This is just a quick post. Im an engineer with an interest in the atari sequencing, particularly cubase & notator. Ive been playing with the idea of a new machine for a while (the ST isnt getting any younger) and was wondering about the reaction of some of the members of the board. My idea has been to produce a custom pci board to plug into a standard motherboard. I have a MIDI interface, a boot ROM and a Compact flash interface on it at the moment. Ive got it plugged into a intel 845GL board with inbuilt video. Im running embedded dos on it at the moment with stonx in the flash.. however the idea is to put it all in flash, hopefully replacing stonx with something better. Then the compact flash will replace both floppy and harddrive... making it pretty economical.
So my questions are these?
1. Do you think there is a market for the above card to be produced and packaged in a ST-like case (better keyboard tho!) for musicians?
2. Im basing it on an intel board and Ive sourced a good quality 101 key keyboard. Any religious objections?
3. Is PAL/NTSC output going to be a requirement for musicians? What do others using cubase cart around with them? I use a monitor with adaptor... but I dont know anyone else still using the atari where i am. If this is a requirement my feeling was to move to an itx board with tv/out... but I wanted this to be cheap and quality. For the most my experience with VIA has been poor.
The major obstacle Im having at the moment is software and which direction to go. Im only interested in single TOS due to cubase timing. So for that reason Im not interested in mint. I would prefer whatever I put in it to be GPL'd. Im not happy with single TOS as it stands at the moment. My single biggest gripe is screen resolution & color depth. We need at least 16bit 1024*1280 IMHO. For this im drawn to emutos and the idea of fvdi and hacking XaAes to run on top of emutos? is this practical? Its a lot of work. Should something be released based on TOS2.06 or will it sink like a stone?
Flames, please,
GD
PS Im calling it the 'jammer' ATM.