New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[XDelusion]

Want badly!

[HammerD]

Very nice!  Will be ordering once the order page goes up.  Thanks AmigaKit!

[mrmoonlight]

Wonderful news a card that means I can listen to  FLAC and not that dreadful sounding Mp3 that sounds like the flushing of a toilet,i for one cant wait and well done to all involved I can almost hear my 1200/600 revving up  for the occasion, best wishes Brian.

[ElPolloDiabl]

It's very nice. What we always wanted, an affordable sound card.

[VingtTrois]

WANT!!!!!!
I also need more Zorro III slots!

[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?

[spirantho]

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

Edit:
@MrMoonlight
It goes without saying that I shall be using parts of my rather comprehensive Beatles music collection to test with I have Dr. Ebbett's FLACs for testing with, and all my needle-drops of my Beatles records are in 200Kbps OGG Vorbis format.

[psxphill]

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).

You should be able to hijack audio.device too.
 
As they ask about software that runs full speed without sound enabled, but doesn't when sound is enabled. The only thing that could be saved would be AHI software mixing and potentially 14 bit processing when using Paula.
 
So I believe the question the wanted answering was likely to be: Is this going to be as slow as using AHI with paula?

[spirantho]

I doubt you'd see any difference, to be honest - the Zorro II bus is about the same speed as Chip RAM (i.e. not fast).
Please remember that the Prisma is a different beast entirely to Paula. Paula plays sound samples but has no concept of streaming. Prisma plays streams but has no concept of sound samples (per se - but you can stream a sample).

The AHI driver will at best be something that might come in handy in certain circumstances, it is not (and is not designed to be) a replacement for Paula or any other sound card that requires use of a lot of samples.

[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.

[kickstart]

People talk about "afordable soundcard" but... whats afordable for aeon?

Its a player? can i use it for soundstudio?

[Rob]

People talk about "afordable soundcard" but... whats afordable for aeon?

Its a player? can i use it for soundstudio?

Affordable like a Blizzard 1260.

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.

Does SS use AHI, maybe the streaming facility will allow you to output directly from SS but we'll have to wait and see.

[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.

[kickstart]

Affordable like a Blizzard 1260.

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.

Does SS use AHI, maybe the streaming facility will allow you to output directly from SS but we'll have to wait and see.

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.

[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.

[psxphill]

Please remember that the Prisma is a different beast entirely to Paula. Paula plays sound samples but has no concept of streaming. Prisma plays streams but has no concept of sound samples (per se - but you can stream a sample).

Can you define what you mean by sample and stream.