]

I said we need everything sorted before announcing anything (or very close to sorting). This is generally the approach adopted now, theres lots of stuff being worked on that isn't announced.

and yet you announce warp3d nova that looks as close to completion now as prisma megarmix at its time. juat a small bit away. the question is why that kind of bits is such an issue in your case.

[wawrzon]

I realise Apollo-Teams approach to information is kind of unortodox and unsusually open.

its not unusually open. and they had to learn their lesson as well, even though nothing natami/vampire/apollo people did in terms of communication was ever close to the degree of secrecy and failed announcements we experienced with the companies related primarly to os4. what concerns amiga projects be it hardware or software there is another sort of tradition, being open, and i mean more open than what you actually mention. just to name aros, projects where strim is involved (030 decelerator, net-bsd and the ppc accelerator for pci bus expansion), hd-rec, pfs3, gba1000 and so on.. just to name a few out of the top of my head.

to be fair, it isnt considerably difficult to imagine the model of communication apollo tam is involving.

[wawrzon]

I trust this will actually work out this time since a coder from a1k has taken care of the driver. However he wont do miracles as well. The question remains if its worth to sacrify a sparce expansion port just for a streaming decoder.