New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[wawrzon]

aeon funding it sounds like an attempt to win the fans of genuine Amigas over, however depending on pricing it may be an interesting item at least for some. and as its pretty obvious there are still quantities more operational Amigas out there than all the os4 Hardware, it might sell well.



edit: i see it a little half hearted though. if they are about to drawn million dollars in hardware architecture for an os that is not actively developed, they did better to sponsor amiga fpga development instead of such high specialized gadgets.

[wawrzon]

If we give them some Classic Amiga peripheral sales that they can wrap their head around, they may consider doing more for us.

dont fall for it. its them they want to wrapo our head around not the opposite;) said that buy the card if it suits you, its a welcome development, but dont expect any political consequences.

[wawrzon]

It's not going to happen - getting ASICs fabbed these days isn't cheap if you want 500MHz CPUs.

when you are starting to shelve out millions to make ppc a valid desktop architecture again you might as well build 68k asic ;P..

But before all that, you need a compatible CPU core. TG68 is fine for a low-end core, but would it clock up to 500MHz? There is the Apollo core, but that's very new. Maybe in a couple of years there will be FPGAs with it in that aren't horribly expensive, with ~100MHz cores.

And I guess you could then have a very fast clockport to go with it!

lets see what that apollo actually is when majsta releases his new firmwaare.

[wawrzon]

The Ogg/FLAC decoding would come in very handy for both ScummVM and my SDL Mixer, how do you interface to them, is there going to provide some kind of library?

shouldnt it be actually solved via datatypes. in this case accelerated. if it was sdl should use them rather than statically linking to libs to make it more configuration independent.

[wawrzon]

no ahi? :O

[wawrzon]

so the almost only advantage of this card is that you will be to play your audio collection stored in some compressed format using a dedicated player? at least something like mpga.library should be thought of. or are we facing c64 future wehre everything hast to be statically linked?

[wawrzon]

Only sensible solution is writing a new dedicated player. It is not that much work. Real challenge is writing decoders for the DSP on that sound card. But writing some decent GUI and simple playlist system is piece of cake.

then i dont see an advantage in this kind of device. it is like warpup, only making difference on very few dedicated tasks and everything tat wants to use it must be specifically recompiled against it. why not just buy a standalone $5 mp3 player instead? you can even place it somewhere weithin your amiga if you really must.. otherwise it gets seriously integrated into the system or let it be.

[wawrzon]

+1 to the reggae framework.

I guess ist what it boils down to.

[wawrzon]

*shudder*
I hate static linking. What do you think I am, a Linux coder?

Here's what you currently need to do to play an OGG Vorbis file:

PrismaBase = OpenLibrary( "prisma.library", 0L);
Prisma_Init();
Prisma_PlayFile( "GreatMusic.ogg" );
CloseLibrary( PrismaBase);

still this has to be called explicotely, no existing app will take advantage of it.

There are a few extra parameters to PlayFile if you want to use them (volume, balance, buffersize, task priority), but that's pretty much it.
There's also PlayMemory() which I'm going to implement soon, and it's this that'll hook into AHI and any apps such as SCUMM.

Sounds like hacking. If if theres is none then create reasonable abstraction instand to bind your implementation to the particular hardware, that will create another gap among amiga users and another app versions hell fort tue users to fight with..

[wawrzon]

many later SDL games/apps use compressed audio for background music.

Exactly. If such a port has ro be explicitely linked to your library to make use of the hardware then it will likely not work otherwise eben without sound. Independent ports will be needed ans ade to tue whole mess.

[wawrzon]

one simple question, is that going to be system transparent or not? will the existing software be able to take advantage of it? say there is a game port compiled with the audio enabled, that struggles on a genuine hardware, but runs well as soon as sound is muted, will this run over this card without a recompile against some additional dependencies?

[wawrzon]

What you're asking really, I think, is does it support AHI. Currently it does not, but that's because I've not finished the driver yet. We're hoping to be able to support a basic AHI driver.

but is ahi supporting hardware accelerated audio decoding to take advantage of this device or will that ahi driver just be able to map the audio output to the card and as long as the application isnt compiled against mhi there will be no speedup?

Obviously it doesn't replace Paula or anything like that (that's impossible without a huge amount of work, as non-AHI programs tend to just hit the hardware).

this doesnt matter as long as paula itself can be passed/mixed through.

It does support MHI if the game supports that, but I don't know of any that do.

okay, so the idea is to push compiling ports against mhi. imho that might work out as long as mhi has some dummy backend for amigas without that hardware that just leaves out all compressed streams, freeng cpu and allowing essentially run the software at acceptable speed just without the sound.

[wawrzon]

Affordable like a Blizzard 1260.

you compare a specialized audio decoder to general purpose accelerator sporting highst end cpu that was viable for the platform at given time?

If you render the SS output in a format supported by the card then you can at least listen to your creations in higher quality than Paula can do.

in fact this hardware looks exactly as useless for existing software as ppc hybrid accelerators at their time, which were a huge mistake in their own right, frankly without any crucial consequences anymore, except the last customers paying fortunes for almost nothing in return.

[wawrzon]

Blizzard 1260 is totally cool piece of hardware to real amigas.

Then this "audio card" is useless for editing software, with your information seems like just a player, 30-40€ can be a good price.

dont know if i need amiga to substitute an mp3 player stick. im not sure if i need to hear crappy repetitive music while playing game, i mostly turn it down anyway. a decoder could be used at best to decode sound effects. the problem today is rather to find a game to port that will be playable on amiga even without sound. and when comes to sound effects the games usually are so overloaded with them, i wonder if a streaming decoder will cope well with that task. this is probably up to novacoder to tell.

[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.