🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4i00tm$rm3@news3.cts.com> dan@cts.com (David Newman) writes:
> : Zorro II card so you need A2000/3000/4000. Motorola 56002 40Mhz
> : 16-bit 48khz. As many channes as you need (well, I don't know
> : if the DSP can mix more than 100 or so :--))

> Unfortunately a DSP is not magic.  1 channel of 48Khz 16 bit sound 
> is 96K/s.  Assuming your samples are spooled from hard disk, Zorro-II
> can only transfer a max of 2.5 MB/s, which limits you to about 25 
> channels and that is assuming that your drive have no seek time as they
> swap between 25 mono AIFF files.  Ie 16 will be your max. At 16 
> channel your bus will be close to saturated (that is why Sunrise was 
> only 8 channels).

It's not that bad. You can use compression to reduce Zorro-II
bandwidth, or use lower sample rates or partially 8-bit samples
(the normal situation for a moduleplayer). With good memory buffering
the HD seek time is not a great limit - although we have played
24 channels with 48kHz/16 bit each on Delfina DSP with no buffers
on Amiga's memory (on A4000 with Warp 40MHz), direct from HD.

> That is the main reason the Audio card I have been working on is 
> Zorro-III.  Bus saturation is a very important thing when you are playing
> back 8MB/s video at the same time.  The product is called SoundStage

At 8MB/s transfer speed even Zorro-III is pretty full. A dedicated 
disk on the video card is a better solution. With audio you can 
(in case of missing bandwidth) always premix to 2 channels, which 
even PCMCIA can handle. 

Zorro-III autosensing would be much better than Zorro-II, of course.
Plain audio use doesn't need better than Zorro-II, but if you really
want to play with DSP (possibly while playing audio), there is never
enough bandwidth. That's why a future Delfina DSP will possibly be
Zorro-II/III, while maintaining complete backwards compatibility.

Programmers interested in developing for Delfina DSP, please contact.

-JP

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