Some things you should know about the delfina

[voyager]

A few months ago I bought a secondhand delfina clockport soundcard.
And soon I found all the horror stories to be more or less true.
The delfina is a spoiled little child that demands a lot, and if you don't give it what is wants it will do something bad, most likely freeze you amiga.

I have learned a lot about this terrible piece of hardware and I just want to share some information about it.

The first time I used it, it was terrible, wav files sounded garbled, the system locked up alot, playing mp3's no way.. I heard about grounding the delfina, so I soldered a small wire on the delfina and grounded the bastard. It did help but not a lot but there was some improvement.

I really thought there was something wrong with it, so I contacted mr schoenfield and asked if he would take a look at it. In the replay they said, "use a big of fat ground wire" So I soldered 2 big ground wires to the delfina. and connected them to the system ground.

That DID help a lot, I could play some wav, some mp3 sometime 4 songs in a row, life was good!

I noticed that if I put the delfina on top of the accelerator It worked better, I thought that was strange because I expected it to be the most nosiest place in the system. But when you want to use the great line-in connectors on the topside it will no longer fit under the keyboard, and you do want to have native sound true the delfina.

I also use a subway, so one clockport is a bit of a problem there, I ordered it from our good friend djbase and after several months It came. For the first time I could move the delfina around some more and I put it inside the unused hdd bracket. The delfina really hated it so I put it back above the accelerator.

I never used the shielding that came with the A1200 but I found that it had a removable part above the clockport so the clockport extender did fit nicely. I connected the Delfina and the subway and started testing again.

It worked great but still some crashes, always on the same mp3 and the same wav files. I removed the problematic mp3's and made a 2 hour playlist, and it works without any problems.

A noticed that when the delfina crashed while playing a wav file the next time I played the very same file the system crashed again and again. Not exactly in same time index but always in the same song.

So this is what I found out. If your delfina locks up / hangs the system it will sometimes corrupt the song it's playing. On wav file it's almost guaranteed, on mp3 50/50

the delfina don't like corrupted data.... it will get angry...

So.. things you should know :

* Ground your delfina the best you can to your system.
* Shield you delfina from the rest of the system
* Remove the file it played when it crashed
* Make your own mp3's
* It hates some accelerators, ACA@56 all is fine, Blizzard 030 mkIII it seems not to like if even after capacitor removal on the delfina pcb
* 44KHz material is upsampeld by AHI to 48 eating away cpu time.
* It can play 44 Khz material with it's on command line player, I think it used the DSP to convert to 48 KHz.

* Playing a MOD file true the delfina is like putting dog poo true a coffee grinder, it will work but it's not something you would like to do on a regular basis
* You will have no native audio, you have to solder wires to your mainboard and use a line-in socked. Be sure to turn it on in the delfina control panel (and yes THAT function works nicely)

* after init you will hear a high pitched sound, annoying but normal

* check under you bed twice this thing is evil.

Good luck! you will need it.

[daxb]

* 44KHz material is upsampeld by AHI to 48 eating away cpu time.

Did you tried to set mixing frequency to 44kHz in AHI Prefs?

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by voyager

and after several months I came.

I suppose the women all love you, eh? *SCNR*

[musashi5150]

[voyager]

Originally Posted by StingRay

I suppose the women all love you, eh? *SCNR*

Yes, many many many wonderful things happen to me :-)

[Bamiga2002]

Classic!