Amiga.org
Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Hardware News => Topic started by: Schoenfeld on April 12, 2008, 02:57:23 AM
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Soundcards for the Amiga are continuously popular, but only one soundcard has a freely programmable DSP - a specialized audio processor. With this concept, the Delfina strictly follows the old Amiga-idea to do as much work as possible with specialized hardware in order to take load off the main processor. We have taken over the Delfina from Petsoff in 2003, but only published a software update once.
After more than four years, we're especially happy that Axel Schneider has taken over the development of the delfina.library in his spare time since october 2007. The original author Teemu Suikki (Finland) has published large parts of the Delfina software under different open-source licenses. For the first time, we're publishing the source code for drivers of a product that you can still buy in the shops and that's actively developed. Although it seems to be quite fashionable to increase prices for classic Amiga hardware, we don't see a reason to follow that trend. The price of the Delfina "flipper edition" of 129,- EUR(*) is still more than 140,- EUR under the price of the predecessors made by Petsoff.
The new library also allows connecting the Delfina to a 26-pin expansion port of our Zorro cards like Buddha and X-Surf (older models). Crashes that occured especially on fast accelerators and under high DSP-load, are probably completely eliminated. There are still some issues when playing back web radio streams with a bitrate of 256kbit or more that we could not trace back to the delfina library. Find out more in the readme file of the archive.
The software support for the older Delfina cards (made 1999 or earlier) is still in the drivers, but it is not maintained or tested any more. We recommend the use of a new card made by individual Computers.
Download:
DelfLib417b1.lha (http://siliconsonic.de/t/bin/DelfLib417b1.lha)
(133 KBytes)
picture archive as addendum to the manual:
delfina_pictures.zip (http://siliconsonic.de/t/bin/delfina_pictures.zip)
(421 KBytes)
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Grrrrreat news! I had my delfina in the closet due to the bugs and hang issues while playing mp3... it's time to get it off there and test!
:-D
BTW, does anyone have tested it under OS4?
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That is good news. I had a Delfina a few years ago that just refused to work with my '060 accelerators (CyberStorm MKIII and Blizzard 2060.) I traded it back in for an X-Surf 3cc. Maybe now I can try again...
Of course, now that I have a Blizzard 1260, I might could try in the 1200, but I just can't bring myself to putting killer sound with no VGA :-) It's gotta go in the 2000 or 4000!
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Pity the new Delfina does not fit in to my A1200 Desktop like the original version else I would buy one.
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ok, is this a good news item about a new library for the Delfina DSP or an advert for a soundcard thats been out ages.
"We recommend the use of a new card made by individual Computers." :-/
Im glad to say I have no cards in my A4KT that hangs off wires, I do have a Delfina Lite though.
One question Ive been interested about, how do people mount these and the clockport USB cards in their Zorro miggie? You honestly dont hang it loose in the case do you?
Does the Delfina mount onto a backplate so you can just connect the audio cables directly to it?
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That's great news.
One question Ive been interested about, how do people mount these and the clockport USB cards in their Zorro miggie? You honestly dont hang it loose in the case do you?
Does the Delfina mount onto a backplate so you can just connect the audio cables directly to it?
Parcel tape and cardboard are your friends.. lol.. with a custom backplate with holes for sound output.. Bascially stuck some cardboard to the X-Surf and then stuck the delfina onto that.. heh
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One question Ive been interested about, how do people mount these and the clockport USB cards in their Zorro miggie? You honestly dont hang it loose in the case do you?
Good question, I had the same problem and I have no Clockport in my BigBox Miggy so I sold the card and bought a Repulse. Ok, it has no DSP but I am happy with.
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Finally they realese good drivers i may buy a new card . Gave up on using mine a few years ago due too poor drivers with horriable crashes ...
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@Oli_hd
One question Ive been interested about, how do people mount these and the clockport USB cards in their Zorro miggie? You honestly dont hang it loose in the case do you?
I've got mine mounted in an A2000 case with nylon tie-wraps and 1/8" plywood. The plywood has cutouts for Delfina cooling and holes for mounting the Delfina card. The delfina is then attached to the plywood with tie-wraps. The complete assembly is then suspended from one of the cross braces in the case, again with tie-wraps. It is slung between 2 Zorro cards, an X-Surf (the Delfina is attached to the Delfina clockport) and another card. Tie-wraps are a wonderful invention.
I've also got a Subway on the other X-surf clockport, also attached using tie-wraps to the cross-brace.
It actually doesn't look too bad but one of these days I'll upgrade the plywood to plexiglass to improve the appearance.
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Now it works fine even in os4 classic?
I have the old zorro version.
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Great news that it's open source, but the new version is unfortunately a no-go with the Delfina Lite. Anyone want to correct that? :-D
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I tested this today... sadly, it hangs when playing from my SCSI HD and cdrom attached to the BlizzardPPC's controller, it works OK when playing from the IDE controller (FastATA MKIII), but even while playing from IDE, if I open a file or even delete a file in the SCSI HD, the mahcine doesn't freeze or anything, but the sound in the delfina goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... as far as I remember, this is the same behavior as with previous versions of the library :-(
I attached it to the VarI/O clock port...
D.
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I've tested this new library on an 060 A1200 connected to the clockport.
Tested in Octamed with the toccata emulation library and it runs fine, so I assume all AHI applications will run fine.
AMPlifier does not give any sound output and crashes when you stop it playing, when set to use hardware decoding of mpegs - When the version 4.16 library is replaced it works again.
***Update*** Working fine now
DelfMPEG by the same author as delfinampeg.device worked, so i looked a little deeper. In the file env:DELFINAMPEG there was a setting "l3rate 32" which was limiting the playback rate to 32000 - when this setting was deleted the playback worked again. Not sure if this is a default setting, I don't remeber putting it in there, but it looks like this was causing the problem with the new library.
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@Dragster:
Did you try to give the player a bigger buffer for the mp3 playback ? Anyways sad to hear that as this was the problem i had too back in the day...
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Thank you!!! I have both Delfina Lite (Zorro) and Delfina Flipper (ClockPort) and they behave differently!!! Unsetting the DELFINAMPEG on the machine with Flipper (delfina.library v19) works now again... I have been scratching my head for a while why the DelfMPEG-player worked and MHI with dmdev did not... THANK YOU!