[bloodline]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Don't be a fool, gravity is something we can experience every day.

Indeed... and that was rather my point.

It really depends how far you push the sound chip with more cpu use. Oh, wait. On the peecee it's a necessity to burn cpu.
What do you mean by "overlap of samples" ?
What do you mean by "environmental effects" ?
Games of early 90's had nothing special.

“Overlap of samples”, when a new samples plays the old one stops. Not cleanly with a fade to 0, but a hard stop, the Paula DAC might go from 127 to -128 in a single sample. It’s a good job the Amiga had such an aggressive low pass filter or a transient like that might damage some audio systems, though probably not any consumer audio equipment available in the ‘80s.

Environmental effects, like delays and reverbs... by the early ‘90s, the Amiga Audio was just about ok for games... but game developers were looking at the horizon and planning for better!

You said it was easy, but you didn't actually do it. Things are always easy for people who don't really do them. I haven't moved the goalposts, you just didn't reach them.

You claim was that it was easier to set up and use the Amiga Audio system than SDL, you suggested it would be difficult to write a tracker in using SDL... Frankly, it was trivial, I think I wrote this on my laptop while watching Family Guy!

But no lowpass filter, nothing fancy you mentioned. It's just the old cheap handwritten mixing giving the old boring pc standard of two voices and single channel at the end.
Where's the "better" here ?

Now I have had a chance to look over the code, it’s quite convoluted because I wanted to be able to add such things to make the audio more like the Amiga (certainly not better)... for example I clearly wanted the ability to cut off a playing sample, as I’ve made quite an effort to allow that to happen outside of the tracker playback routine!

This code never went in production, which is why I still own the rights to it and can share it. If it were for serious work, I would always use 32bit float audio, not 16bit

It would be even simpler if I just used the audio device raw, opened 4 8bit channels etc (you can read how the SDL API works... and half the code is just structure definitions and byte swapping! I also seem to have wanted the ability to “O’Scope” the individual channels (I have no idea what my plan was for that, but that has made the code more convoluted too...

Why not add an LP filter and whatever else you like, you might find it fun.

This is by far not the casual use of audio, i.e. music and sound effects - for which the Amiga is still fine.

For nostalgia junkies like us, but that wasn’t the original intention of the machine, and certainly it would not be of any use to most people now who want to game/produce music/enjoy music! All things that one can easily do on a cheap laptop now!

Isn't it wonderful ? Everyone likes their machines for different reasons.

But why do you deny the characteristics which made it interesting? Had the Amiga produced perfectly good high fidelity audio, I definitely wouldn’t still have one in my studio!! There just wouldn’t be any point!