Let's talk about a 32-bit Amiga Paula
category: general [glöplog]
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hardware sample sound channels post 1991 became an anachronism and DSP chips the future
I think you're at least a decade off, since sound cards (e.g. Sound Blaster Audigy) and game consoles (e.g. Xbox) still had hardware sample channels after 2000. You're right about it being a dead end, but I'm not sure generic DSP chips ever became mainstream for computers? Seems like we went straight to CPU.
what do you think is in your pc or mac or android or iphone or console sound hardware?
as for the 1991 claim, sure, after the first implementation (in NeXT) it still took a decade or so for DSPs to completely dominate over hardware sample channel solutions. hence "it became an anachronism" and not "it was" :)
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what do you think is in your pc or mac or android or iphone or console sound hardware?
My PC has a dumb Realtek codec, and I believe Playstation 5 uses a GPU compute unit? No idea about the rest, so colour me impressed if they generate audio using generic DSP chips like the Next workstation you mention.
who cares if the dsp is generic or proprietary, openly programmable or dumbed down, standalone or part of a bigger chunk of silicon. it's a design philosophy and it's sad commodore was not an early adopter because it turned out to be the future.
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Super Paula in 1995 would have impressed absolutely noone
Super Paula would've come out in 1992, same year as AGA.
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who cares if the dsp is generic or proprietary, openly programmable or dumbed down, standalone or part of a bigger chunk of silicon. it's a design philosophy
Yeah, the Atari Falcon 030 had one which they boasted about incessantly, but in the end the machine still failed because Atari didn't push it hard enough, or they did but no-one knew what to DO with a DSP back then.
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and it's sad commodore was not an early adopter
As I said earlier:
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I don't think that Commodore even cared about being a trendsetter anymore. I blame Mehdi Ali for his indifference to the Amiga brand, being in charge and all that.
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who cares if the dsp is generic or proprietary, openly programmable or dumbed down, standalone or part of a bigger chunk of silicon. it's a design philosophy and it's sad commodore was not an early adopter because it turned out to be the future.
I don't particularily care, I'm just trying to understand what the design philosophy you suggest entails. I'm not familiar with Next workstations, but Atari Falcon had the same DSP chip, and to my understanding it was application programmable. Instead of having a fixed audio architecture where sampled sound is mixed in hardware, you could have the DSP chip mix, decompress, synthesize, add effects, or whatever else the application needs. On the other hand, application running on my PC do not have the ability to offload such calculations to a DSP chip, and instead have to do them on the CPU, just like a DOS PC with a parallel port DAC would. It's unclear how these two scenarios are part of the same design philosophy, so it would be helpful if you could be more specific than "guess what is in your PC".
nah, i'm not wasting any more time explaining the obvious to you guys. the pyjamas and tattoos do look good on you though :)
That's one way to save face I guess. Regarding pajamas and tattoos, feel free to point out the delusional fanboy statements I've made in this discussion, or indeed any pro-Amiga statement.
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Certainly, but in a way that's mincing words, because the cutoff frequencies of the interpolation filters used in PC trackers (linear, cubic, sinc, etc.) follow the note frequency per channel (before mixing), unlike the static filter(s) that process Paula's output (after mixing), and it sounds quite different.
I don't honestly know what this means. :-) But sure, it sounds quite different, for a lot of reasons; including that the Paula filter isn't all that good.
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nah, i'm not wasting any more time explaining the obvious to you guys. the pyjamas and tattoos do look good on you though :)
Are you anti-Amiga or something? Or do you think we're sad for still following a "dead" platform? For me personally, it's Amiga for life! You should've seen me in its heyday, I was quite the zealot, promoting it and defending it!
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That's one way to save face I guess. Regarding pajamas and tattoos, feel free to point out the delusional fanboy statements I've made in this discussion, or indeed any pro-Amiga statement.
delusional fanboy? it's not even necessary, i can just point out that you don't know how your own systems work, or fail to accept that reality because it doesnt fit your narrative
but don't let that stop you from writing another reply from that magical pc of yours that does all audio mixing on the CPU (muhahahaha)
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But sure, it sounds quite different, for a lot of reasons; including that the Paula filter isn't all that good.
No, it's not. The idea was to reduce harsh sounds caused by low-quality samples, but that's easily solved by using better samples that use more memory, but then memory was at a premium back then, and the filter just muffles everything anyway.
I think it's so ironic that "Sound Enhancer" devices came out for Amiga audio around 1990-91 to try and counteract the filter. I bought one, and while it worked, the harshness was increased with poor samples. That was back in the early 1990s. If one of those devices was used on an accelerated A1200 running a modern demo prod with HQ audio, it would really enhance it.
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delusional fanboy? it's not even necessary, i can just point out that you don't know how your own systems work, or fail to accept that reality because it doesnt fit your narrative
Even if that was the case, how would it be related to wearing Amiga logos? If you're going to throw insults around, at least make them somewhat accurate.
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but don't let that stop you from writing another reply from that magical pc of yours that does all audio mixing on the CPU (muhahahaha)
Why are you being so antagonistic? Sorry if your Christmas sucked, but don't take it out on me.
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I believe Playstation 5 uses a GPU compute unit?
Kindof, it's a GPU-esque architecture but considerably more locked down, to avoid it being used for graphics. I also faintly remember it being able to do some convolution effects and audio decoding in hardware, and some hardware mixing.
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that magical pc of yours that does all audio mixing on the CPU
On user level or kernel level? On user-level it definitely does.
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and some hardware mixing
Oh and I faintly remember that it can do Dolby Atmos downmixing in hardware to whatever setup the user selects in the console OS. (Admittedly all of this has been a while and I no longer have my notes from the dev conf.)
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On user level or kernel level? On user-level it definitely does.
if any, on the hardware level- i don't care if and how dsp is implemented in your OS or if that would be user programmable or not, or anything like that, just that it's there
isn't that all audio drivers these days (and thus CPU)? e.g. if you play heino.mp3 in foobar and bluetooth it to your headphones your (onboard) sound card isn't involved at all afaik. must be magic!
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if any, on the hardware level- i don't care if and how dsp is implemented in your OS or if that would be user programmable or not, or anything like that, just that it's there
It's not the first time in the thread you've moved goalposts, but at least we finally got the disconnect cleared up. It may very well be a hardware design philosophy to put DSP chips or blocks everywhere, but if they're not used by applications, it's hardly a relevant measure of success. I'd say that dedicated hardware for sample channels was replaced because of the flexibility offered by generic computation, regardless of the type of processor it runs on. CPU speed just happened to improve fast enough that it generally wasn't worth exposing DSPs to application programmers.
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and some hardware mixing
That's interesting. I wonder if it's dedicated silicon, or a piece of software provided by Sony, similar to audio on the Nintendo 64 RSP? As with GPU shaders, terms like hardware or software get a bit muddy with programmable hardware...
I don't see how paula would benefit from being 32-bit apart from supporting 4 more sound channels, that is. Maybe this can be done in WinUAE with a plugin...? I dunno, DSP was the new thing appearing on the horizon so the industry switched to it back in the days. But yeah there could be many improvements that could be done on the Amiga, making it look like a pc of the early/late 90s. :)
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Quote:On user level or kernel level? On user-level it definitely does.
if any, on the hardware level- i don't care if and how dsp is implemented in your OS or if that would be user programmable or not, or anything like that, just that it's there
Is it though? I haven't encountered hardware-accelerated/implemented since roughly SBLive or so...? In most software I encountered in the last 5-6 years, all DSP was implemented purely on the CPU side, or at most using the GPU for some quick convolution calculations.
if the specsheet says the component is there...
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I don't see how paula would benefit from being 32-bit apart from supporting 4 more sound channels, that is. Maybe this can be done in WinUAE with a plugin...? I dunno, DSP was the new thing appearing on the horizon so the industry switched to it back in the days. But yeah there could be many improvements that could be done on the Amiga, making it look like a pc of the early/late 90s. :)
I think that's why Commodore left Paula more or less untouched, they thought it was good enough as it was, and I don't think even the engineering team were that interested in DSP usage: it certainly wasn't mentioned on the brief "Mary" specs in that Wikipedia link.
And I think Toni Wilen wants an AUTHENTIC Amiga emulation experience, he's not going to create add-ons that break that rule... as far as I know, anyway. Heck, one of the Amiga's biggest assets was the NewTek Video Toaster, and he's refused to even try to emulate that so far!
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I don't think even the engineering team were that interested in DSP usage
The Amiga 3000+ prototype had a DSP chip, so I don't think that's accurate. Who knows, maybe that's the reason they didn't update Paula for AGA? Nobody in their right mind would consider it "good enough" in 1992.
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The Amiga 3000+ prototype had a DSP chip, so I don't think that's accurate. Who knows, maybe that's the reason they didn't update Paula for AGA?
I stand corrected.
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Nobody in their right mind would consider it "good enough" in 1992.
Well, there's a reason why Commodore management did nothing with it, when they DID try to upgrade the graphics. Not enough time? Cost-cutting? Lack of funds? Disinterest in the audio aspects?