More that 4 Sound Channels???

I know on an A1000, you can only have 4 notes playing at the same time, it's a basic limitation of the system. Over the years, I have entered music into my A1000's Deluxe Music Construction Set program.

Now, I have DMCS working in WinUAE and I was thinking: Is there is a way, in the emulation, to increase the number of notes that can be played at one time?

I thought it might be the "Sound Buffer Size" in the Sound tab, but it doesn't make any difference. I suppose the program itself could be limited, as well.

Thoughts?

[thomas]

It's definitely the software which limits the number of channels. It uses one software channel per hardware channel.

Check HD-Rec for example, it can have any number of software channels. Other modern software titles can do the same.

One could add more hardware channels to the emulated motherboard, but no software would use it because no software knows that they are there. You would have to write special software for these additional hardware channels.

BTW, with WinUAE you should use a software which uses AHI for output (like HD-Rec). AHI accesses the PC's sound card directly without the limitations of the Amiga motherboard.

[Mad-Matt]

You could try music software such as Octamed for 8+ channels. 4 hardware channels used but all tracks (upto 32 ?) cpu mixed into 2 channel 14bit stereo

[alexh]

Jochen Hippel was the first person to implement (at least on the Amiga/ST) platform more than 1 software channel per hardware channel.

His 7-voice routine became legend, used in many Thalion games and the Turrican series.

Even though he effectively retired from games music in 1991 he was credited in Turrican 3 in 1993!

[laser]

the paula chip is old and never was updated ..even when the A1200/A4000 were realized

the major problem is the 4 channel hardware limitation and most amiga games and softwarae were limited to that issue....at the exception of rare titles like turrican series with a 7 voice technologic

but most of amiga games lacks a descent mixture of audio effects/music
and music software was limited to 4 notes ..protracker...deluxemusic..and all the others
Octamed is the exception with 8 notes but...I don't know very well that

so...Mr Dragon3d....I think that there's no way to solve that...even on winuae

and if you want infinite notes played at the same time I recommend you the use of a modern pc program instead Deluxe music


bye

[amiga]

There are at least 3 programs u can use:

Octamed SoundStudio supports *64* channels!
Symphonie pro (on Aminet & on Amikit) supports *256* channels!
Digibooster pro supports *256* channels.


@laser:

... and no, you don't need a PC/Mac to do music today.

BTW, Paula is "obsolete" and it still *kicks ass* !

Thanks, I figured that it might not be possible. The only reason I even consider using DMCS at all is because I have it (don't have to pay anything more for it), I'm not really being big music person (where I would need the latest and the greatest) and it's more of a novelty anyway.

[musojon74]

The Amiga version of Soundstudio is free if you register at www.medsoundstudio.com. This also has a notation editor, though may not be as good as DMCS, haven't used it much.

[Sune Salminen]

I did a lot of tracking using a german sequencer called Oktalyzer on an Amiga 2000 back in the late 80's. I still remember the demo song with sampled lyrics, "This is the A-mi-gA with eight voices".

It does 8 channels, and lets you disable channels for improved sound quality. I remember a programmer friend of mine called it 'sound channel multiplexing' (or something) at the time. He also said that the playback engine was too CPU intensive and of course the samples I used were too large for the music to be used for anything except live performance. So that's what I did, a few times.

Oktalyzer also had a rudimentary sample editor and MIDI input built in.
Later versions had improved sound quality, graphical improvements to the UI and stability fixes but at the time I only got hold of a demo version - that couldn't save.