25 October 2019, 09:17 | #841 | |
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I agree with all that you wrote there. And I think 16-bit sound have it's use but only in music niche. So it is difficult to argue for '16-bit is always more useful and versatile than 8-bit in sound' since it was pointed many times in this thread that in game business it is not. Amiga games was far from utilize already existing potential of Paula if we talking on bits and sample rates. But those same games were constantly choking on 4 voices sound limit since a decade because that dilemma ('music or sfx?') was well known even on 8-bit computers. Even effects like echo, flanger and more can be quite easily emulated with more voices available (to some degree of fidelity) with virtually no CPU/memory overhead. |
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25 October 2019, 09:36 | #842 |
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25 October 2019, 09:55 | #843 | |||
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If you browse through the music catalogue of the era, the Amiga references pop up left right and center as well as cases of blatant plagiarism. Quote:
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PC or synth workstations that began offering build-in multitrack sequencers at the time. Sorry to hear you share the Commodore's view about music being a niche on Amiga. I'd say there were easily ten times more hobbyist musicians using Amiga primarily for composing, remixing and sampling than there were people using Amiga for spreadsheets, desktop publishing or even creating art in DPaint. Last edited by jizmo; 25 October 2019 at 10:13. |
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25 October 2019, 10:27 | #844 |
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Not that anyone thinks I would have been against 16 bit sound quality on the Amiga.
What I am saying is, that simply adding a second Paula would have done wonders, and should have been doable without too much trouble, I guess. I love using my Elektron Octatrack, and this thing also only has 8 Sounds playing at the same time (those are stereo, though) which I use for mixing down whole tracks. |
25 October 2019, 10:45 | #845 |
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Precisely. We are talking about maximising benefits for the users at minimum expense from company point of view. Not saying that the 1992 computer didn't deserve whole new sound chip.
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25 October 2019, 10:52 | #846 |
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I afraid it isn't quite that simple. A second Paula would have required four additional DMA slots to receive sample data, and thus Alice (or Agnus) would have to be expanded as well. In particular, you would need to allocate time slots for the four additional DMA channels from somewhere.
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25 October 2019, 10:55 | #847 |
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No. The Amiga delivered 4 channels of mono sound. Two output to the left RCA output, two output to the right. That is NOT stereo.
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25 October 2019, 11:54 | #848 |
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25 October 2019, 11:58 | #849 |
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25 October 2019, 12:05 | #850 |
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25 October 2019, 12:56 | #851 | |
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They should have hired Glenn Keller back (as they did with Carl Sassenrath for the CDTV) and upgrade Paula. The obvious trick would have been to use "double cas" on that 16bit-chip as they did with Lisa - well Lisa is 32-bit wide in addition but uses two fetches per time-slot to get 64 bit each slot. Double-Cas could have been introduced as early as 88 or 89, since RAM was fast enough by than ... so the chipset could have stayed 16-bit but Paula and Denise would double the throughput. So 8 channels for Paula and 64 colors in high-res via Denise... That is what 16bit ECS in 1988 should have been - followed by 32bit AAA in 91 or 92 skipping AGA entirely. (the A3000 should have come with VRAM for Chip-Ram instead of Amber Flicker-Fixer allowing 1024x768 in parallel to old modes - see discussion about the use of UHRES here on EAB) How Glenn Keller did Paula: [ Show youtube player ] Last edited by Gorf; 25 October 2019 at 13:35. |
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25 October 2019, 14:53 | #852 | ||
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I'd say it's still stereo. If you use two channels (L+R), you can actually freely pan around left and right by changing the volumes accordingly. Last edited by 8bitbubsy; 25 October 2019 at 14:59. |
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25 October 2019, 15:20 | #853 | |
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The 8 Bit 4 channel Paula might be enough in 1993 but 2-3 years later it wasn't. I used it for making music (Protracker and later DigiboosterPro) a big amount of my live time. I still listen to recorded music through Paula each day. For games it wasn't or still isn't important to have more then 8 Bit and 4 channels, because it only makes a "small" part of a game in most cases. Having music and sfx at the same time doesn't make a game good. Today you can listen to your favourite music while playing a game. |
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25 October 2019, 16:28 | #854 | ||
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25 October 2019, 16:35 | #855 | |
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26 October 2019, 21:29 | #856 | |||
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So it boils down to simply that Atari had it first. But I think think the key factor was having MIDI ports built into the ST. It certainly wasn't its sound capabilities, or the disk drive (which was originally only 360k), or the non-upgradeable memory, or the clunky operating system, or the crappy keyboard and horrible mouse. But a musician saw those MIDI ports and thought - "this is the machine for me!" (even though other computers could do it with a $15 cable). So the ST got a foothold in the music market despite having much worse sound than the Amiga. Quote:
The Atari Falcon030: A Closer Look Quote:
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26 October 2019, 21:54 | #857 | |
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With samples recorded at full volume the dynamic range should be at least as good as cassette tape, and with their playback volume controlled by Paula it's even better. If you can hear quantization noise it's probably due to poor samples or a bad player. |
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27 October 2019, 12:46 | #858 |
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I agree to what 8bitbubsy says. Samples are not always using 100% volume amplitude. I would say the most don't. So you can't get always 8 bit resolution. Further, if you have a full amplitude sample and do a volume fade out in Protracker for example you will hear noise at the end part. The mentioned bass samples by 8bitbubsy often or always have a lot of noise with full 8 bit resolution. 8 bit really sucks in this cases.
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8 bit = 256 possible values 16 bit = 65536 possible values 24 bit = 16777216 possible values |
27 October 2019, 13:21 | #859 | |
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See "Super Audio CD". For 8-bit and a moderate sampling frequency, you can also resort to sound-dithering to compensate for the lower resolution ... but that is of course lot of extra work and was newer used for Amiga samples as far as I know... |
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27 October 2019, 13:49 | #860 | |
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If you want to sample a whole musical piece with both very loud and rather gentle parts (e.g. a classical piece) within the same eight bit range, you will run into those problems you described, unless you're using an envelope follower or something like that to dynamically adjust the volume. Last edited by chb; 27 October 2019 at 14:03. |
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