Author: F-labs crew (cvx-sto-1-724.ppp.netlink.se)
Date: 10-06-2000 01:05
Hi again, Gurjit.
Don´t you worry, Atari WILL live.
After your previous requeST at 10-02, we took a closer look at what could be done, but firST of all, we muST face the fact that the ST is... an ST! The PCI bus is an 32 or 64 bit interface, and those DSPs you were talking about are 24 or 32 bit devices, made for 32 bit machines. Now, all STs STill only have an 16 bit bus. A little of software tinkering won´t change that, so we juST have to hang on to what is possible at all.... The ISA bus is an 16 bit interface, it could be (and has been) used with the ST. Now, an ISA-board would have to be connected to the cartridge port, and that interface is a sad STory... Designed to be an read-only port, but can be written to, by some tricks. This makes writing to, much slower than reading this port :( We don´t know exactly how bad this is yet, we´re working on it...
We have found the "perfect" DSP to be used with an ST, it´s an 16/24 bit, suits perfect. There´s no problems at all, to put it on a PCB and slam it into the (16/24 bit) cartridge port, peace of cake. The BIG problem remains though, there has to be a whole range of new softwares written for it. There´s simply no way we could use softs written for the Falc, for certain reasons. Just like most STE-specific softs can´t run on an older ST. Hey, we just discovered that Cubase Audio runs on an Mega 4 :) giving the MIDI musicians tons of new MIDI functions! BUT, even if we add an DSP to this, "the Audio Engine" wont start... And the ACSI interface is WAY too slow to handle HD-recording, anyway. :(
Well, at leaST the games/demo coders could have a lot of fun with a DSP on the ST...
Now, we CAN build this card, so who wants to write some code???
Keep on TOS-i´n
Flashlabs crew
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