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About Paula

John Heritage

Posts 111
08 Feb 2017 18:11


Just curious --

My understanding of SAGA is that it has it's own "soundchip" with an eventual plan to route Paula output through DIGITAL-VIDEO or similar.

I was curious about Paula herself --  could there be an improved design of Paula that plugs-in-place but gives a few enhancements like somewhat improved sound quality, 1.44/2.88 mb 'full speed' floppy support, and a faster serial port -- while working within the constraints of the OCS/ECS/AGA chipsets and the Amiga OS 3.x?  i.e. register compatible?

I know this isn't necessarily domain of the Apollo team but the experts are here, so I appreciate this..

Thanks
John


Daniel Sevo

Posts 299
08 Feb 2017 21:53


John Heritage wrote:

Just curious --
 
  My understanding of SAGA is that it has it's own "soundchip" with an eventual plan to route Paula output through DIGITAL-VIDEO or similar.
 
  I was curious about Paula herself --  could there be an improved design of Paula that plugs-in-place but gives a few enhancements like somewhat improved sound quality, 1.44/2.88 mb 'full speed' floppy support, and a faster serial port -- while working within the constraints of the OCS/ECS/AGA chipsets and the Amiga OS 3.x?  i.e. register compatible?
 
  I know this isn't necessarily domain of the Apollo team but the experts are here, so I appreciate this..
 
  Thanks
  John

For what it's worth... The old Natami specs said "Paula style sound" upgraded from 8 to 16-bit... Still only 4 channels I think..
But that was like 8 years ago..




OneSTone O2o

Posts 159
08 Feb 2017 22:55


I don't know if HD or ED disk drive would be a benefit. It never was a  stadard. You won't find many software on it. And using diskettes for data store or data transfer (to PC, Mac, ...) is difficult as modern PCs mostly have no disk drive anymore. Better would be to support USB and USB mass storage driver. Or porting ParCP-USB to Amiga.


Michal Warzecha

Posts 209
09 Feb 2017 08:49


The main goal of SAGA is to be backward compatible with any Amiga chipsets and give more screen resolution and better audio autput via DIGITAL-VIDEO. But to speedup all chipset features You need to change mainboard because You can't use SAGA via Amiga original outputs. That's why SAGA use own DIGITAL-VIDEO, If You try to use OCS/ECS You need to jump to original Amiga video out.
Of course all You want is possible on Standalone board, but I'm affraid team will not spend much time to improve any old not needed Amiga feature like faster FDD. But still it's FPGA, if someone from team decide to do this- it's probably only core update thing.


John Heritage

Posts 111
09 Feb 2017 18:10


oneSTone o2o wrote:

I don't know if HD or ED disk drive would be a benefit. It never was a  stadard. You won't find many software on it. And using diskettes for data store or data transfer (to PC, Mac, ...) is difficult as modern PCs mostly have no disk drive anymore. Better would be to support USB and USB mass storage driver. Or porting ParCP-USB to Amiga.

Agreed completely at this point - I was just curious from a technical standpoint - would it be possible. 


Michal Warzecha

Posts 209
09 Feb 2017 20:16


On standalone board for sure. There all Amiga outputs and interfaces will be managed by FPGA and We all know that team probably can put anything into this core. But other things are much more important. Mayby when averything will be done and they start to get better existing things, mayby our floppy drive will be faster than WinUAE can do :)

posts 6