Debuging NallePuh...

@kas1e

I never tested the test button , don't press the test button.

I can see one mistake, using FreeVec insted of free().

Ok, working if you do not press "Test" (you should grey out this case :) ).

Symphonie player is working with NallePuh (quality is not as good as on real Amiga but it does the job).

@K-L

already fixed.

@K-L

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I didn't even know that worked!

@K-L

I see its java, how do you run SymphoniePlayer

@LiveForIt

https://video.amiga-ng.org/w/gXxwNrvbDwUXRKWioxQQ64

@K-L

Really cool.

The editor kept crashing on my system, DSI error in audio.device,
and other places. the tiny player worked well.

It does produce a bit of noise, I guess that’s because NallePuh is bit of half assed implementation, not sure it actually support 14bit.

For the noise, it must also comes from me (bad insulation).

@K-L

Sound quality of Hippo is pretty good in comparison, (as long as the module is played at the correct speed.)
I think it’s even better than the AHI player, but that might be developer bias. I’m pretty sure its not bad cabling, I have HIFI cables here. and I know the code.

http://amiga-dev.wikidot.com/hardware:adkconr

for 14bit i think we need support for the modulate option.

NallePuh only know how to set and clear this bits, it does not care what bits are used for here.

@LiveForIt

Yes but I still have trouble with sound when recording, just listen to this video : https://video.amiga-ng.org/w/kgM94MRF2bngfizdiGrvBH

I will check to see how I can bet better sound recording

@K-L

Before I replaced my cables with some quality RCA cables, I had lot issues with noise, I also changed my cables management, under my table, move audio cables 10 cm away from HDMI and Network cables.

It’s also easy to get white noise, if you are amplifying a low signal.

Some programs have boost option, intended is to amplify a low recoding, but on normal audio recording can course clipping.

I use an external USB sound card, so I don’t get any signal noise from PSU, or motherboard, or other internal cables.

@K-L

That's more than Symphonie Player. You're running the full package! I didn't even know it worked.

I only got as far as loading it then no sounds for me. Since it obviously bypassed audio.device. Shame it's too early for AHI like a lot of the big Amiga audio programs.

@LiveForIt

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No it wouldn't support 14 bit I think. I don't think I would call it half assed, it does what it's told. It detects a Paula write and sends it to AHI. AHI does all the mixing. Since that is the job of AHI.

14 bit is a specialist implementation. How would PUH know a program wants to play in 14 bit? In simple terms, one channel is full volume, while another is at 1. This could happen in a module, at one point in time, so how would it tell the difference and what the intended output desired is? It would need to interpret what is written in the registers and it may misinterpret it. Even if it could detect it another issue is a 16 bit source has been split to 14 bits, so it would still be missing the 2 lower bits, if it upscaled 14 to 16 for playback.

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Could depend on AHI mixing mode. It has a few mixing modes that usually only serve to confuse. Most AHI players I know of don't use AHI to do the mixing but do it themselves. At least on OS4. On 68K an AHI plug shouldn't do any mixing. First, AHI already provides a player interrupt feature so that should be used, and the AHI routines don't need any screen counter kludges. Don't know how AHI handles DMA wait internally. Second, an AHI player should request a proper Paula mode, so Paula does the hardware mixing.

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AM and FM support would be good in future as an exotic feature. But does anything even bother to use it? The 14 bit players don't use modulation mode directly but instead use the 64/1 volume pair trick to give the side effect of 14 bit output.

@Hypex

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sure it’s possible to upscale to 16bit, digital enhancement techniques has existed for long time in the audio / video industry, wave form corrections, when audio CDDA they introduced a technique, where shattered the audio data, so its minimum impact if surface was a bit damaged, and they added digital correction techniques to fill in the missing data.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicati ... Disc_Digital_Audio_System

I came across serval other techniques to correct for clipping and other distortions too.

the problem missing bits is none perfect wave form, your kind have wobble effect, you need to correct for. I guess you need break down signal into frequencies, and reconstruct etch frequency.

I think that’s why of scope of this project but go ahead and do your resources and try it out, I’m not going to stop you.

By the way, stairstep frequency I guess is 2 x the sample frequency, it can be possible to pass it into a digital lowpass filter, to remove some of the white noise.

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Well, your maybe correct about 14bit, I don’t know how works, I only think I know. I have not looked at any playback routines for 14bit.

But when I say half assed, and you look at the “Martin Blom» original readme / mail, he sead it was a proof of concept, and he has serval ideas he did not implement. (self-modifying code, chip ram mirror)

And it becomes even clearer when you compare it to the UAE Paula emulation, that does do all nice things AM/FM modulation, and filtering.
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Yes, that can be the problem, or they apply some filtering and other things to the audio, or it’s something with timing is not perfect, its hard to pinpoint, my impression is It sound somewhat muddy.

@LiveForIt

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Yes I read about that. Didn't know about the EFM. I wonder how much "pure" data is 16 bit? With the modulation and what not. Especially since not all CD rips are equal. The data can change.

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At that point the damage is done. Bit advanced for a Paula emulator. In fact given it controls mixing using AHI no distortion should occur on the output.

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I suppose 2 bits isn't much to lose or recreate from existing bits.

If you want to deconstruct the signal then you need to get into FFTs, breaking it down into frequency components, then resynthesise it to reconstruct it back.

Given Paula is synthesised to begin with that might not be so far fetched.

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Lol. To be honest I can't even tell the difference anymore. Maybe I need to hear the real thing but to me a real Amiga playing a module sounds like just my X1000 playing a module with digital mixing.

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Depends on the DAC. Paula synthesizes it so it's not a pure basic DAC. It can take a staircase and the result will be smooth. It also has the analogue filters.

The max output frequency will be half of the sample rate as per the Nyquist theorem. I used to think it was because Paula had the sound in sample pairs so needed two samples for one difference. Meaning it could only output half the frequency at any time. But it wasn't related to the hardware implementation at all.

The same happened when I read about the magic 4489 MFM floppy sync number. I recall first reading about it an an Amiga document. It may have been a technical guide included with X-Copy. Now it said something about the smart people coming up with 4489. Because it was an Amiga document I thought the smart people were the Amiga designers. Nope, as it turns out it didn't relate to the Amjga at all, and the smart people thought of it before the Amiga came along. It was only to do with how the floppy is encoded.

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They are simple in principle. Split each 16 bit channel into upper and lower 8 bits. IIRC it plays the upper 8 bit sample on one channel pair at volume 64, scales the lower 8 bits into a 6 bit sample, and plays that on the other channel pair at volume 1. This has the effect of outputting 14 bit resolution. It somewhat simulates what would happen if it was volume modulated. Since a 6 bit sample matches volume resolution. Technically, it could just play the lower 8 bits in full at also volume 1, but apparently it's noisy as that's above what the volume does. I don't know if the 14 bit is a digital 14 bit or the 14 bit is some kind of analogue equivalent.

I've looked into using AM to do it in hardware. But there are some limitations. I forgot what they are. Needing to use CPU to write values is too much. I also theorised that 15 bit was possible a number of years ago when I did the math on it.

There is also 9 bit as used by Symphonie. This is a real possibility and unlike 14 bit can provide a real dynamic range of 9 bits digital without simulation tricks. And at full volume.

What I'm interested in is if anyone has scanned it with an oscillator? Fan boys going on about the Amiga doing 14 bit is all
well and good amongst themselves but I want to see some real results. Could be a good activity for my club.

Could be hard to quantify as an Amiga 16 bit sound card playing a 14 bit sample, to compare with as a baseline, won't be exactly what Paula would output with it's different DAC synthesis.

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Oh I understand. Yes, well, the idea wasn't suitable for the real thing anyway. So, this PUH thing uses the MMU to intercept Paula writes, diverts it to the AHI driver, which then directly writes it to Paula. Am I missing something?

The other advanced ideas don't make too much sense because it has Paula hardware. So, there really is no practical point apart from a proof of concept, unless someone is wanting to divert it to a 16 bit sound card.

On OS4 the idea makes sense. On the AmigaOne anyway. Since it has no Paula hardware. But it wasn't done as cleanly. It doesn't program the MMU. It overrides the DSI vector so it's kinda hacky. But, they didn't help in providing any other way, and when I enquired they refused to provide support for any program that wanted to add a hook to catch custom access cleanly. I'm still interested in if the MMU interface can do it in a cleaner fashion.

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Yes, it does a lot more, but it's also a fully integrated solution. So I think it's easier for it do do all that. Something like PUH has to intercept live calls to audio registers and deal with it in an instant.

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I suppose it's fully customised that way. It doesn't need to rely on AHI using the correct mixing mode or any options that avoid distortion. It can just generate the full sample stream. I can understand really. It needs to resample to one output frequency but also scale by channel volume. Paula volume is also said to be PWM based so a pedantic mixer can also take that into account. But apart from that, if output is 16 bit minimum, then volume can be used to upscale the samples to 14 bit then add to 16 bit. 6 bit volume x 8 bit sample = 14 bits. Mixed is 15 bits then upscale to 16, or upscale 14 bit to 15 bit then add. Fully mixed 16 bit result.

@LiveForIt
I see that new version of NallePuh were released with CIA stuff added, so want to give it a go, but find out few remarks:

1). installer doesn't works. Saying "Sorry, and error has occured. SOURCE: Parameter already defined in line 144.". So had to copy libs manually.

2). Is "Test" button supposed to work now ? It didn't crash now as before, but doing nothing as well (at least, i can't see anything in the shell when hit "Test" button, and didn't hear any sound as well).

@All
Does anyone find some old 68k demos/apps which works now with new CIA stuff added ? Interesting to know if anything new working now as well.

@kas1e

I always sucked writing install scripts, I tested it under advanced install, perhaps it only works in that mode. If you know of someone who is good at writing install script any help with that is appreciated.

Remember to delete old catalogs, before installing, new programs use different id numbers for languages categories.

Test button should work, it does not actually trigger an exception, but does write to the emulated hardware registers, so not test of exception routine, only the routines in the back end.
if problem with AHI make sure you have more than one channel configured for AHI unit, as other programs might need to allocate AHI channels as well.

So far my test is a bit of mixed result, it seams a lot software that does use CIAA/CIAB also uses copper, sadly, the software that crash because x,y,z still crash because of x,y,z this programs have other issues. Only programs freeze up, hang, can be working, the emulation of the CIAA/CIAB chips are not designed to handle forbid state, as I have setup up a timer device timer to update timer ticks. It handled in PUH itself, and not in exception routine.

Sadly there is no database of software can be searched by issue/problem, this means retesting everything. To find the needle in haystack.

To correct myself before anyone else does, you can look at Intuition Base website,
but you can’t download the list, nor can you write SQL Quary or Trubo Calc / Excel spreadsheet with filters. Does you need to click threw every game / program listed, read the fault description.
OctaMedStudio should be working, but its not, something is wrong with programs interrupt routine, or perhaps how I try to execute it, more investigation needed. Perhaps the wrong values are passed into 68K registers.

CIAA / CIAB emulation is not designed to handle any 68K WHDLOAD
or any hardware take over software, this is waste of time to test.

with old software its even difficult run the software, because can’t find the correct resolution, for example 320x256 or 320x400 modes are hard to setup. In other words, keep your expectation low.

@kas1e

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I checked out SimCity 2000, and of course firing up the game is not that easy. I installed a patch from Aminet. Then I had to use the old Newmode program to promote the game to 640x480 mode in 8Bit. Then I still had to click 2 times on Ignore errors in GR. Only then does the game fire up, but unfortunately the graphics on my current Radeon RX 560 still display erroneously. I remember that 10 years ago when I still had the old Radeon HD 4770 it displayed fine. However, at that time, when I used CIAGent exclusively, the game did not make any sounds of itself, there was complete silence. Now, thanks to Nallepuh, there is sound.

@LiveForIt
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The Test button for sure didn't produce any sound for me, and i use my usual AHI mode which had 32 channels.

@Mufa
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Will be interesting to have a big list of things working with NallePuh which didn't before, but so far the only way i can think of, is start to download whole aminet's demos/musicdisks/mags and one by one checking ..