IIRC, once there was delfina DSP card for clock port. To me this looks little similar (except that this one has both zorro and clock port interface).
After drivers are done it should work as audio card or as a compressed data playback card... perhaps even both at the same time + mixing paula in...

now if one combines that with the recent DJ SW for Amiga ....

Last edited by KimmoK on 22-Apr-2014 at 08:25 PM.

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

@asymetrix

AAA is pointless. It would be a lot of effort to add support for hardware which has no legacy software. You might as well have a Radeon GPU on there instead, at least there's already drivers that could potentially be back ported from OS4 and you don't have to build the chip yourself.

I'm thinking of buying two boards in autumn with trapdoor-options. I guess you'll make enough boards that they don't sell out too fast? :)

@KimmoK

Quote:

After drivers are done it should work as audio card or as a compressed data playback card... perhaps even both at the same time + mixing paula in...

This is the confirmation I am looking for. Could be very interesting for music production folk!

Q!

"i am home"

Last edited by QuBe on 23-Apr-2014 at 10:19 AM.

@QuBe

The basic idea with this card for games will be to playback compressed music in OGGY/FLAC format while SFX are generated in the usual way (eg Paula). This should mean that the game's music will be 'free' or at least very close to 'free'. The SFX will then be fed directly into the Prisma to be mixed with the music automatically.

Of course only games that are coded to use the new Prisma library will be able to do this. When I pull my finger out, I'm going to attempt to use the library to add music to some of my ports (eg my new Duke Nukem port). Normally I have to skip the playback of music to save CPU cycles.

Most of my ports have music available in compressed format (ScummVM, Descent Rebirth and Duke Nukem).

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@QuBe

The Prisma card will playback uncompressed audio but because of the bandwidth required it's actually substantially slower than playing compressed audio. This is why any any AHI driver that will exist will be very limited, it can only offer 2 channels, one for each speaker.

The Prisma is designed to play music streams... support for anything else will be limited at best.

@Spirantho

Hiya,

I've got a question, does the library support the ability for the card to decompress data and then write the decompressed sound to an accessible memory location?

Just to be clear, with this approach the Prisma wouldn't actually output any sound itself.

This appears to be the preferred approach for integration with ScummVM and mimics what the OGG/FLAC libraries do (ScummVM has it's own internal software mixer).

One potential problem I can see straight away is the speed of the clock-port interface, passing compressed data to it isn't so bad but passing uncompressed sound the other way might run into throughput problems. What do you think?

@Spirantho

>The Prisma card will playback uncompressed audio but because of the bandwidth required it's
>actually substantially slower than playing compressed audio. This is why any any AHI driver that
>will exist will be very limited, it can only offer 2 channels, one for each speaker.
>The Prisma is designed to play music streams... support for anything else will be limited at best.

Surely you mean: "when connected to clock port"?

When connected to zorro slot the bus should not be the bottleneck I think.

I wonder what is the status of PCIe version.... will it ship with cyrus+ betatester version?

Last edited by KimmoK on 23-Apr-2014 at 09:01 AM.

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

@NovaCoder

That sounds fantastic NovaCoder. If you can do it I think a lot of people would enjoy the new audio experience.

Also, if demo's were made to stream pre-recorded high quality 16 bit tunes through Prisma would it mean freeing up more resources for demo routines?

Q!

"i am home"

@QuBe

That would be easy. :) That is its purpose.

@NovaCoder

There's no way of getting data out apart from when the input is an audio stream, I'm afraid!

@Kimmok

The data throughput on a 44KHz 16-bit WAV is 705,600bps - so over twice that of even a high bit-rate MP3 (320Kbps)! You can see why the clockport is the bottleneck, as you say - but even on Zorro II when the CPU is slow (e.g. a vanilla 68000) it's going to struggle to keep the VS chip fed. The clockport is only one a few bottlenecks (the other, of course, being disk speed - the VS chip has to be kept fed at all times and hard disk access - especially on IDE systems - can be a killer.

@Spirantho

"but even on Zorro II when the CPU is slow (e.g. a vanilla 68000) it's going to struggle to keep the VS chip fed"

Agreed.

IIRC, A590 SCSI adapter managed to transfer 2.5Mbytes/s with DMA on unaccelerated A500, (my friends A500 did faster transfers than my A4000 IDE, even when A4000 IDE already was faster than normal y1994 486 motherboard IDE) but I wonder if A500 side connector is faster than z2?

btw. does Prisma Megamix support DMA on z2?

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

@KimmoK

Not as far as I recall. That's more a hardware thing (Michael Boehmer)...

@Spirantho

Quote:

This is why any any AHI driver that will exist will be very limited, it can only offer 2 channels, one for each speaker.

Why would that be? AHI has it's own mixing routines based on the soft channels set, IIRC max 32.

@Hypex

Of course the software mixer will provide more channels, but I mean in hardware. Software mixing will slow things down rather...

@Spirantho

Quote:

Spirantho wrote: The clockport is only one a few bottlenecks (the other, of course, being disk speed - the VS chip has to be kept fed at all times and hard disk access - especially on IDE systems - can be a killer.

Given the ATA/Zorro/clockport bottlenecks, a wodge of SDRAM on the board would have been nice-to-have for prebuffering.

A couple of questions re PCIe version.

Will this bring other advantages to systems based on PPC cpus, or is it more of a "why not"?
I can see the advantage for Amigas, leveraging extra usability when using a 68K cpu by offloading, but not so much for the more powerful PCIe based systems.

Is that DSP capable of some funky generic maths (eg reverse fourier transforms, or Altivec-like matrix/vector maths), or is it too specialised, or documented/supplied with libraries only for high-level operations?

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@Boot_WB

I can't really comment on any NG version, but I can say the DSP is very specialised - it's only a decoder chip, not a maths chip.

As for SDRAM, I'm afraid that would have increased the complexity greatly, as there'd need to be a controller on there too. This would have increased the costs to probably a level people wouldn't be happy with. I agree it would have been nice, but I think "maybe in the next version" is probably the correct answer here - if we sell enough Prismas, then who knows...?

@Spirantho

Quote:

Spirantho wrote: @Boot_WB I can't really comment on any NG version, but I can say the DSP is very specialised - it's only a decoder chip, not a maths chip.

Just exploring the possibilites, very nice regardless.

Quote:

As for SDRAM, I'm afraid that would have increased the complexity greatly, as there'd need to be a controller on there too. This would have increased the costs to probably a level people wouldn't be happy with. I agree it would have been nice, but I think "maybe in the next version" is probably the correct answer here - if we sell enough Prismas, then who knows...?

Thought that would be the case, and I agree with the philosphy of simplicity especially for the initial runs.
Getting it to market is priority no1, nice-to-haves are some way down the road.

Thanks for the information.

Last edited by Boot_WB on 23-Apr-2014 at 09:05 PM.

_________________
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People should think about this card as internal highly improved version of MAS Player, but not a proper Amiga sound card...

@Spirantho

Quote:

Spirantho wrote: @QuBe That would be easy. :) That is its purpose. @NovaCoder There's no way of getting data out apart from when the input is an audio stream, I'm afraid!

Yep OK that's cool, it would probably be too slow anyway.

I'll just have to grab the raw OGG data earlier in the pipeline (whatever the hell that means).

@digging info etc...

"Prisma Megamix, a modern next-
generation soundcard for Classic
Amiga computers."

IMHO, sound card is little different than just a mas player.
Delfina DSP was a sound card.
Is this much different?

"incorporates a VS1063 DSP chip which
can play and encode MP2, MP3,
WMA, OGG, LC-AAC, HE-AAC,
FLAC, IMA, WAV PCM and many
other sound formats making it ideal
for hi-fi audio playback and stream-
ing applications."

So, it can also output uncompressed audio.
But how many channels it then handles?
Only stereo via AHI?
Will we have regular 5+1 or 7+1 audio via this card.


From delfina DSP info:
"The clockport of the A1200 cannot reach the data performance of the Zorro-bus, but it's still fast enough to playback several AHI channels, and of course to playback MP3 files"
http://www.vesalia.de/e_delfina.htm

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