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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

16/24bit Audio?page  1 2 

Fernando Pereira

Posts 68
14 Sep 2017 17:03


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

     
Fernando Pereira wrote:

      If you want to create stereo sound, 8 voices for both music and SFX is definitely not enough. Having the kick coming out only from the left speaker and the bass from the right speaker is not how you create a stereo environment (at least a good one). 
     

     
      Actually PAMELA does support in HW placing the channels "in Stereo" room.
     
     

     
      Ah! Then completely forget what I said! Gunnar that is so freaking AWESOME! FINALLY! 8 samples at the same time in stereo mode on the Amiga!
   
    But does that mean we can have stereo WAV like files playing their left and right tracks like a genuine stereo file or PAMELA simply plays a mono file through both LEFT and RIGHT speakers?


Kef Emzy

Posts 50
14 Sep 2017 17:09


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Kef Emzy wrote:

  In a game probably not so much. But 16 voices would be awesome when making music.
 

 
  Well you can have "voices" and "voices"
  You can with the CPU mix voices too.
  So mixing 64 soft voices with the CPU - using AMMX should be piece of cake.
 
  For music making I think this should work very good.
  When music making, the CPU is idle and can do this easily.
 
  For games - I think its nice to have "some" free hardware voices for in game music, which cost no CPU time.
   

Yes, soft-mixing is always possible, but you will have problems with volume levels, panning etc.

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

 
  Actually PAMELA does support in HW placing the channels "in Stereo" room.
 

Thanks for music to my ears!


Tim Waite

Posts 42
14 Sep 2017 19:54


There is a youtube video of Digibooster playing 64 channel xm mod with AHI on 14 bit standard amiga audio.  Appears to work very well.  I am impressed. It will only get better!

EXTERNAL LINK


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
16 Sep 2017 12:55


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

 
  So question is how much more will 16 voices give in this scenario?

My friend. Let me tell you the benefits of 16 channels.
Keep in mind that what I am about to say is merely an idea, and not a try to "push" for more channels, only to answer you question.

As a musician who has made quite a lot of music in my days, both on the Amiga, and in real studios, as well as in cubase and Logic pro on the Mac, I wish to let you know that by adding more channels, and thereby more instruments playing at the same time, you can really make the music sound much more alive. 4 channels, as you said yourself, is good for the kind of music that has been on the Amiga always, and it does allow for sound effects. Now, hear me out.

Imagine having 12 channels. You could use 8 for only music, 2 for ambience and 2 for sound effects. In other words, 3 times better than any Amiga (except for in hard drive based games where you can stream music from wave files and therefore only use 2 channels for music.)

One could create scenarios where you could lower the volume on some instruments, like drums for example, in some scenes where music needs to be more serene, and raise the drums, and maybe electric guitar, when more action is happening.

Have you played the latest Zelda game, breath of the wild? In Hyrule castle, they use this method for inside and outside of the castle walls.

Now, say you would walk past a trap that shuts with a noise, at the same time as two monsters are grunting at the same time, music playing on 8 channels, and now 11 channels are being used at the same time.

Now, to make said scenario even better. Say you could freely pan any of the channels, even the 4 original channels, from left to right, with inbetween values on the panoration, this would be even better!

Then while playing classic amiga games, the 4 original channels can just go back to default mode, OR, with some tool perhaps, if someone will make, one could manually pan those channels to their own likinng.

I know this would take some engineering and time, maybe even someones hair grow thinner, but I just wanna say, think about the benefits.

4 channels was cool before, 8 channels are ofcourse a much welcome addition. 12 would be great, and 16 would be awesome!

And free stereo panoration would be even better ;)


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
16 Sep 2017 14:43


Mallagan Bellator wrote:

  Imagine having 12 channels. You could use 8 for only music, 2 for ambience and 2 for sound effects. In other words, 3 times better than any Amiga
 

 
Yes I understand what you say.
Technically we can have 12 channel.
 
 
On the other hand - I wonder if this is a little bit like riding a motorbike.
 
Yes when your Motorbike has 30 Horsepower
then having a Bike with 60 Horsepower will give you 2 times the power. And you will certainly feel this...
And of course having 120 Horsepower on your Bike will again be much more... And 240 Horsepower on the Bike even MORE!!!
 
My point is .. I assume there some point of saturation - when a game will simply sounds good and plays well.

Maybe we should first use the 8 channel fully?


Vojin Vidanovic

Posts 770
16 Sep 2017 14:52


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    Maybe we should first use the 8 channel fully?
 

 
  Surely, sooner Pamela comes out as it is, the better.
 
  Keep in mind Vamp could be Amiga/Atari sound successorr and having that HQ+ 24-bit 12+ channels stereo separated Pamela size 5 would be a great bonus for some late V4 or future V5 core. Add a bit 3D and advance 080 as you can, and at hardware level that should be enough (providin e.g. some Voodo 5 6000 rev 5 compatibile core and Glide/Warp3D/MESA support). Some video in and video out support and there is again multimedia rich system based on 68k. Glide is open source and a lot of people remember it, as well as 3dfx.
  Pure gold for nice FPGA system, PCI card, ASIC or Standalone (adding PS/2 and fastest SATA. That would be one big fat Vampire :-)


Szyk Cech

Posts 191
16 Sep 2017 17:05


Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

    Pamela size 5 would be a great bonus for some late V4 or future V5

  I have small number notice:
  It is obvious for all Assembler coders, that next Vampire version will be V8 not V5 - it is due to binary numbers. 1 is 2^0, 2 is 2^1, 4 is 2^2, and 8 is 2^3 (where 2^N is 2 power of N). Similarly all other versions will be next powers of 2: 16, 32, 64... and so on...
 


Fernando Pereira

Posts 68
17 Sep 2017 13:44


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  (...)
    Yes when your Motorbike has 30 Horsepower
    then having a Bike with 60 Horsepower will give you 2 times the power. And you will certainly feel this...
    And of course having 120 Horsepower on your Bike will again be much more... And 240 Horsepower on the Bike even MORE!!!
  (...)
 

 
  I believe that 16 voices is the perfect spot for both musicians and developers. I Rarely use more than 16 channels when composing music or when I create SFX. Usually, it goes from 10 to 14 channels. The main reasons when I use more than 16 voices is when I do sound experimentation.
 
  You mention the possibility of 12 voices in stereo? If that happens, I just take that offer and remain silent about it for the rest of my life! :D The limitation from 8 to 12 voices does a freaking difference, perhaps not as much as 4 to 8 voices but still, it opens a big fat gate for new possibilities.
 
 
 
 


Fernando Pereira

Posts 68
17 Sep 2017 13:50


@Gunnar
 
  I still have this doubt:
 
  "But does that mean we can have stereo WAV like files playing their left and right tracks like a genuine stereo file or PAMELA simply plays a mono file through both LEFT and RIGHT speakers?"

I ask this because you quoted channels being: "in stereo".

  Thank you.


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
17 Sep 2017 20:52


Fernando Pereira wrote:

@Gunnar
   
    I still have this doubt:
   
    "But does that mean we can have stereo WAV like files playing their left and right tracks like a genuine stereo file or PAMELA simply plays a mono file through both LEFT and RIGHT speakers?"
 
  I ask this because you quoted channels being: "in stereo".
 
  Thank you.

That will most likely not happen using ONE hw channel. If it did, I sure doubt it would be 100% compatible with Paula, and since I'm sure they started out with a standard Paula and built on that, I would say no
However, you will always be able to play stereo wav music/sounds with certain software, like play16 for example, but they will use 2 channels for left and right, which just makes sense.



Fernando Pereira

Posts 68
17 Sep 2017 22:37


Mallagan Bellator wrote:

Fernando Pereira wrote:

  @Gunnar
   
    I still have this doubt:
   
    "But does that mean we can have stereo WAV like files playing their left and right tracks like a genuine stereo file or PAMELA simply plays a mono file through both LEFT and RIGHT speakers?"
 
  I ask this because you quoted channels being: "in stereo".
 
    Thank you.
 

  That will most likely not happen using ONE hw channel. If it did, I sure doubt it would be 100% compatible with Paula, and since I'm sure they started out with a standard Paula and built on that, I would say no
  However, you will always be able to play stereo wav music/sounds with certain software, like play16 for example, but they will use 2 channels for left and right, which just makes sense.
 

I'm sorry, what do you think it's not going to happen? Playing stereo files or mono files in stereo? Gunnar did say channels could play in stereo. At this point I'm more confused than ever.


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
20 Sep 2017 18:51



 
>> I'm sorry, what do you think it's not going to happen? Playing stereo files or mono files in stereo? Gunnar did say channels could play in stereo. At this point I'm more confused than ever.

Sorry, what I mean is that all 4 Paula channels are mono, registered to specific channels. Ch 1 and 4 are left, ch 2 and 3 are right. If you wanna play back a file in stereo, you will need to use two channels. Either 1 or 4 combined with either 2 or 3 to play both tracks in stereo.

Since Pamela is based on Paula, it will at least originally be mono channels that can play on both left and right at the same time, with pannig. So, one mono track per channel like the original, unless it has been heavily modified to be able to actually play two different tracks in one channel, that would now be a true stereo channel and not mono.

If this modification is made, I believe 100% compatibility with Paula will be hard to achieve, and the statement is that Pamela is 100% compatible with Paula, so the separate (at least first 4 channels) might not be stereo compatible by themselves.

It would of course be awesome, and I don't know how the Pamela instructions look, but those are my thoughts


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
20 Sep 2017 18:55


Unless, I guess, there are different compatibility modes in Pamela, to revert back to plain Paula. This would be possible


Fernando Pereira

Posts 68
23 Sep 2017 19:21


Mallagan Bellator wrote:

  Unless, I guess, there are different compatibility modes in Pamela, to revert back to plain Paula. This would be possible
 

 
  Perhaps you missed this:
 
 
Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

 
Fernando Pereira wrote:

  If you want to create stereo sound, 8 voices for both music and SFX is definitely not enough. Having the kick coming out only from the left speaker and the bass from the right speaker is not how you create a stereo environment (at least a good one). 
 

 
  Actually PAMELA does support in HW placing the channels "in Stereo" room.
 
 

 
My question remains unanswered. But at this point I really don't care.


Mallagan Bellator

Posts 393
23 Sep 2017 21:01


In stereo room means that you can chose how loud it will play on both channels.
To simplify, let's say it has 10 volume values, from 0 to 9, where 0 is completely silent (it has more levels, but just to simplify)

If right channel has volume 9 and left has volume 0, it's gonma sound like the sound comes from the right. If the sound then gradually rises on the left channel, all the way to 9, it's gonna sound centered, since both left and right play it equally loud. Then if you lower the volume gradually on the right channel, it will sound like the sound moves from the right, to the center, then to the left.

That's moving in stereo room, using two channels, or you could do this in one channel on a chip that suports this. Namely Pamela

Paula is unable to do this in one channel, but Pamela can

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