PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[commodorejohn]

What's so bad about the AC97 spec?

It's provided a mediocre standard for computer audio to uniformly adhere to and never bother with striving to improve on or add interesting new facets to. (At least until you get into overpriced pro-audio gear.)

and what makes OPL3 so good?

It's a versatile synthesizer chip capable of a wide variety of rich, interesting sounds, and has the distinctive Yamaha FM character. You'd never mistake it for anything else.

What's wrong with ROMplers?

Nothing's inherently wrong with ROMplers, but by the mid-'90s they had, kudzu-like, almost completely overtaken the landscape, from the bottom-end cheap Casio crap to high-end digital pianos and "workstation" keyboards. This is a problem because ROMplers are just plain not in the slightest bit organic; you press a note at a given velocity with a given patch, you get the same damn sound every time. Whereas even the DX7, while just as purely digital, lets you add subtle touches (like the capability for any of the six oscillators to be free-running) that differentiate each note from the next in an analog kind of way. ROMplers have their uses, but as the be-all and end-all of sound synthesis that they've become, it's Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Baked Beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam. Just way the hell too much Spam.

Btw, I feel that it weren't until the 90's that artists learnt to make good use of synthezisers.

Allow me to prove you completely, utterly wrong.

[freqmax]

What demands do you think a sufficient computer audio standard should place?

There might been a minority artists that knew their stuff but perhaps not the music industry at large.

[commodorejohn]

The music industry at large has never known its ass from its elbow, man. When Chuck Berry was ripping it up on the crazy new distorted guitar and Little Richard was shrieking like a maniac, the music industry was employing Pat Boone to make that music safe for easily-frightened old white grannies. Nowadays the music industry thinks that you can make a singer by grabbing some skank off the street and running her through auto-tune. "The music industry at large" is the last place you look for actual talent in music.

A sufficient computer audio standard shouldn't be a standard at all, basically. There should be some basic standard capabilities, but manufacturers should be encouraged to color the results in interesting ways, with interesting (optional) effects, and we should bring back MIDI as a default method for music delivery. Back in the day, when each sound card had its own way of rendering MIDI, you could actually get different sounds out of them. If you didn't like the sound of an OPL2 sound card, you could get a GUS, or an IBM Music Feature Card, or hook up to an MT-32 through an external MIDI connection. Each of those would sound very different, and you could pick one that you liked. Now it's all the exact same stuff in MP3 recordings, and where there is MIDI, it's that same wretched Roland soundfont that comes with Windows. Yuck.

[nicholas]

If that featurelist is accurate, yes. For a 68k-based softsynth, that's  impressive - resonant filters and effects? Hell, a lot of hardware  ROMplers didn't even have that.

Its modules are supported by the UADE replay engine (For *nix, MorphOS and Haiku) that emulates the 68k CPU + Agnus + Paula to (almost) recreate the authentic sound.  The Droidsound player in the Android Play Store plays them nicely for when I'm on a journey.

[XDelusion]

+1 Very true, very true!

The music industry at large has never known its ass from its elbow, man. When Chuck Berry was ripping it up on the crazy new distorted guitar and Little Richard was shrieking like a maniac, the music industry was employing Pat Boone to make that music safe for easily-frightened old white grannies. Nowadays the music industry thinks that you can make a singer by grabbing some skank off the street and running her through auto-tune. "The music industry at large" is the last place you look for actual talent in music.

A sufficient computer audio standard shouldn't be a standard at all, basically. There should be some basic standard capabilities, but manufacturers should be encouraged to color the results in interesting ways, with interesting (optional) effects, and we should bring back MIDI as a default method for music delivery. Back in the day, when each sound card had its own way of rendering MIDI, you could actually get different sounds out of them. If you didn't like the sound of an OPL2 sound card, you could get a GUS, or an IBM Music Feature Card, or hook up to an MT-32 through an external MIDI connection. Each of those would sound very different, and you could pick one that you liked. Now it's all the exact same stuff in MP3 recordings, and where there is MIDI, it's that same wretched Roland soundfont that comes with Windows. Yuck.

[Linde]

didn't mean to piss you  off,.

Well, I'm not pissed off, just curiously arguing as usual

At the time it was produced the SID was pretty remarkable.
Compared to the 6502 its a work of art.

I think that it's still remarkable in that there hasn't been a sound chip like it since.

The 6502 is little more than an attempt to undercut 6800 pricing.
The design holds no attraction for me.

Fair enough, but my point is that to most C64 programmers, the CPU is more or less just a means to an end. The fun stuff is the VIC-II and the SID. The amiga community seems to have been very CPU-centric, in comparison.

And if we have all stopped use old processor like the 68K, how come I can still use 68K machine code under MorphOS?
And believe me, its being done. New code.
Because its still backward compatible.

I never questioned that, but you have to agree that if performance or particularly interesting designs were the reason people keep using these CPUs, they would have been long forgotten.

We are just a really stubborn bunch.

Indeed!

[hairy]

I've seen people take SID chips and create little synth boxes to be controlled via MIDI. Seems a lot of people are willing to pay a nice amount to have such a thing.

 So I'm wondering, how come nobody seems to be doing this with the Paula chip? Also has the Paula chip been cloned?

Unless you're one of those purists who can tell the value of the 8580 external caps in a blind test, then you could try strapping a Parallax Propeller chip to the serial port of your Amiga

Demonstration videos:
http://youtu.be/w_GTOvkdM5Q
http://youtu.be/bawJFT3hSLw

consider that removing the video and SD parts from that demo, the audio generation only takes 1/8 of the processing power of the chip.

So putting aside some 2/8 for serial port and routing, up to 6 SID chips could be emulated with a single $8 chip.

[freqmax]

The music industry at large has never known its ass from its elbow, man. /../
A sufficient computer audio standard shouldn't be a standard at all, basically. There should be some basic standard capabilities,

Lets put it this way, any music you could access by listening to radio or buying records. There were even special shops for those weird "imported records" for people that wasn't satisfied with the industry marketed and spoon fed stuff. It took until the 90s before they presented synthesizer music that was good. Internet = many ribbons of red tape and capacity measured in kbit/s ..

When I think audio standard, I think more in terms of S/P-dif with at least 96 ksp/s 20-bit. Otoh, via USB one can connect any audio stuff one can think of. But USB is in my opinion half-duplex singled ended over complicated piece-of-crap.

The nice thing is that nowadays it's economically possible to bring one's one hardware to do more or less anything one can imagine. I had some ideas along pick-and-place and analog hardware that would make chips not manufactured possible and avoid the whole ASIC deal.


As for the 6502, it certainly lacks many features and is slow. But it was delivered 7 times cheaper than 6800 and changed the market. Delivered by ûbergeek Peddle and hand drawings
Seems also that both the VIC-II and SID were created with the mantra "everything good that is on the market into our chip", and it succeeded.

Dunnu why Amiga fans are CPU focused. Perhaps it's because the instruction set stays but the peripherals vary?

@hairy, Silicon is cheap these days..

[commodorejohn]

Lets put it this way, any music you could access by listening to radio or buying records. There were even special shops for those weird "imported records" for people that wasn't satisfied with the industry marketed and spoon fed stuff. It took until the 90s before they presented synthesizer music that was good.

Dude, every single one of those except the Doctor Who theme was off a record that was either on a major label (Relayer and Selling England by the Pound, both by bands that were very popular at the time,) otherwise a significant hit (Oxygène sold 15 million copies and hit #2 in the UK charts, Équinoxe hit #11,) or both (friggin' The Dark Side of the Moon is only the second best-selling album of all time.) These were not obscure little indie records or something.

[freqmax]

There are still some geographical areas that are retarded .. You seem to have been spared

Oxygène, Équinoxe, etc.. could be found if you asked the broadcasters what did you play at time X on channel Y to even find the artist, and then went around to record shops praying for luck.

[commodorejohn]

I'll admit that, being as I was still close to a decade out from being born in 1976, I can't say firsthand, but...seriously? Oxygène was a smash hit. People who aren't even into electronic music (i.e. my dad) knew about it.

[takemehomegrandma]

@Iggy

You are talking tech specs and comparing those to others like the discussion would be about computers. It's not, it's about musical instruments. Like it or not, but the SID gives a very unique sound. There are many big musicians/groups that has used a Sidstation in their productions (Madonna, Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, Timbaland, Daft Punk, RedOne, Robyn, David Guetta, Depeche Mode, Psy, No Doubt, Machinae Supremacy, to name *a few*), and it's quite easy to spot when they do. The reason has nothing to do with tech specs compared to other solutions or price of SID chips on e-bay.

[nicholas]

Cubase 64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y

[commodorejohn]

Cubase 64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y

Amazing

[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)

[freqmax]

SID was an real good synthesizer and perhaps something Amiga missed. And Paula was perhaps just a D/A but it had DMA to add and beat the competition like 286 with single square oscillator......

Jay Miner knew his stuff and made good design decisions. That Commodore management lacked the insight to build a long feature on this platform is another story.