PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[Amiga_Nut]

The only thing from the world of SID I want for Amiga and Paula is a dual Paula adaptor board like the SID2SID mod for Commodore 64s.

Amiga's sound hardware was an ingenious design decision at the time (I mean what other 1985 home/small business/artist's computer could recreate ANY sound. Exactly

But as others have said it is pretty much just the most basic implementation of a very basic 8bit DAC so I don't see a market for Paula based stand alone products myself.

As for the 6510 being crap, well the only other mass market alternative was the Z80 and as the 65xx series pretty much executed 200% instructions per mhz compared to the Z80 you get the idea. I agree 1mhz was slow for the C64 CPU but ultimately there was enough DMA and very advanced audio visual custom chip wizardry that it hardly mattered excepted for 3D wireframe/polygon games and let's face ALL of those looked like crap on ALL 8bit computers. IMO even on the Amiga 500 and Atari ST 3D games looked crap, the only exception being Zarch (AKA Virus) on an Archimedes in 256 colours. I wouldn't bother with anything else before that except for probably Stunt Car Racer on Amiga (ST version is noticeably smoother but without all those creaking wooden plank samples the game is a bit boring)

[Amiga_Nut]

Amiga can do pretty nice sounding SID renditions (Per Hakan Sundell's C64 Demo for Amiga OCS and his SIDPlay app sound excellent...he also wrote C64S DOS emulator).

The problem with having a traditional soundchip is they have a distinct sound. The SID suffers a lot less from this than the Yamaha AY/YM Amstrad/Atari ST chips but designing tunes for games on Amiga you forget how spoilt you are when you then have to do the C64 version as well. All AY/YM tunes from the Amstrad/ST are instantly recognisable (as are the TI chips in Coleco/MSX machines too) but there are a lot of instances where the SID is not recognisable (compare the soundtrack to Rambo for example with the soundtrack to Sanxion's loading music to the electric guitar solo in the game Wizball. You can guess the author but the layman in the street would not know they are on the same computer).

Having said that SID is a genuine analogue synth on a chip and that is the key to why it is such an awesome piece of kit to design things for. If you look how much 1980 mono synths with similar technology cost you will not call a $20 6581 chip over priced ever again IMO

Biggest problem with SIDs IMO are that no two even from the same revision sound exactly the same ie two 6581 revision 3 chips may sound different even in the same machine...a subtle difference but with games that use complex filtering effects it can be noticeably different.

Any way if you really want to see what all the fuss is about you need to get a silver label original 1982 C64 with ceramic VIC-II chip and take it from there, later models of the C64 produce a much less basey sound which makes SFX in games sound a bit weedy lol

Avoid the white 64C with the 8580, totally useless machine unless all you want to do is run Cynthcart/Prophet 64 for basic music work.

[Amiga_Nut]

Cool thread guys, I saw reference to Yamaha stuff so wanted to tell you guys I have one of these boxes "The Amiga Project XG"

Id also like to say that anyone here that is saying they can get the "amiga sound" through emulation on a pc is full of CRAP. They must be tone deaf. Sure you can "prove" it with technical theories and whatever else, but take it from me djng for over 20 years the Amiga Paula HAS A SUPER PHAT SOUND hook it up to a good mixer and speakers and feel the base. Perfect for electronic/hip hop. The low end bass is out of sight.

Not the same sound, BETTER sound using any old Win XP laptop costing $50 and a copy XMPlay. The only unusual thing about my setup is it's sitting in my home cinema and the music is sent digitally to the amp so it is the purest possible sound of what the MOD is supposed to sound like before the cheap ass components on the A500 motherboard destroy the quality even more.

People who think a real Amiga playing a MOD sounds as good as XMPlay on a PC are tone deaf (usually in the tones from about 8khz to 20khz deaf actually lol). Signal to noise ratio on a real Amiga is terrible, total harmonic distortion is about the same as a 1978 Alba/Binatone clock radio and the hard separation of channels 1,3 and 2,4 with no possibility for even 1% cross fading all go to making MODs sound worse on a real Amiga....and that's before you even talk about pre-amp tweaks to the frequency spectrum and smoothing of 8bit samples to pseudo 16bit samples (which is actually what the Ensoniq 8bit sample keyboards of the late 80s did...and as they were all designed by Bob Yannes the designer of the SID and the IIGS awesome synth chips you can bet your ass there is a good reason for this upscaling of 8bit samples).

A simple test is either the Level 1 music for Super Stardust or the intro on It Came from the Desert, play it on a real Amiga linked to the line input on the same amp and again on any old Win XP PC playing the same MODs attached to the same amp via a coax/TOSlink cable to the digital input line.

Emulation of the computer as a whole will never come close to the frame accurate code running on Daphne/Agnus I agree but MOD playback is something PCs were doing better since the start of the century with standalone players so Paula IS technically nothing special at all, only the creative talents of the people who used it well and the genius decision by Jay/RJ/Dave to stick a 4 channel DAC on the motherboard of Lorraine