July 1993 MAGazine Volume 9 Number 7

PRESIDENT'S PONDERINGS JULY 1993

By Bob Nunn

VIDEO BACKUP SYSTEM UPDATE

At the last meeting I promised to let you know what else I discovered using the VBS program. I am happy to report that it works well even on whole hard drive partitions. I am able to backup my entire BBS using a parnet cable from my other system to the VCR. That means no downtime for my bbs but the trade off is the slower backup time because of the parent transfer. I can't tell you how relieved that makes me knowing that now it I crashed I could restore all 500+ megabytes of my system in a few hours. The $99.95 investment for this program from Manta (Mall Order House in Amiga World) was well spent, even if I did have to work at it a bit. Now if I can just keep my wife and daughter from recording their favorite programs over my backups

!SIGN ENGINE & TAHITI

I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the different technologies now available for the Amiga. We are moving to photo-optical storage where I work to store color images and to transfer finished color catalog pages to the print production people. The MaxOptical Tahiti technology allows 1.0 Gigabyte of storage in a reasonable priced cartridge format. Thanks Scott Pitts for bringing out your equipment and especially preparing handouts for meeting participants. Kelly Boswell of Videospeak showed us the latest in vinyl sign making equipment tied into an Amiga base format. It certainly seems like a viable alternative to custom, less flexible systems. Perhaps Amiga has found another market niche. Videospeak are offering the systems. Perhaps all you need is a custom sign or two, check with them on having one made up.

QUANTUM 240 HARD DRIVE

I just installed an additional drive to my system bringing it up to a total of 505 megabytes. The new drive has proven faster than my smaller Quantum 52 meg or my newer Maxtor 213. My landed price on the drive was just over $312.00 and the drive comes with a 2 year warranty. At just over $1.30/meg it is one of the better buys now and according to sysinfo it is by far the fastest. I had a custom cable made up special at Videospeak. After visiting with David I wished I would have purchased the drive through him. While his price might not have been exactly the same, I think it is important that we support our local dealers for the services they provide. I probably would have got the cable and drive in a combo for the same or less. It is nice to know that when you need a custom cable or odd part there is someone here local willing to help you.

COMPUTERS-4-U

Donald Buchanan from the aforementioned stop by the last meeting to take a poll on Amiga import magazines. Don agreed to get some of the magazine titles for the club members to review. Seems like the folks are looking at getting some of the better titles in. The guys also have decided to get out of the PC compatible business and are moving out their inventory. From now on they are specializing in Commodore 64/128 & Amiga equipment, repair, and software only.

GRAPHICS CONTEST!

I hope that most of you are excited about the graphics contest as I am. We announced the basic rules at the June meeting, check inside for full details. We have 3 Grand Prizes and Certificates for 2nd and 3rd Place.

Would you like to learn more about using your Amiga? Call my BBS and remind me that you are a MAG member for special access!

Operator Headgap BBS - 3/12/24 - 901-365-1583/
V.32bis Hi Speed Only! 367-0744

MAG .info

The Memphis Amiga Group (M.A.G.)
P.O. Box 752683
Memphis, TN 38175-2683

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Memphis Amiga Group (M.A.G.) is a non profit organization whose purpose is promoting and encouraging the use and understanding of the Commodore Amiga Computer Systems. Membership are open to all who share a common interest in the Amiga computer and its many wonderful and unique features. Monthly meetings are open to the public and visitors are welcome.

MEMBERSHIP

Annual membership dues for new members is $25.00 with an annual renewal rate of $20.00. All memberships are family memberships and dues are nonrefundable.

NEWSLETTER

This newsletter is published monthly for the distribution to members of the Memphis Amiga Group. MAGazine contains meeting announcements, hardware and software reviews, video and book reviews and other information of interest to Amiga and computer users in general. Contributions are welcome and may be submitted in hardcopy or via disk in ascii format at any meeting or you can upload to Videospeak BBS 853-4804. Be sure to leave a note to the sysop. The editor reserves the right to reject material related to illegal service, products or unethical practices.

CLUBS DISKS & MISC.

ADVERTISING RATES

MEETINGS

General Membership Meetings: 2nd Saturday of each month 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm in the Farris Auditorium at State Tech.

Board of Directors Meeting: 2nd Saturday of each month at 11:30 am at Gridley's on Macon Road.

All special events will be announced via the newsletters.

BOARD MEMBERS

New for Studio 16: SampleXfer, the Sample Transfer Module

Sooke, BC, Canada - June 11, 1993

SampXfer is a sophisticated MIDI musician's utility for the transferral of professional wuality audio samples between various MIDI samplers and Studio 16. This software tool will close the creative loop that starts with the performance and progresses to the sound editing environment. Now the engineer or performer can receive perfect material from the end product to use again in the creative process, providing superior editing for your samples. The performing musician will now find the ultimate in performance sample recording and editing systems in Studio 16. Here he can record samples of whatever quality he may require and recombine them in the most intuitive and easily learned environment possible. Now, with the addition of SampXfer the performer's ultimate sample editing tool is complete. You are no longer bound to the large, expensive, and limited dedicated sampling instrument. Any sample playback instrument will now not only have access to Studio 16's recording environment, but through SampXfer and Studio 16, you will now be able to transfer all or your old sample libraries from your samplers into your modern tools.

The Technology

SampXfer pushes the "state of the art" envelope for Amiga MIDI support by doing something no other program supporting MIDI sample dumps can do. Amiga or otherwise. The Amidi Systems' custom serial port handlers allow Amiga's Exec to fully support the multitasking user environment during large high speed MIDI sample dumps without interruption! No screen blanks, no hanging, nothing but pure uninterrupted access to the flow of control of the Amiga's graphic user interface at the same time our custom Serial Interrupt Vectors are handling al incoming and outgoing MIDI sample data, even with samplers which stream the digital audio data in at full duplex mode without packeting. These custom interrupt handlers are installed and removed from the Amiga's Exec legally and SampXfer retains a pointer to the previous serial port handlers and politely replaces them after using the port. Much thanks to Carl Sassenrath for technical support in their development.

The Advantage

The custom Amidi serial vectors are written in assembly and are blazingly efficient! The CPU timeslices used by our handlers amount to such small overhead that the user may continue using other applications with little or no hesitation. The standard AmigaDOS Serial.Device is far to slow to handle the rigors of many system exclusive sample dumps without missing significant amounts of data, so SampXfer transparently borrows the serial port only during sample dumps as executed by the user, and with the greatest finesse recovers all incoming MIDI data, at all other times returning the serial resource back to whichever task had it previously.

Memory Usage

Memory is allocated dynamically at runtime according to the demands of the sample that is being manipulated. SMDI sample dumps are executed directly to and from disk storage, and thus facilitates the movement of very large samples. Memory is handled internally in 16-bit sample words, but can be received or sent in whichever bit resolution the user's sampler will support. The actual value is hidden, as it is set relative to the current sampler's protocol. SampXfer always attempts to use the highest resolution available up to 16-bit.

Transfer Protocols

MIDI Samplers currently supported are Prophet 2000 (untested), Akai S700, S7000, S900, S950; Roland MKS-100, S-10, S-50, S-220, S-330, and all MIDI Sample Dump Standard machines such as Akai S1000, S1100, Roland's S550, S770, Yamaha's TX16W, and many others too numerous to name here. SCSI digital transmission technology called SMDI is also supported. Some SMDI samplers are the Peavy SP, the Kurzweil K2000, and several Roland and Akai SCSI equipped samplers. Ask your dealer if your SCSI equipped sampler will support SMDI.

DSP Chip - An Overview

The validity of the following information is not known. The information was collected from various NETS over the last month or so. So please use this as a general overview to help you understand the new DSP chip. I will try to publish the final specs on this chip as soon as they are released.

Trevor

DSP3210 Overview

The DSP3210 is a full 32-bit floating point DSP implemented in .9 micron CMOS. It provides many advantages over fixed point DSPs such as the Motorola 56000. Some of the main features of the DSP3210 include:

• 32-bit floating point arithmetic.
• 32-bit addressing.
• Large (8k) on-chip, zero wait-state memory.
• Single cycle instructions (for up to 33 Mflops)
• Share bus with Motorola or Intel style CPU.
• Serial I/O with DMA transfer conters for up to 25 Mbits/second transfer:
  • Serial data transfers occur without processor intervention.
  • Cycles are stolen when necessary.
  • DMA control for serial in and serial out.
• Barrel Shifter for bit manipulation in graphics or data encryption.
• Both mu-law and A-law encoding.
• Bit I/O general purpose 8-bit I/O port for control of external hardware.
• Programmable 32-bit timer for interval timing, rate generation, event counting or waveform generation.
• Fully vectored interrupt structure with hardware context save:
  • Allows very fast interrupt processing, up to 2 million/second.
• Low power CMOS design.

No special programming is required on the DSP3210 to implement floating point algorithms. or to process signals wtih a much larger dynamic range (in excess of 1500 dB as opposed to < 300 dB for fixed point). The DSP3210 is also designed to share a host memory bus with either a Motorola or Intel style CPU. This greatly reduces system cost by removing the requirement for expensive fast local memory for the DSP. This also removes any practical restrictions on program or data size. A large on-chip cache (8k) combined with software that intelligently utilizes the cache allows the DSP3210 to execute complex signal processing algorithms without expensive local memory. All instructions execute in a single cycle (four clock periods> 80 ns for a 50 MHz part or 60 ns for a 66 MHz part) and includes all floating point normalization (which is performed automatically). A single instruction may have two floating point operations: a floating point multiplication and a floating point addition. The DSP3210 also supports up to four memory accesses in a single instruction cycle (quad-word transfer). The DSP3210 architecture features seven functional units:

• Control Arithmetic Unit (CAU)
• Data Arithmetic Unit (DAU)
• On-chip memory (RAM0, RAM1, Boot ROM)
• Bus Interface
• Serial I/O (SIO)
• DMA Controller (DMAC)
  • Timer/Status Control (TSC)

The following is how the DSP chip will be used in the Amiga. Again the information is not final, but that is not unusual when dealing with Commodore. This chip will greatly improve the sound of the Amiga. A point which I feel was greatly overlooked in the new AGA, and should have shipped with this chip as a standard feature. Why improve everything but the sound? Anyway I hope this information is useful.

• It is a Zorro III card
• It is partly A3000 compatible
• It uses a 66 MHz 3210 DSP- future versions will use the 3207
• The separate design dramatically improves performance
• With the A4000, the DSP can share Amiga memory
• The card comes with 2Mb of memory, exp. to 16Mb
• AT+T have worked very closely with C= to port VCOS
• CBM will provide basic applications such as recording and playback of 16 bit CD-quality sound
• Blue Ribbon are writing a version of Bars + Pipes to use the DSP
• Applications include MPEG, audio decompression, modem, speech recognition

MEMPHIS AMIGA GROUP MEMBERS JULY 1993

If your name is underlined check your renewal date.

If you have a change of address or phone, please notify; Terry Campbell (601) 393-4864

Financial Report of the Memphis Amiga Group June, 1993

Animation Contest Rules

Categories

• 3D Animation
• 3D Stills
• 2D Animation
• 2D Stills

Rules

1. If larger than 3 meg or is an AGA file, must submit on video tape (VHS)
2. Must be IFF fomat if to be displayed on club's computer.
3. Maximum time on animations - 5 minutes.
4. Limit on submissions - 1 per category per person.
5. Remember - family oriented meeting, material should be appropriate.
6. MAG Club Members only.

Preliminary judging will be done by a panel. The top 5 in each category will be displayed at the September meeting to be voted on by the General membership. Entries to be in by the August meeting for preliminary judging.

Prizes: 1st prize in each category will receive a plaque, 2nd and 3rd prizes in each category will be a framed certificate.

Meeting Notes June 12

The board meeting was brought to order at 12:00 pm by Bob Nunn, president. Present were: Bob & Cheryn Nunn, Terry Campbell, Bill Bowers, & Brian Akey.

Rules for the animation contest were discussed and decided upon (see in this newsletter.)

Demos for the June meeting will be Directory Opus V4 and the Opal Vision Board running on an A4000.

Don't miss the July meeting; it will be a great one!

Submitted by Cheryn Nunn, Vice President

500 System For Sale!

Amiga 500 w/Fattened Agnus, 512 Ram & Clock Board, External Floppy, GVP A500+ 105 Meg Hard Drive, 8 Meg of SIMM Fast Ram, & 1084 Monitor - $1100 - Call 682-6186.