A-EON Technology arranged for a few Prisma Megamix audio cards to be sent to developers over the world

Here is a video of it being installed in NovaCoder's A1200:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vup29ZUhMwA&feature=youtu.be

Novacoder will be working on integration of Prisma support into ScummVM and some other games applications that can make use of it.

Software Development Update

- OS 3.x Zorro driver software complete for big box Amigas and optimised in ASM
- OS 3.x clockport driver completed for A1200 and optimised in ASM
- MHI driver completed
- OS 4.1 Classic driver in development
- GUI in development
- AHI driver planned next

Last edited by amigakit on 06-Mar-2014 at 02:14 PM.

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@amigakit

Great news!

@amigakit

Is the card able to mix both paula audio and 16bit out at the same time?

UPDATE to my own post:
-card can output&mix mp3 and paula audio at the same time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlZLK3CO1Fk
-not 100% certain yet about the card being able to act as sound card
(it should at least be able to output stereo audio stream, so it should work, once drivers would be done. no official confirmations yet on this... except AHI driver planned next in the first post!)

Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Jul-2014 at 05:55 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Jul-2014 at 05:54 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Jul-2014 at 05:50 AM.

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@amigakit

Great news I will order one!! Happy there is an AmigaOS 4.1 Classic driver planned :)

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A-EON Technology delivers :)

[img]http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=85961&stc=1&d=1397761445[/img]

[img]http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=85962&stc=1&d=1397761445[/img]

Last edited by amigakit on 20-Apr-2014 at 12:41 AM.

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@amigakit

Any update on when this will be ready for purchase?

Will i be able to play mp3s on my A1200 with this card?

@Amiga1200Mark

We're trying to sort out an awkward unreliability on certain A1200 setups.

And yes, you will. :)

@Spirantho

Hey thanks for the update. Really looking forward to getting it now.

I may have missed it but is there any info or expected price on this yet?

Thankyou

@amigakit

Really interesting.

What i don't understand is why a solution for audio stream only has been choosed. It's maybe something for classic only Amiga?

Moreover, why not a solution based on the Xmos chip? Those chip are really good for audio.

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@AmigaBlitter

>Moreover, why not a solution based on the Xmos chip?

It would be more complex, slightly expensive and an overkill.

Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Jul-2014 at 09:33 AM.

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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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@AmigaBlitter

It is for Zorro and clockport eqipped Amigas. It's not necessary for PPC Amigas since they have enough processing power for audio streams not to be an issue.

@AmigaBlitter

The Prisma is just a "Classic" Amiga card. It fits into a Zorro slot or a Clockport - no PCI or anything. The reason it doesn't use XMOS is because it would be daft to, basically. :) There's no reason to use a multifunction programmable chip and then have to program it to do a job that there's already bespoke hardware for.

The Prisma card is really an interface to a chip which decodes just about every common compressed audio streaming format, with extra bits for things like S/PDIF. Nice and simple = lower costs. Its purpose is to allow A1200s (and even A500s/A2000s) to play compressed audio streams.

It will be interesting to see what will be the standard audio solution for cyrus+ based systems.

From original PDF:
"Xorro PCI-E version is also planned for A-EON Technology's Next-Generation AmigaONE systems"

Interesting as it then blocks other xorro cards.
(perhaps it will have some kinds of pass through for xcore I/Os .... Atari9p ports... perhaps)

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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@Spirantho

what are the benefits for any Amiga-NG ?
I have an A1XEG4 and playing common audio streams is not driving my CPU down.
Good luck in finalizing the driver

OK, another update.

All the Prisma cards arrived from Michael and they look great.



Michael is also manufacturing an audio back plate PCB for towered A1200's and big box Amigas which will an optional extra for the card.

I have been really busy with AMIStore development so decided last weekend to devote to Prisma instead :)

In the meantime, Spirantho very kindly sacrificied one of his weekends to add an AREXX port to the Prisma.library which is indeed very handy.

So I changed my PrismaControl programme to take advantage of Spirantho's efforts. Now PrismaControl uses Arexx messaging and it works well for all of my tests so far on my A1200T.



It also means all you programmers out there can make your programs control the Prisma card with a few simple Arexx messages, for example:

rx "ADDRESS PRISMA_MSG_PORT 'PLAY'"

rx "ADDRESS PRISMA_MSG_PORT 'STOP'"

rx "ADDRESS PRISMA_MSG_PORT 'VOLUME 10'"

I haven't yet tried it, but I also believe that I could modify my IBrowse MIME settings to play OGG, MP3, WAV files from webpage links. Any suggestions on this would be good.

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@amigakit

Ian provided me with the new Prisma.library this week which enables Zorro mode. So Chris and I tested Prisma in two A4000s, one with a Buster 9 and one with a Buster 11. All tests passed

Yesterday evening I implemented the extended m3u support in PrismaControl and my work today is to implement reading and displaying the ID3 data.

I am waiting for Ian to add a few extra features to the Prisma.library such as a message to my program that the song has ended and also a progress indicator.

The Prisma.library for 68k is currently high optimised in assembler for maximum performance so it needs to be converted back to c code in order to port to OS4 for the future AmigaOS 4.1 Classic version of the library.

Just enabled M4A filetype in the add song.. ASL requester to add the the FLAC, MP2, MP3, OGG, WAV supported file types.

Testing some M4A songs on my A1200 - they play well :)

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@amigakit

Quote:

I am waiting for Ian to add a few extra features to the Prisma.library such as a message to my program that the song has ended and also a progress indicator.

Could you do this yourself if the song length is known? That is set up a timer when play starts.

You could do a progress indicator with the help of a timer.

Quote:

The Prisma.library for 68k is currently high optimised in assembler for maximum performance

Given the card is doing is the hard work decoding the sound data, is this necessary? A good compromise is to write the main code in C optimise and time critical parts with assembler. But, I've doen that with AmigaE, which makes hybrid code easy to do.

Last edited by Hypex on 15-Dec-2014 at 01:48 PM.

Today I added an Arexx port to PrismaControl so Spirantho's Prisma library can send messages to my application indicating song end amongst other useful information. Simulated the messages with Arexx scripts in the Shell and it all seems to work. Now Prisma lib has to be updated this week to send messages.

@Hypex

Spirantho originally wrote the library in C and it was too slow for the clock port but fine on Zorro. So the whole thing had to be rewritten in asm to ensure maximum speed.

For OS 4.1 Classic, it will need to be re written in C again to be compiled for PPC.

Last edited by amigakit on 14-Dec-2014 at 11:24 PM.

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@amigakit

Nearly, not quite. :)

The problem wasn't with the clockport - though it probably would have been. The problem was with the 7MHz 68000 used in Amiga 2000s, it just wasn't fast enough to keep the VS chip's tiny buffer full. Had there been a clockport on an A2000 it would have been even more necessary. The 68000 could just about keep up but as soon as anything else happened in the OS it started to stutter badly.

@Hypex

The VS chip has only a very small amount of RAM on-board, so it needs to be kept happy all the time. The way I've done this is in two ways (two versions of the library): one is to hook into the VBl so that every 1/50s of a second the chip is polled to see if it needs more data. If it does, then it's fed till it's full, then it continues until the next VBl. The other is to not use interrupts at all but to use a timed loop, but this would be too slow under heavy load. It may work better on odd, fully-laden machines though.
The VS chip has no interrupt unfortunately (and even if it did, it'd be triggered too often, I suspect), which is why I have to poll it.
That's why it's in hand-optimised assembler.

@Spirantho

Really? People with only a 68000 in their A2000 want to put a soundcard in it? I can't imagine such a scene, it's not the late 80's anymore.

I wonder what sort of hardware the VS chip is aimed at? With these limitations it doesn't sound well designed. Perhaps not designed for a desktop computer, I don't know.

Using a VBI sounds like a module player. I don't like the sound of feeding data during an interrupt. The same as I didn't like module interrupts waiting for a scan line inside the interrupt. I suppose it's low latency anyway.

Could a buffer (and interrupt perhaps) have been put on the hardware side on the card to ease the situation?