New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[wawrzon]

We can't tell Prisma to play more than two sounds at once, in other words, and one would be in the left speaker, the other in the right.

thats finnally spelled out as i suspected.

With software mixing this isn't a problem, of course - but then speed becomes a factor as software mixing can be slow.

okay, so with software mixing the card practically loses its all advantage against the bare system. the speed and the cpu load would immediatly become the same problem as it is without the card.

few years ago i ported or attempted to port different sdl games to amiga and so noticed that the sound is usually necessary to be turned off as a whole in order to make it at least thinkable to port. the load of decoding sound alone was taking almost the whole bandwidth of the system even with a 060. now if we imagine such a typical game, its audio consist usually of an underlying soundtrack plus a great number of event triggered sound effects that may well happen at the same time or overleap.

all in all even if we have just stereo soundtrack to decode and a single layer of sound effect samples it seems the card becomes unusable to conveniently cope with that task.

and i very much doubt that when porting game your regular bedroom coder will be able to leave the soudtrack as compressed audio while converting the sound effects to be played by paula, as it has never happened till now to my knowledge.

so, im sorry, looks like this card is useless except for playing back mp3s.

[wawrzon]

For what it's worth, this will make it MUCH easier for bedroom coders to play back compressed audio soundtracks while using audio device (Paula) for spot effects. A simple call to Prisma_PlayFile() is all that's needed - can't get much simpler than that.

but thats exactly the problem your card will not improve upon. even without background music, which is easy to get along without anyway, be via it paula or another ahi device the sound effects decoding will likely create a load that is unbearable for an amiga system one way or another.

my point is exactly that, this card is hyped as a (multipurpose) "sound card" able to play compressed formats, and people expect considerable boost in general audio playback, games and other applications, while as you wrote its is good to playback one stereo soundtrack at a time.

[wawrzon]

@spirantho

I'm not sure people do expect a considerable boost in anything except compressed audio streams, do they? I'm not sure why'd they think that, to be honest.

as you see people are asking questions like if this card would assist with their music software (be it hd-rec, or some tracker i dont know) to play multiple compressed tracks (i assume). then the people wonder their games would run faster with it or will there be games with more sound effects and so on. this is not entirely clear to everybody, which you may not realize being yourself involved, and to be honest, you were a little vague about this, probably in order not to turn people off in advance.

just to observe that the title of this thread suggests a general purpose sound card, and as for the press release it suggests that it can play compressed formats, not mentioning that it is restricted to just one hardware accelerated stereo stream/sample at a time.

Generally speaking I think Paula is quite fast enough to do spot effects itself - it's something the Amiga has always been able to do well. What the Amiga has never been able to do is to decode high-quality music, and that's what the Prisma does.

yes, but then if you bother to rewrite every sound effect call to paula, and convert every sample to amiga format you end up with a port, that will run as well on amiga hardware without the card in question. perhaps except the background music, but thats the whole difference.

Note I'm not trying to be critical here - I just want to know where this misunderstanding has come from as I don't want people to buy the card thinking it's going to somehow speed up old software!

i not trying to be critical either, the whole point is i agree exactly on this statement with you, and this is the whole point of my posting.

[wawrzon]

thanks, and keep us posted on unexpected achievements.

[wawrzon]

@nova
do you think its possible to keep prisma detection and support within universal executable?

why im asking this is because of the versions mess on aminet where every cpu gets its own dedicated optimized executable. this is in many cases already a task for itself to find the right one. i think we should push towards plug and play philosophy where possible, too much thinkering puts the not so hardcore audience off.

[wawrzon]

@wawrzon

don't worry, it's very easy - just call OpenLibrary on prisma.library and if it fails, then don't play any streamed audio. No reason for it to be complicated.

perfect. thats what i mean!

[wawrzon]

but this chip has no hardware midi afaik. it is just streaming audio hardware decoder. for hardware midi ( polifonic & multitimbral )you would need a real soundcard hardware.

[wawrzon]

making dedicated cards for every single task there is will make you run out of expansion ports pretty soon, i doubt this is anything more than gimmick.

[wawrzon]

That's like asking if a Video Toaster is better than a Cybervision 64.

It is a streaming audio card, not a general purpose sound card like the Delfina.

this is the result of advertising it as a "sound card". no wonder people expect sound card functionality. if it was advised as an audio stream decoder the expectations wouldnt be wrong and people would not ask "stupid questions"..

[wawrzon]

What would be nice is to have it emulated under UAE. That way it would be a lot simpler to play with it than bringing back my 3000 for the basement since I don't have place for it
By play with it I mean patch existing games to handle the prisma instead of Paula. Any USB version planned for PC/MAC?
Kamelito
PS nice shop by the way.

what would that be good for? uae can decode compressed audio streams or video for that matter with the available 68k software with no problem and with no need of emulating any custom spacialised hardware.

[wawrzon]

There's very little on the player module board other than the VS1003 IC. The VLSI chips are really easy to use if you can source them. It shouldn't take long for spidi to integrate the VLSI chip onto the clock port CPLD SPI controller board. How to get the audio out of the Amiga is the remaining issue, either a headphone jack through a hole in the case or some kind of connection into the existing Amiga audio out circuits. The software is looking ok already.

doesnt look like like any much less than the hardware being subject here. simply a decoder chip attached to amiga bus plus some playback control software. the genuine thread concerning the polish option seems to be here:
 
http://www.ppa.pl/forum/elektronika/33114/moja-platforma-badawcza-z-interfejsem-spi#m482618

but whats interesting is a resulting initiative being discussed here:

http://www.ppa.pl/forum/elektronika/33115/kanapka-fpga-dla-a1200#m483203

that may become an alternative to vampire accelerator and some other fpga based periferial enchancements for an a1200. and it seems that if anything be achieved, it remains open source. also looks like some technical capacity is given.

[wawrzon]

Gah. I kind of wish people would stop beginning "new initiatives"  and work together to finish some of the ones we already have.

this time it is a proper initiative of people who intend to be open and "work together". other than that you cant force people do things for you the way you like.

i have posted the link as a matter of interest, not to satisfy any demands.

[wawrzon]

Sorry to dump but this is coming from a guy that has spent "over" $20,000.00 starting in March 2013 including a few thousand to developers to help encourage them.

sounds like you have a serious problem. alas, its a bit late now, you might have listened to reason before.

I am close to done.

seems so.

If you don't deliver don't ask for money! That list is very small now. I am sick of people misusing my trust and my investment.

now there is anopther teaser though, maybe this time you should trust them:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40426&forum=2&start=60&viewmode=flat&order=0

remember they have bought ppaint and there is an additional brush tooltip bar now worth well what it costs to purchase a copy these days (i dont know how much, never bought a thing from them).

I Sure hope and pray !!!

i doubt it will help, but why not, as long as everything else fails. this attitude used to have an established tradition in this society anyway.

[wawrzon]

They're making an announcement that they're going to have an announcement in another month?  Aw man, you gotta be kidding me.  It's like a carnival, only with less clowns.  

Kidding, kidding, but seriously now folks...  :p

gotta be kidding yourself if you have ever trusted that to start with. now, im really in a popcorn mode, what concerns this other trip, if i was into popcorn at all, that is.

[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.