Amiga DSP sound cards - any creative uses?

[commodorejohn]

I'm just curious, as I was looking through the Amiga Hardware Database and noticing how many Amiga sound cards include a DSP, and that at least some of the Delfinas allow them to be reprogrammed. I gather from a quick glance around Aminet that these are largely used for standard reverb/chorus/equalizer-type effects processing, but I'm curious as to whether anybody made more creative use of them for synthesis or more unusual sound-warping. I see a couple massively-multichannel wavetable systems on Aminet, but that's kinda boring - I had a Microkorg running a 120MHz DSP that could do four-voice two-oscillator synthesis with an emulated resonant filter and custom signal patching/modulation, so I have to imagine that the 40-70MHz ones in some of these sounds cards could at least manage a convincing monosynth...

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, I've seen some of that. Shame they didn't go that route, Amiga software would probably have made better use of such a thing than the early Mac Quadras did (Apple having developed a "do it in software!" culture from the get-go on the Mac...)

[commodorejohn]

DSP performance metrics aren't really that comparable with CPU ones, though - they're designed for completely different tasks. A moderately-clocked MHz DSP can do a lot of math-heavy signal processing that an equivalently-clocked CPU would choke on, while a CPU can much more easily do general-purpose computation. And yeah, you could probably do more with an ultra-modern chip like the EMU20K1, but that's rather academic since no Amiga cards have the EMU20K1. As I said, plenty of interesting stuff has been done on such hardware; the microKORG is a full analog-modeling semi-modular polysynth on (I believe) a 120MHz DSP, so I don't see why 40-70MHz shouldn't suffice to do some fun stuff with.

[commodorejohn]

Following on from our ZorRAM and MAS Player Evolution projects, we are in the early stages of product development on a new Amiga Zorro card with a modern DSP.

I would be grateful for valuable feedback from Amiga users out there on what features you would like to see on this card and what features you would like in the software.  

It's going to be a notable software and hardware development cost, so we want to get the features right for the Amiga Community.

I hope new project will be a catalyst for Amigans to be creative in sound and audio projects.

Fascinating! The only real feature request I'd have is that it be programmable, but I assume if you're making a specifically-DSP card that's a given. Decent-quality audio output, too...oh, and is there any chance of getting a 1200 version?