SuperPAULA - if you have experinece in amiga music please give feedback

[amigaksi]

>>    If mixing is not noticable in today computers, it sure >>will be with a slow 060

>What you say is non true at all!
>
>Even with a stock 68000 you can mix 8 channels.
>For a 68060 mixing 8 extra channels takes no time

Better to keep as much in hardware as possible.  Even in the B&W Mac days, they thought the 68000 was so powerful that they put so much in software that nowadays that Mac is pretty much obsolete since all that software functionality can be done better on a PC.  If something time-critical was being done and music/samples were playing in the back-ground, at least the hardware can be exactly measured rather than relying on a software module to mix tracks.  

Also, today's PCs also seem to have a mixer of analog signals as well since the CDROM-audio can be mixed with the wave audio at various volume levels.  I'm not a musician but I sample lots of stuff from cassettes into compressed digitized audio and I find that some parts of the music is very low in volume and has to be normalized by hand.  I don't know if there's a music term for that but a dynamic normalization mode could help there (perhaps playing lower bits as if they were higher bits in a 24-bit/8-bit mode).

[amigaksi]

Yes, the Macs before they switched identities and still used the same name.

>>
>>        Also, today's PCs also seem to have a mixer of >>analog signals as well since the CDROM-audio can be mixed >>with the wave audio at various volume levels.


>    I don't know which decade you're living on, cd-rom audio >hasn't been analog for years (the analog audio cable isn't >even connected).

>Very true! I think the last time I connected a CD ROM audio >cable was 1999...

On my PC the audio cable is connected to the motherboard (it's a 1Ghz Dell running Windows 3.11).   It saves on the bandwidth to have it mix the analog audio rather than run it through some Media Player that reads the digital data off the CD and plays it like a WAVE which prevents using applications at the same time that use the WAVE output.  The old Thinkpads had some sort of module that let you play multiple wave files simultaneously-- may be it was their MWAVE DSP that did that.  

Anyway, I guess any analog mixing would be external to the Paula chip if this is going to be a plug-in replacement or backward compatible on the hardware level.

[amigaksi]

>And thus you have it, you can't possibly beat today's PC or Mac but you can come close to a 1999 PC without destroying compatibility. Given that this is retro-computing some might complain that that's not retro enough!

That wasn't what was being attempted.  If you do want to compare PC sound to Amiga sound, you would have to compare the standard hardware not some specialized card in either machine.  Taking the Sound Blaster standard in the PC and the Amiga hardware, you can easily see that the Sound Blaster cannot play 4 waveforms at the same time and uses a 1 Megahertz crystal to calculate frequencies whereas the Amiga can play 4 waveforms and uses a 3.57Mhz crystal to calculate frequencies.

While you could emulate the more channels in software, it's not comparing hardware and it's not real-time anymore.

[amigaksi]

by FrenchShark on 2008/3/17 21:33:16

>- 16 16-bit channels.
>- 2 volume control registers (one for left, one for right).
>- Better precision for the period register. I guess your SuperPaula clock will be 28 MHz at least. Even at 28 MHz, you need to have a "fractional" part for the period register so you can generate 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz sampling rate.

How does the SoundBlaster get away with it using just a 1Mhz crystal?  I guess they are rounding off to rate closest to the 22.05Khz, 44.1Khz or 48Khz.  I just thought that it would be more useful if the FPGA was in a plug-in module for the Paula socket so it's backward compatible with existing Amigas. (i.e., pin-compatible).