Submitted by Based on VS1063 chip, it can playback many music formats in full 16-bit 48Khz audio and additionally mix with the Amiga’s native Paula sound. When it is decoding and playing back a MPEGA audio file or various other formats, it frees up the Amiga to do other things. An MHI driver is supplied with the card for AmigaAmp and other various music playing software.
I’m continually amazed by the Amiga community.
Nice! I remember reading about this a LONG time ago. It’s good to see that A-eon is supporting the classic machines as well.
Still would be nice if they’d make some PPC accelerators built with modern technologies for old classic machines at a not insane price.
(to steam up the Amiga vs Atari) Awesome thing about the Atari Falcon, is with the DSP, even with a 68030@16, I can play mp3s on it. On the Amiga 4000d with a 68060@50, I would still need a soundcard like this.
Edited 2016-11-03 00:44 UTC
They could just provide a Virtualbox image and let everybody use cheap modern hardware.
There’s AROS for that.
Ah, the 060/50 was pretty capable of decoding MP3s up to about 256kbit with still enough CPU time left for word processing (but not much else). Anything less though and you’d need to halve the bitrate or other nasty tricks. I wrote my thesis on that machine in uni back in the day and it was constantly playing MP3s in the background.
It was one of the advantages of the later Atari machines alright, it didn’t need 90% of a very expensive CPU’s time to decode MP3s. Still wasn’t anywhere near a good enough reason to convince me to buy one though.
Interesting, I will have to try it again, but I swear I tried one and it stuttered on the Amiga, maybe because of Paula?
Search then for Vampire 600 (accelerator for Amiga 600), or Vampire 500 (Amiga 500). Not a PPC emulator, but quite capable of playing MP3s and with a lot of cycles to spare for other things. Reasonable price too.
It is a pitty these accelerators are not avalable for PC users.
Last time I remember seeing an MPEG decoder card in a PC was around 1999, I suspect because they’re basically pointless in any newer PC.
Nowadays the GPU features hardware MPEG decoding, even ARM chips do with NEON extension.
Yep, of course hardware decoding on a GPU or SoC is a similar story, but when’s the last time you saw a card dedicated solely to MPEG decoding?
I think part of it is that everything’s going integrated.
When was the last time you saw a system without onboard audio? Thanks to economies of scale, it’s simply not worth it to offer a separate audio-less SKU for people who want to put in something like an ASUS Xonar and, for MPEG, video is offloaded to the GPU while MPEG audio is considered too trivial to bother with.
(In the past, I’d play back MP3s on a 75MHz 486DX4 running Windows 95.)
WinAmp powaaaa!
No, llama power.
Yes it is. Because such cards releases preasure on CPU. They also deliver better sound in my opinion. Even with a 3GHz PC, multitasking can sometimes be a problem. Especially if a browser uses all of the CPU power. Then the music playing wouldnt affect also. So, its good for all kinds of MHz and GHz.
That has always been why the Amiga has been a powerful platform, not everything had to pass through the CPU. Offload stuff to dedicated processors for that! For the longest time the generic intel based systems only did the CPU, granted they also only made the CPU chipset, so it kind of makes sense they would want to sell bigger/faster CPUs to handle the load.
It probably was mostly the kick off to the 3d era where both the Atari and Amiga failed and the dedicated hardware for Intel systems really pushed the need for things to be ran outside of the CPU.
The amiga did have an edge during a short while during its heyday in terms of multimedia during the 80s. But it was well before the 3D era that the Amiga had fell off the wagon; The PC surpassed the Amiga’s chipset in terms of performance and capabilities by the time SoundBlaster and VGA were out.
Ironically the Amiga’s chipsets and OS ended up being a dead end kludge in terms of scalability, Commodore was never able to properly expand/advance the platform.
Edited 2016-11-04 00:08 UTC