@Hypex

Quote:

Obiously the fake 14-bit is no true 16-bit. I read it sets the volume of one channel to 1 or something so don't really see how that ends up adding 6-bit more bits to the mix. Expect affecting the annalogue output. In which case the effect would be lost in emulation.

If the emulator emulates Paula then the 14-bit mode would most definitely work. The 14-bit mode is not 16-bit, no, but it is true 14-bit stereo.
Let this be 16 bits:
ABCDEFGHijklmnop

Playing this through 8 bits implies cutting away ijklmnop leaving only ABCDEFGH.
Now, if we play ijklmnop on one channel and ABCDEFGH on another, we get this:
ABCDEFGH +
ijklmnop
=a mess since ijklmnop was not supposed to play that loud.

Let's lower the volume on ijklmnop as much as we can (6 bits), we get this:
ABCDEFGH +
______ijklmnop

Now only GH and ij overlap so we need to manually shift ijklmnop two bits to the right and play it on the second 8-bit channel:
ABCDEFGH +
________ijklmn
=ABCDEFGHijklmn
= nice and clean 14-bit sound from two 8-bit channels with 6-bit volume setting.

Of course the final mix between these two 8-bit channels happen in analog circuits on a real Amiga, while on UAE they are sent to the host OS for further remixing onto whatever sound card it has.

Quote:

Sure you can do software mixing, not as efficient as hardware mixing. But you need a good mixing program to make it worthwhile. Don't know how the Digi Booster 2 mixng routines work. Nor exactly what AHI does with a good mode. But adding all the samples together then dividing by the total to get an average and avoid clipping, which I've seen done before, is not a proper mixing routine.

Yes it is How else would you do it? If you have a lot of bits you should skip the division. Like mixing many 16-bit tracks into 24-bits implies no dividing, only adding since clipping is not an issue.

Of course both sources need to be upsampled to the target frequency (using whatever filtering routines) before added together if they are different, which they always are when mixing tracker music where the sample rate sets the pitch.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

Hey everyone, wow a lot of great input on this. To be clear this is my hardware setup:

1. Amiga 1200 with an (in the mail now) ACA 1233 68030 + 128mb ram card

2. installing WB 3.1 roms (in mail as well)

3. I own a stereo GVP sampler that goes into the parallel port

4. a pyramid MIDI interface (1 midi in, x2 midi out, x2 midi thru)

5. the AGA Mark 2 video card

6. using (learning) Bars and Pipes 2.5b as my midi sequencer

I'm not using emulation (though I can see why people would!) just actual Amiga hardware. I can't afford anything high end like an 060..

So with that setup I'm not really sure how it would be possible to do any kind of multitracking.. I will say the idea of doing multi-tracking in 14-bit sounds really cool as in.. a sound I'd love to explore because it's not 16bit..

HD-Rec sounds like it requires MUCH newer hardware and the modern AmigaOS (I take it, this isn't WB 3.1) so that wouldn't qualify for my studio constraints.

That T.R.E.X. software sounds perfect! Where can I find it? I did a google search and didn't come up with anything useful. I found this http://amr.abime.net/coverdisk_index_6 but there are a lot of disks and i'm not sure those are a comprehensive list of disks. If I have to I could grab all the adf's and scour through them.

I found a thread where someone says they have soundprobe so i've PM'd that person. http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=34370

@hypex about lemmings.. yea that was not a good example.. i just mean like say.. some kind of executable amiga file could just be loaded into an editor as raw data and you'd hear how it sounds, which was basically a bunch of noise / static.. but still unique to each program..






Thanks!
Caleb

Last edited by 227 on 27-May-2015 at 02:11 PM.
Last edited by 227 on 27-May-2015 at 12:42 PM.

@lylehaze

There were a number of different sound cards for the clockport in the past. Some of them came with a DSP or MP3 decoder on board too.

@Rob

but it seems like those are hard to come by. no one makes them anymore and the few out there are probably not being sold

plus it seems like hardware is only part of the issue. the other side would be having software that uses it, unless the hardware somehow intercepts all audio actions automatically.

I didn't expect it to be possible

OctaMED does do more voices, but I never had cared for working with trackers. I prefer using a midi sequencer that then taps into the amiga's internal hardware for sample playback..

Still cool to think about. man i wish I had that high speed serial cable back in the day. i remember trying out different modems to get the most speed possible.. even trying a PCMCIA card with luck.. I think I ended going with a 33.6 at the time because the faster / more expensive 56k modems were not delivering any additional data.

Oh Commodore.. what were you thinking.. heh

Last edited by 227 on 27-May-2015 at 06:25 PM.

@lylehaze

Quote:

Just a wild guess, but "full blown" sound card using uncompressed LPCM requires a pretty big chunk of bandwidth. The wider the samples, the higher the sample rate, the more bandwidth is needed.

That's why AHI was designed to load samples into a sample bank. Since chip ram was displaced by sound ram. But with live streaming, yes, it's a mute point and you need bandwidth.

@227

Quote:

ut it seems like those are hard to come by. no one makes them anymore and the few out there are probably not being

That why I wonder why they didn't put an audio chip on since there's a gap in the market with people who don't want to use a tower and PCI busboard.

Quote:

plus it seems like hardware is only part of the issue. the other side would be having software that uses it, unless the hardware somehow intercepts all audio actions automatically.

There is Nalle Puh which can redirect Paula audio to AHI but I've never used it myself and I have no idea aboput compatibility.

OctaMED Sound Studio has MIDI support and the upcoming release will have to support AHI but it's not much use if you don't like using trackers.

Quote:

I'm not using emulation (though I can see why people would!) just actual Amiga hardware. I can't afford anything high end like an 060..

There is a new FPGA 68k CPU core being developed and it's already achieved 060 level speed on the smaller FPGA contained on the Vampire 600 card.
I've no idea how far away this Apollo core is but it's promised to be much more affordable than any 060 card and Majesta has a track record of producing reasonably priced hardware.

@Deniil715

Good explanation thanks. I always saw a problem with it because if you, for example, play a 16-bit file with the bytes reversed you hear a terrible mess! So I couldn't see how playing the LSB at any volume would help! In any case it has got me thinking, with the 14-bit theory, how loud really is an 8-bit LSB?

When I read it was 14-bit I thought it made use of the 6-bit volume control. But here it seems not. I had my own theory of 14-bit sound, that used the amplitude modulation on the hardware, so that 6-bits volume were used to control the amplitude of the other 8-bits. But I never got it to a working state.

Quote:

How else would you do it?

You have to avoid dividing because you chop a bit off as well as half the amplitude of the sample each time which isn't correct. Sure you have to compensate for clipping but not by halving the samples. I tested this on my Amiga. I needed to mix some tracks together for a drum track. I used the add and divide method and knew immediately it sounded wrong. It wasn't like the Amiga output at all which played both samples at full volume. So I added and then only divided if there was a clip. Sounded a lot better.

Quote:

Of course both sources need to be upsampled to the target frequency

I always wondered how the hardware did this. I suppose it came out seperately per channel as digital then ended up in an analogue mixer.

But with digital mixing you need room so 16-bits should be used for 8-bit samples and so on. A clip of course has to be cut down if it happens. For live mixing, such as a tracker, if all the samples are at a reasonable volume, clipping shouldn't be a problem and can be delt with as it happens. For a final render it might be best to normalise it all to maximum amplutide provided there is not too much distortion which will soften the volume and thereby resolution of the whole mix. Just my thoughts and some experience.

Last edited by Hypex on 28-May-2015 at 12:16 PM.
Last edited by Hypex on 27-May-2015 at 04:17 PM.

@Rob

wow that sounds cool about the new chip. How can I be in the loop on news regarding this development? I won't hold my breath, but I will certainly be an interested buyer if it comes out and if it's reasonably priced.

I bought the ACA 1233 mostly out of fear that some day they would go away entirely.. 030's are no longer in production.. I don't mind that it doesn't have an FPU because really I'm not using anything than would benefit from it. MIDI / music programs seem to all be largely cpu driven apps.

I'm not doing any 3d rendering or really much in the way of demos and such.. though I wouldn't mind trying burning chrome again once this 1233 shows up :) that was the only AGA demo I ever ran and it made good use of my Blizzard 030 card back in the day.

@QuBe

Quote:

QuBe wrote: @Hillbillylitre That is amazing Hillbillylitre. I hope I can get some setup assistance from yourself when I am at the stage I can do similar. I used to track modules and I would like to do it again. For down sampling 4 protracker tracks to 1 sample I used to use "mod2sample" if I remember correctly; that was about 20 years ago or so... Q! "i am home"

yes me too used mod2sample together with ProTracker probably 20 years ago before I bought a copy of DigiBoosterPro, V2.0 I think it was.

And before these internet times I recorded short chords and loops on a old cassette deck using the Tracker on my Amiga 500 and sampled them back with an 8 bit sampler using Audiomaster, and got a little noise effect as a bonus...


I have had a Prelude 1200 clock port soundcard lying around for years but without installing it because it doesn't give the right unique Paula sound...

_________________
Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

the prelude sounds cool.. all i would want is to be able to have my second (slave) A1200 be a higher voice sampler...

As it is i have MidiIn and SMT working well with it, but they only have access to the 4 voices of the paula chip. I'm wondering if these programs could somehow access other hardware to allow more voices to play in real time.

It does seem like with the whole virtual mixing that programs like OctaMED used, that somehow a sampler playback program.

basically trying to turn the Amiga 1200 into a Mirage sampler of sorts http://www.vintagesynth.com/ensoniq/ens_mirage.php

@227

Quote:

bought the ACA 1233 mostly out of fear that some day they would go away entirely.. 030's are no longer in production.

It's always best to buy what's available now. I'm sure countless people have left the scene while waiting for the next amazing piece of hardware that never came.

Development of the Apollo core can be followed here. So far it the discussion is about getting development cards out for A500 and A600 with a target price of around €150. I'm sure that once those are up and running properly the range will be expanded to include A1200.

A video of the early version Apollo core running on Vampire600 can be found here here. Torwards the end of the video you can see it scores over 3 x the speed of an 040 @25mhz in the Sysinfo benchmark. Like I said earlier the newer cores will be using a bigger FPGA and have a more complex design similar to the 060 so should be much faster.

Kipper2k is the guy who builds and sells the hardware and says he's will have 2 new items in inventory in the next few weeks. Maybe the A500 and A600 Apollo boards. When he was selling the Vampire600 boards they only cost €90.

His site is here.

Just noticed something for myself that I hadn't spotted there too. A CD32 RGB adapter.

@Rob

absolutely awesome! :) I guess what that hardware comes along... I should revisit HD-Rec :)

Also regarding that.. I've heard people toss around WB 3.9 and 4.1.. do they run with an A1200?

do they run all old software still just with modern motherboards? I've found the whole next gen of amiga stuff something i missed out on completely.

I'm pretty nostalgic about using the original hardware, but i'm also interested in making my A1200 experience better (like getting the AGA Mk2 card)


Thanks!
Caleb

@227

AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 is Amiga compatible, AmigaOS 4 is not.

AmigaOS 3.9 have some extra stuff OS 3.1 not have but still hardware and software compatible as far as I've noticed. Besides those extra few things 3.9 have you can downoad from Aminet and install on 3.1 too, like AHI.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@227

3.9 will run on a moderately expanded A1200 like your setup but it's not essential. 3.9 CD pop up on Ebay from time to time and you can also try asking on Amibay too. The price shouldn't be too high from a decent seller. If you don't have a CD driver for you A1200 you should be able to install it from UAE.

4.1 needs a Blizzard PPC card on the A1200 or dedicated hardware PPC hardware such as the Sam460 or X1000. The price of of a second hand BPPC tends to overlap that of a Sam460 but performance is nowhere near as good as the Sam. If you've not got a large disposable income OS4.1 hardware is extremely expensive anyway.

There is also MorphOS which runs on various PPC Mac hardware that can be picked up for flea-market prices and some would argue it's better than OS4.1 too. You also don't even have to buy MorphOS to try it out if you have suitable hardware. There's a trial version which runs normal for 2 hours before slowing down.

@Rob

Quote:

Rob wrote: 4.1 needs a Blizzard PPC card on the A1200 or dedicated hardware PPC hardware such as the Sam460 or X1000. The price of of a second hand BPPC tends to overlap that of a Sam460 but performance is nowhere near as good as the Sam. If you've not got a large disposable income OS4.1 hardware is extremely expensive anyway.

Bwa-HA! AmigaOS 4 disable the 68K CPU on Blizzard PPC cards and therefore must emulate all Amiga software, and Sam 460 can not even emulate an Amiga computer with a 030 card properly using EUAE.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

Quote:

Bwa-HA! AmigaOS 4 disable the 68K CPU on Blizzard PPC cards and therefore must emulate all Amiga software, and Sam 460 can not even emulate an Amiga computer with a 030 card properly using EUAE.

That's why you run 68k software directly from OS4 instead and most software that requires UAE doesn't need a fast processor. All system friendly software runs way faster on a Sam than any 68k Amiga. The same goes for MorphOS too. AROS x86 is the only NG OS that has to use UAE to run any 68k software

@Rob

Quote:

Rob wrote: @Hillbillylitre Quote: Bwa-HA! AmigaOS 4 disable the 68K CPU on Blizzard PPC cards and therefore must emulate all Amiga software, and Sam 460 can not even emulate an Amiga computer with a 030 card properly using EUAE. That's why you run 68k software directly from OS4 instead and most software that requires UAE doesn't need a fast processor. All system friendly software runs way faster on a Sam than any 68k Amiga. The same goes for MorphOS too. AROS x86 is the only NG OS that has to use UAE to run any 68k software

Even if the Amiga software is OS4 friendly it need to emulate the 68000 CPU. And most software is relative. In my case had approximately 99% of all Amiga friendly software needed to be emulated with EUAE. But if you use your AmigaOne with the AmigaOneSystem 4.1 operating system as a miserable old PC without software, so well its okay if you shit money.

Its absolutely ridiculous to combine OS4 with a Blizzard PPC card, it's like downgrading the Amiga computer to useless.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

Quote:

AmigaOneSystem 4.1 operating system

I like your subtle nonsenses. Quite a poetry.


However, this thread is about A1200 clock port.

@pavlor

Quote:

pavlor wrote: @Hillbillylitre Quote: AmigaOneSystem 4.1 operating system I like your subtle nonsenses. Quite a poetry.

Well i never bought OS4 and am glad I never did. It must have been the worst purchase I had ever done.

Quote:

However, this thread is about A1200 clock port.

Yes it is, under the so-called classic Amiga forum...

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

Quote:

Even if the Amiga software is OS4 friendly it need to emulate the 68000 CPU. And most software is relative.

Petunia and Trance blow any 68k Amiga out of the water.

Quote:

And most software is relative. In my case had approximately 99% of all Amiga friendly software needed to be emulated with EUAE.

If you found compatibility with system friendly software then you must be doing it wrong.

Quote:

But if you use your AmigaOne with the AmigaOneSystem 4.1 operating system as a miserable old PC without software, so well its okay if you shit money.

Most my system friendly software has always run fine on both my X1000 and the XE before it and the speed increase over my old 060/66mhz setup isphenomenal. There's also plenty of software takes advantage of the faster hardware and newer features available in the OS allowing you to do things not possible on a 68k Amiga.

I'd a agree with you that the pricing is not for everyone but most people who it feel the end user experience justifies the price. Then there are other people feel that their 68k Amiga offers everything they need from an Amiga, which is fine. Different people have different needs and tastes.

Quote:

Its absolutely ridiculous to combine OS4 with a Blizzard PPC card, it's like downgrading the Amiga computer to useless.

The BPPC offfers very little under OS3.x. Faster image decoding the abilty to play MP3 without slowing the system to a crawl and it just about manages to play Video CD.
Because OS4 and MorphOS are purely PPC you don't have the problem of sotware accessing 68k system structures which cause then context switches that slow down execution of PPC software under 3.x. You can also have a dual boot setup so you can run 3.x when you want to play some games via WHDLoad or run some scene demos.

Having said that I could never recommend a BPPC for running PPC or 68k software because at the prices they change hands it doesn't make sense.

Anyway I think we're going way off topic discussing the finer points of Amiga 68k and Amiga NG here.