New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[wawrzon]

making dedicated cards for every single task there is will make you run out of expansion ports pretty soon, i doubt this is anything more than gimmick.

[HammerD]

It's a nice idea, but the A1200 wouldn't be enough, I don't think. The ClockPort would be out, for sure (far too slow) maybe a Zorro-III card could send the data fast enough, I'm not sure - Zorro-II would be enough for smaller videos.
It's a possibility, after all the CD32 had an FMV cartridge, but I'm not sure how easy or worthwhile it'd be given it'd be limited by the bus bandwidth.

As far as I recall C= also had planned the FMV on a Zorro II or III card for the A4000.  Maybe there was even a prototype.  Of course you know the history and it never materialized

Anyway, back to the Prisma...really looking forward to it! Thanks for of your work on it!

[kickstart]

No, it plays lots of formats and has other features.
All of which are listed in this thread and press release.

What you said is like saying, "I keep seeing .wav files is that all this cd-rw drive is good for".
Makes no sense.

No... you dont understad, i only see a internal mp3, ogg, flac, (whatever format), and after many post i dont know if this card have more uses than a music player. Makes sense.

[skolman]

ALAC decoder for VS1063a available (experimental)
http://www.vsdsp-forum.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1320

[polyp2000]

The card supports WAV PCM format , according to the press release - given that is generally uncompressed audio (afaik), while it might not be able to do multichannel mixing in hardware, at the very least it should be possible to act as a two channel 16 bit audio output from something like Octamed ?

Even when mixed with the Amigas audio, could be useful having a couple of 16bit channels on top of the usual four 8bit ones.

Surely a software driver for something like that would be possible?

Mixing more than two channels would probably be done on the software side and need a decent CPU.

Has anyone thought of this ?

Nick

[spirantho]

Believe me, we've thought about it.
We're still looking at doing an AHI driver for the card, but this is secondary to the primary purpose, so will come later.

The problem is that when we mentioned AHI, people expected it to be a fully retargetable audio card like a Prelude or a Toccata - it's not. The VS1063a has a tiny buffer on it, so it's not suitable for anything other than streamed music really - i.e. what it's designed for. In fact, if we do an AHI driver, it will primarily be for Octamed and things like that!

[HammerD]

Believe me, we've thought about it.
We're still looking at doing an AHI driver for the card, but this is secondary to the primary purpose, so will come later.

Sorry, I'm a bit out of date, but no AHI driver? I would use this card primarily to playback MP3's with TuneNet (on OS 4.1 Classic) or using a variety of 3rd party MP3 players (AmigaAMP, AMPlifier, AmiNetRadio, etc...) so for this wouldn't an AHI driver be a requirement out-of-the-box ?

[amigakit]

@HammerD

It has a MHI driver already.  AmigaAmp and others use MHI.

[Faerytale]

Where is it!!?? I have cash to burn!

[HammerD]

@HammerD

It has a MHI driver already.  AmigaAmp and others use MHI.

Thanks and this works with TuneNet as well?

[amigakit]

Not sure if TuneNet supports MHI.  Will have to do some research into it.

[skolman]

VS1063 PCMMIX
http://www.vsdsp-forum.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1314

[skolman]

New DigiBooster3 for mixing does not use the AHI. AHI is used only for send 2ch PCM stream at all cards. So with card Prisma Megamix do not need at all to use the AHI. AHI only slows down and reduces the quality of the sound. link

[spirantho]

If the author of Digibooster 3 wants to use the Prisma.library directly, I'm more than happy to help....

[krashan]

I wonder if Krashan would consider porting Reggae to 68k given a big enough bounty? That's assuming that it isn't reliant on MorphOS specific features.

Would be a funny experiment and in theory there are no serious obstacles. It wouldn't be trivial, but isn't technically impossible. However in Prisma case it would not help. As far as I understand, the card takes an encoded stream, decodes it, performs D/A conversion and outputs analog audio. There is no way to get decoded PCM stream back to the computer. Then Prisma is equivalent to Reggae demuxer + decoder + output classes merged into one. Not very useful.

[krashan]

@spirantho: Just sent a mail to you. I guess it is possible, but I need more technical information about Prisma and the library.