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Good News: 16 Voice Amiga Audio

Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
18 May 2020 08:13


Many people love AMIGA Audio and will forever remember some of its game and demo Songs.

AMIGA Audio was very advanced at its time.
Four Audio Channel each supporting 8bit samples.
One Sample could be astonishing 128K Long,
and the chipmem was available for sample storage.

Four Audio channel are excellent for game SoundFX.
And also with four channel very nice Amiga MOD were made.
Of course some coders wished they would have a few channel more
as playing both game music and SND FX in parallel was not easy with 4 channel.

The Amiga Developer Team planned therefore to expand
the audio features with the AAA chipset.
The plan was to increase the number of channels to 8,
and even add support for 16bit samples.

Its obvious that with 8 Audio channel playing a MOD and in parallel playing some  game SNDFx would be much easier.
And is clear that with 8 channels a MOD could also be made easier and better sounding.

The Super-AGA chipset goes therefore a step further.
After discussing the audio topic with both several Amiga game coder and Amiga musicians we came to the conclusion that having 16 audio channel combined with some new features would be perfect.

Super-AGA therefore provides exactly this to the Amiga users now.
* 16 DMA based Amiga compatible audio channel
* maximum sample length of incredible 64MB
* 512 MB memory available for Audio storage
* support for both 8bit and 16bit samples
* Fully free frequency choice for each channel.
* 2 Volumes per channel for free LEFT/RIGHT positioning
* One-Shot play mode for very easy game SND-FX coding.




Andy Hearn

Posts 374
18 May 2020 08:58


sounds great!
is this v4 only? (obviously the 512MB bit is v4 only ;) )
or will this be for v2 with gold3 core as well?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
18 May 2020 09:09


Andy Hearn wrote:

sounds great!

I hope so :)

Andy Hearn wrote:

  is this v4 only? (obviously the 512MB bit is v4 only ;) )
  or will this be for v2 with gold3 core as well?

The 16 Amiga Audio channel are part of the SAGA Gold3 Chipset.
The 16 channel audio is currently available to a few game coders,
and amiga demo and application developers.
It will be made public with the next V4 release probably in one month.  It will come together with software using it - for example there will be a MOD tracker making these features available.

For the V2/V1200 there the plan to also provide this feature but this is extra work and will take more time. It might come with Gold3 for V2 - today its available for V4.


Markus B

Posts 209
18 May 2020 09:33


I know AHI is not your most appreciated piece of software, but a Pamela driver would be very helpful for all the existing software using it.
Will such a driver be there as well with the next release?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
18 May 2020 10:11


Markus B wrote:

I know AHI is not your most appreciated piece of software,

 
Of course AHI works already on Amiga and Vampire.
 
But as you will know very many Amiga coders hate AHI for a very good reason.
The reason is in nutshell that AHI does not support the AMIGA features and kills of the general idea of DMA driven AMIGA audio.
If you understand the idea of elegance of Amiga audio and review what of this is killed of and not possible by AHI, then I'm sure that you will fully agree.
 
While I can see the motivation for AHI at a time.
Looking back now, AHI was a misguided approach for which is no need anymore. AHI has actually a very sad story behind, as you might know. The author of AHI got so frustrated about the performance loss of AHI mixing that he got mentally depressed, needed psychiatrists treatment and totally stopped coding.
 
The SAGA Amiga chipset has Audio feature far beyond what AHI can do.
In my opinion the best long time approach is to enhance software to use the SAGA Amiga audio features directly. This way all features are available and also no performance is wasted.

 
Game coders that I spoke to will go directly for SAGA Audio now, some also plan to write SDL_Mixer replacement to skip AHI and to go directly to Amiga Audio. Such solution is much better in the end.

Lets look forward now and lets focus again on the topic.
On the new improved 16 voice Amiga Super AGA Audio.


Roger Andre Lassen

Posts 150
18 May 2020 11:03


Awesome news !!


Ray Couzens

Posts 93
18 May 2020 11:27


Roger Andre Lassen wrote:

Awesome news !!

I second that!


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 260
18 May 2020 12:43


How many raster lines the replay routine takes to play 16 voices at 16-bit quality?
Show us the copper lines showing this :)


Kevin Saunders
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 50
18 May 2020 13:05


Really impressive and exciting path for Vampire Amigas, and I just push pixels.


DiscreetFX Studios

Posts 140
18 May 2020 13:18


This is great news Gunnar, thank you. It’s sounds really awesome!


Saladriel Amrael

Posts 166
18 May 2020 14:22


That is awesome!


Saladriel Amrael

Posts 166
18 May 2020 14:24


Kevin Saunders wrote:

Really impressive and exciting path for Vampire Amigas, and I just push pixels.

Don't know why... but reading your "I just push Piexels", my mind wandered about a "They Bleed Pixels" Vampire rip-off, LOL


Amiga 4Life

Posts 101
18 May 2020 15:40


this is Awesome news... Vamp is headed to the music studio...(Pamela 2.0)..



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
18 May 2020 19:57


Kudos to Neoman who added today 16channel SAGA direct audio support to Milkytracker!!!

Nice work!


Paul H

Posts 13
18 May 2020 20:20


This sounds great. Easy register based ADSR envelope support would be most welcome as well if possible. Just a thought!

posts 15