I would love to see how the chipset worked. Is it as advanced / unique as we think ?

One could even write a book on the subject...

A schematic of the chipset & paula would be worth gold.

paula is part of the chipset. ;)

so what chipset are we talking about? (OCS ECS AGA?)

  which chipset ? any and all.
 
  mainly OCS as ECS and AGA are basicaly bolted on. still interesting to see the differences.
 
  so do you have schematic of OCS ?
 
 

So long,
Thomas

I had never mentioned it to anyone, thinking I just had a fluke machine... then one day I was speaking to Team Chaos lead Musician, Sidewinder. He just casually mentioned how his A3000 audio was so much brighter than this A500 audio.  This led me to believe that my machine was not a fluke but that all A3000s & A1200s were like that.

Speaking of audio flukes: According to Team Chaos Executive Vice President of the Paula Banging Dept. Damien Stewart, Different models of Amigas have the left and right switched around and different versions of documentation have the left and right switched around.  So no matter how Thomas arranges the channels they will perfectly match some Amiga models and be the opposite of some others.  Fun :)

This will be a lot of work for sure, but most likely a lot of fun too! At least it may give us an answer if Paula are "tuned" differently on the various Amiga models, or if this only happens to be a difference between the old and new generation AMIGAs. Most likely we can say that A1000/A500/A2000 belong to the old generation, but what about A500+ and A3000? They may sound different from the others, or may not. TCL claimed his A3000 sounded better than his A500, but does it sound better, worse or similar to for example the A1200? Again, this has to be confirmed by a test, or by someone who has done a "serious" comparsion. A600/A1200/A4000 would to my knowledge belong to the new generation. One question though: Could there be sonic differences between the Amigas produced by Commodore and Escom? Well, well... Maybe I go a bit too far now. I think I should stop here. ;-) Going through all the motherboard revisions as well as the different models would probably be an impossible task. Anyone out there who are willing to take the challenge? ;-)

About noise: I would assume that the desktop models, where the power supply is located inside the enclosure will affect the sound in a negative direction, but obviously not if the components are well insulated.

A simple way to find out if SMD generates more or less "noise" on a PCB could be to playback an empty sound sample on the actual Amiga, record the "empty" sound using a high quality RCA cable - and finally connect it to a good sound card (a high quality USB sound card for example).

To me sound quality is all about how the sound is reproduced, how it actually sounds (how my ear perceive the sound, which for that matter is subjectively), not about noise frequencies. Of course, background noise is a bad thing, but a record with some background noise could also sound good. LP recordings are a good example of this. This doesn't mean that I want the Natami to have a lot of noise, but I would rather want the sound of the Natami to be as much *hi-end* as possible when it comes to sound reproduction and musicality, rather than sounding flat with no noise whatsoever. Of course I want both things (best of two worlds) if possible! I hope all these things are taken great care of when the Natami is being designed. All circuits should be separated from each other (and well isolated), so no electromagnetic interference will affect the sound in any way.

For instance like this:

1. Original sound of DAC (no interpolation/tuning)
2. A500
3. A1200
4. (Eventually others)
5. ......

I know I have asked this before, but I don't think I've got an answer from anyone. Thomas: Have you decided what sound chip (DAC) you will use in the final Natami? The Samantha mainboard has a Cirrus Logic sound chip for instance. I don't believe this is a very costly chip being able to produce very good sound - since it's also to be found on rather old PC mainboards. I don't know if the chip has been improved ever since, but maybe it has. What are your plans for the Natami here? I hope the sound won't be low priority because you find it necessary to keep the final price of the Natami down to a minimum. :-)

       Frame generation .......... ECS, fixed 28MHz pixel clock
       SyncZorro Interface ....... preliminary version
       Copper .................... fully implemented
       Video DMA ................. fully implemented
       256 color registers ....... fully implemented
       Sprites ................... 16bit linebuffer
       blitter ................... basic implementation.
                                    Block and fill mode done, line to come
       Video priority ............ half implemented
       Scandoubler ............... fully implemented
       Interrupts ................ fully implemented
       Paula DMA control ......... fully implemented
       Audio out ................. fully implemented
       VGA out ................... working
       DVI out ................... o
       PCI ....................... o
 (new) IDE ....................... fully implemented
       CIAs ...................... fully implemented
       Disk DMA .................. 880k and 1790k, read only
       Serial Port DMA ........... o
       Slow peripheral I/O ....... fully implemented
       (Joy/Mouse/Keyb/PRT/DSK/SER)
       PC mouse and kbd support .. o
       Fast RAM controller ....... o
       Kickstart flash logic ..... o
       Battery-backed up clock.... o
       15k Video out ............. o
       15k Video in .............. o
       Audio in .................. o

Alexander: Should be a kickstart ROM in flash memory, IIRC.

Take your well deserved break.

Really looking forward to see some of the most cpu hungry scene demos fly on this thing. Another thing i want to see in action, is the gpu/3D core.

Asaf Ayoub wrote:

Take your well deserved break.

Eh? - What break? Please Hurry up and finish this, - i can hardly wait ;) -jk

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Got my hands on its little brother instead, which sounds almost just as good:

EXTERNAL LINK 

These headphones are great for critical listening and/or mixing. They are able to disclose all errors on a recording etc.

steve thomas wrote:

But I suspect that a Natami with an on-board valve amplifier, will have a longer warm-up time than a PC's boot-up time.:-)

I assume not many people would want a solution like that. ;-) I do not expect the Natami to use specialized hi-end audio components, but I expect it to have something better than this:

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Since it's already been said that the Natami will have 24-bit output, it can't be that bad. I'm just curious in what league it will be. 24-bit is only a number, and doesn't necessarily mean good sound.

If the Natami could have a sound chip similar to Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS in quality for example (which is now eight years old), I would be happy. You can get these cards for about 30 USD these days, so hopefully it wouldn't be out of reach to adapt a similar chip to the Natami as well.

I guess only Thomas can tell...

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