19 replies to this topic

[Sikor]

Święty (Saint) make new version of his SID2POKEY. An example music you can download from here: http://www.kswiecick....pl/sidload.zip

[Heaven/TQA]

great work! still dreaming of having a tracker for the routines...

[emkay]

Yeppp.... that's outrageous.... such "Galway-qualities" in an emulation...

[Tezz]

This new update of SIDplay is very impresive, it is a step in the right direction for A8 sound development. Wouldn't it be great to have a tracker which provides access to Pokey and Sid emulation, perhaps not possible on the real thing but a PC based tracker would allow to produce some interesting new tunes. But, back to the A8 prog, I wonder if Święty (Saint) will ellaborate on his work and give some details on the workings of it and what CPU time is left. It's interesting to see this continue to improve in both sound emulation quality and optimisation. Excellent stuff.

[MaPa]

Tezz, on Sun Mar 19, 2006 9:20 AM, said:

This new update of SIDplay is very impresive, it is a step in the right direction for A8 sound development. Wouldn't it be great to have a tracker which provides access to Pokey and Sid emulation, perhaps not possible on the real thing but a PC based tracker would allow to produce some interesting new tunes. But, back to the A8 prog, I wonder if Święty (Saint) will ellaborate on his work and give some details on the workings of it and what CPU time is left. It's interesting to see this continue to improve in both sound emulation quality and optimisation. Excellent stuff.

This is not new version of SIDplay, this is another software. At least I read it at polish forum (even I don't know polish but it's near to czech). This one doesn't use softsynt method, but uses normal POKEY functions...

[Tezz]

MaPa, on Mon Mar 20, 2006 10:42 AM, said:

This is not new version of SIDplay, this is another software. At least I read it at polish forum (even I don't know polish but it's near to czech). This one doesn't use softsynt method, but uses normal POKEY functions...

Really? that's even better news. I guess much more CPU time is free now then? There's really good things happening in the A8 scene lately by these tallented guys. Can't wait to see (and hear) more progress.

[Sikor]

MaPa, on Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:42 AM, said:

This is not new version of SIDplay, this is another software. At least I read it at polish forum (even I don't know polish but it's near to czech). This one doesn't use softsynt method, but uses normal POKEY functions...

Yes, right. My poor translation about it:

 SID2POKEY play Music from C64 via precalculation frequency and emulate ADSR envelope of SID's.
Excepting SID rejestr scaning SID2POKEY map it for 3 atari's chanell and inspect that Pokey will be tact of 64 or 15khz, more, recount frequency for valid chanells, and finally - split 24bit/16bit results 16bit - split time bases of Atari 1,79*SID factor/SID frequency = this, wchich we get for 2-chanells 1,79MHz Atari sound

Sorry for my english - it is technical info from atari area. One hints more:
for test your sids is simply way change sid with player at $1100 adress.
Good luck!!!

[carmel_andrews]

Any advance from the supposed 'Sid u/g or mod for the A8 (why you'd want to replace Pokey with SID i don't know)

It was mentioned on this forum

if you can do that with SID, and with the recent developments surrounding the XE video card/board, what would be nice is for some kind soul to hack any PRE AGA Amiga graphics/sound hardware into the A8

[Rybags]

Amiga-type sound would be the perfect companion to the graphics upgrade.

Hacking in Amiga hardware would probably be to complex and expensive, but really, to simulate Amiga sound is just a case of 4x 8 bit D/A convertors and a DMA interface.

[MEtalGuy66]

Rybags, on Tue Mar 21, 2006 8:55 PM, said:

Amiga-type sound would be the perfect companion to the graphics upgrade.

Hacking in Amiga hardware would probably be to complex and expensive, but really, to simulate Amiga sound is just a case of 4x 8 bit D/A convertors and a DMA interface.

Well, it may not be as hard to interface an actual paula chip with the atari, as you might think. Especially if it was designed on a board and given it's own 24bit dma channel to say 2 megs of dedicated memory. Then all youd have to do is build the logic to simulate the agnus's bus arbitration signals, and work out a menial interface by which the atari could fill the ram. What's kewl about the AMIGA setup is that custom chips like the PAULA are designed to pull their data from "chip ram" which is ram that has shared access (via alternate DMA cycles) with the CPU.


Also, by using the Paula, youd have an excellent starting point for a 900k or 1.8meg (HD) 3.5" floppy controller. heheh.

Edited by MEtalGuy66, Fri Mar 24, 2006 12:20 AM.

[emkay]

MEtalGuy66, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:17 AM, said:

What's kewl about the AMIGA setup is that custom chips like the PAULA are designed to pull their data from "chip ram" which is ram that has shared access (via alternate DMA cycles) with the CPU.

Sure "alternate cycles" ? remembering the shared "Chipmem" is slow, compared to the unshared "fastmem".

[MEtalGuy66]

emkay, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:15 AM, said:

MEtalGuy66, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:17 AM, said:

What's kewl about the AMIGA setup is that custom chips like the PAULA are designed to pull their data from "chip ram" which is ram that has shared access (via alternate DMA cycles) with the CPU.

Sure "alternate cycles" ? remembering the shared "Chipmem" is slow, compared to the unshared "fastmem".

Yeah, which is why you put all your CPU code and data in fastram (normal system ram) , instead of trying to use chipram. That way, your CPU doesnt suffer from Bus cotention. Also, if agnus wants to, she can totally lock the CPU out of chipmem, (usually in cases when the custom chips are really heavily accessing it) giving full bus time to the custom chips. The fact that the custom chips are perfroming operations in paralell to the CPU where graphics and sound are concerned more than makes up for the "bus cotention" you get on the rare occasion of a poorly written program that is trying to use chipram for system ram. The whole purpose of CHipram is so that the custom chips have ram to work out of, in paralell to the CPU. The AMIGA, having a 32bit OS model from day one, had no limits (except the actual adressing capability of the CPU) to the amount of contiguous fastram that could be utilized in a any given system. From the advent of the '020 on, there were accelerators even for the lowly a500 that had fastram configurations of 32megs+.. The OS directly supported this. The only real limitation being the high price of RAM in those (late 80s) days.

Of course, if you are referring to a bone-stock A500 with nothing BUT chipram, then thats the owner's fault for not buying a fastram expansion. Even the crappiest amiga ever made could easily be expanded to at least 8megs of fastram via commonly available plug-in expansions. You wanna play, you gotta pay. ATARI alwayse used the slogan "power without the price." Lucky for them ST users didnt know what REAL power even was.

[emkay]

MEtalGuy66, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 9:06 AM, said:

The AMIGA, having a 32bit OS model from day one, had no limits (except the actual adressing capability of the CPU) to the amount of contiguous fastram that could be utilized in a any given system. From the advent of the '020 on, there were accelerators even for the lowly a500 that had fastram configurations of 32megs+.. The OS directly supported this. The only real limitation being the high price of RAM in those (late 80s) days.

Of course, if you are referring to a bone-stock A500 with nothing BUT chipram, then thats the owner's fault for not buying a fastram expansion. Even the crappiest amiga ever made could easily be expanded to at least 8megs of fastram via commonly available plug-in expansions. You wanna play, you gotta pay. ATARI alwayse used the slogan "power without the price." Lucky for them ST users didnt know what REAL power even was.

Well... while it was always a matter of taste, if the A8 or the C64 is the prefered machine, you need two ST's to have one AMIGA ... Remembering running a demo in the background on my A2000 while writing a Letter in "Documentum".

[MEtalGuy66]

emkay, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:05 AM, said:

MEtalGuy66, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 9:06 AM, said:

The AMIGA, having a 32bit OS model from day one, had no limits (except the actual adressing capability of the CPU) to the amount of contiguous fastram that could be utilized in a any given system. From the advent of the '020 on, there were accelerators even for the lowly a500 that had fastram configurations of 32megs+.. The OS directly supported this. The only real limitation being the high price of RAM in those (late 80s) days.

Of course, if you are referring to a bone-stock A500 with nothing BUT chipram, then thats the owner's fault for not buying a fastram expansion. Even the crappiest amiga ever made could easily be expanded to at least 8megs of fastram via commonly available plug-in expansions. You wanna play, you gotta pay. ATARI alwayse used the slogan "power without the price." Lucky for them ST users didnt know what REAL power even was.

Well... while it was always a matter of taste, if the A8 or the C64 is the prefered machine, you need two ST's to have one AMIGA ... Remembering running a demo in the background on my A2000 while writing a Letter in "Documentum".

Yep. I couldnt agree more. I am 100% die-hard ATARI 8-bit. Ill take one over a C=64 any day. From a coding standpoint, the ATARI's architecture and OS is so much better organized and straightforward than the C=64. But on the 16/32-bit level, The AMIGA was the real "successor" to the 8-bits. Nothing else was even on the same level, from design and functionality standpoints.

The ST sure did have a pretty GUI though. Too bad ATARI cant claim development credit for GEM. And if theres one thing ATARI really excelled at during the "post trameil aquisition" years, they made some of the sexiest case-work ever to grace a computer desk. The machines really looked awesome from a cosmetic standpoint.

[Guitarman]

Didn't Atari help develop the Amiga chipset?? No wonder it was good. Just think if the Amiga chipset never made it to Commodore and ended up in the ST series..

[emkay]

Guitarman, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:55 PM, said:

Didn't Atari help develop the Amiga chipset?? No wonder it was good. Just think if the Amiga chipset never made it to Commodore and ended up in the ST series..

Well... If the AMIGA made it to ATARI, the ST series never would have existet.
And, in the sense of "originality", the AMIGA everytime was the "true ATARI". The development-team ... sponsoring by ATARI etc. . But, I never was really sad about Commodore's rights for the "Amiga" label.
I think, one point of success was that people thought about C64 and the AMIGA is the better C64, because it's from Commodore.... so they bought the AMIGA.
On the other hand, the real ATARI died somehow, when the Tramiels went in.
When the AMIGA had made the way to ATARI... I guess that something like a C256 (C1024 ) would have made it at Commodore, overrunning the "ATARI-AMIGA" on the market.

[MEtalGuy66]

emkay, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 12:14 PM, said:

Guitarman, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:55 PM, said:

Didn't Atari help develop the Amiga chipset?? No wonder it was good. Just think if the Amiga chipset never made it to Commodore and ended up in the ST series..

Well... If the AMIGA made it to ATARI, the ST series never would have existet.
And, in the sense of "originality", the AMIGA everytime was the "true ATARI". The development-team ... sponsoring by ATARI etc. . But, I never was really sad about Commodore's rights for the "Amiga" label.
I think, one point of success was that people thought about C64 and the AMIGA is the better C64, because it's from Commodore.... so they bought the AMIGA.
On the other hand, the real ATARI died somehow, when the Tramiels went in.
When the AMIGA had made the way to ATARI... I guess that something like a C256 (C1024 ) would have made it at Commodore, overrunning the "ATARI-AMIGA" on the market.

Naah. Commodore died their own death due to poor marketing, just like ATARI did, in the end. They were one more platform that fell victim to an insanely unfair marketing advantage on the part of microsoft/IBM.

Yep, the development of the original AMIGA architecture was almost completely funded and supportd by ATARI during the early 80s. That was Trameil's biggest "screw-up" when he aquired ATARI. He was so focused on "cost cutting" the whole operation, that he immediately cancelled just about every existing development project, including the AMIGA. The AMIGA however was actually being developed by an independant group at the time, and just largely FUNDED by ATARI, so they were free to just "go next door" to Commodore, who immediately responded with a major bid, and bought it, lock-stock & barrel. By the Time Trameil realized what he had done, Commodore was slated to show the A1000 at CES 85.. So Trameil, got his guys together, and hurredly slammed together the ST architecture, so ATARI would be able to mnake a showing on the 16-bit Front, and compete with Commodore. Anyone who thinks the ST platform came from commodore originally, couldnt be more wrong. It's true that several of Trameils "boys" followed him over from Commodore, and some of them worked in Engineering. But if you look at what Commodore was developing up until the time they aquired the AMIGA, there couldn't be a bigger difference between that and the ST platform. Also, if that had happpened, there wouldve been some major legal sh*t over it, because those designs would have certainly been the property of Commodore, whereas the AMIGA, being under independant development, and just FUNDED by ATARI did not have that problem, where rights were concerned. When Commodore bought it, they bought it all.

One thing that would have been diferent, and in most people's honest oppinion could have been better was the AMIGA's operating system. Personally, I think power-wise, its 100 times more capable than than TOS (which is just a "tameilized" version of CP/M, ported to a 16bit platform.) Still, it lacked things like "protected memory space" which was already in use in many xNIX type OS's of similar scale. I personally couldv'e done with a few less "guru meditations" hahah.. Anywayze.. Nothing is perfect. And Hind-sight is alwayse 20/20....

[emkay]

MEtalGuy66, on Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:37 PM, said:

One thing that would have been diferent, and in most people's honest oppinion could have been better was the AMIGA's operating system. Personally, I think power-wise, its 100 times more capable than than TOS (which is just a "tameilized" version of CP/M, ported to a 16bit platform.)

Well... Memory protection was missed in the AMIGA OS. But, I doubt, any ST user realizes the difference between the "Bomb" errors and the "Guru Meditations". One was a simple singl task and restricted Operations System the other had some problems when Software cut the limits and used memory that was used for "other threads" .
I really had Demos running in the Background while writing letters, or, playing games while listening to the musik played by the multi format "noiseplayer" ... on a standard AMIGA 2000 (7,2MHz) with fastmem extension and an SCSI harddisk...

Ok. End off topic.

On the ATARI 8 bits we really can have "AMIGA quality" music.
We really can have programmed square, sawtooth and triangle waves... (As my thread "Hardsynth" shows"
Only the low notes would have to be digitized, because POKEY has it's limits there. And programming low notes doesn't take too much cpu time.
Sid2Pokey really shows that programming techniques can gain "real" music out of the A8 Hardware.

[MEtalGuy66]

Yeah the POKEY really is a very capable chip, hardware-wise. WHat it lacks in comparisson to the C=64 is the built in "firmware" to control it precisely.

[sack-c0s]

emkay, on Sun Mar 19, 2006 5:24 AM, said:

Yeppp.... that's outrageous.... such "Galway-qualities" in an emulation...

fantastic... I was impressed with an earlier version that played one of my tunes properly and RESID doesn't

We need more Galway on the pokey actually... his driving basslines that make up for the lack of drums is one of the things it does best. galway would've done awesome things with it