Re: Did anyone ever hack an Ensoniq RAM expansion?

[Blake Patterson <blake@blakespot.com>]

	I had a Gravis UltraSound on a PC to watch demos in the best possible
light, a while back.  It had the GF-1 on it, bascially the child of the
GS' DOC.  Quite fine.  I had 1MB on the board--maxed out.  Loved that
thing.  

	For straight audio sample playback that's great, but would've been nice
if more samples could be loaded into the audio RAM so that they could be
triggered from there to playback complex MOD-style music with virtually
no CPU hit.  With 64K, that's not so easily accomplished.  

	As machines grew faster, it became less of an issue, of course.  My G3
400 will play back really complex MOD-like music, loading the audio
samples somewhere into the 192MB of RAM in the system.  BUT -- just
knowing that there's nothing all clever going on in audio hardware
somehow detracts from the overall experience.  Kinda like the new thing
in MOD competitions (XM, S3M, IT, etc.) of placing the entrered songs
on-line in their native format AND in MP3 format.  Talk about taking
away the fineness of a playback of a MOD file -- listening to in as an
MP3.  (Even though it would sound exactly the same.)  Dunno--guess I'm
just a wire head.


bp

Supertimer wrote:
> 
> Blake Patterson <blake@blakespot.com> wrote:
> 
> >       Did anyone ever hack together a way to expand the very small amount of
> >audio RAM the IIgs has??  (What is it, 64K?)
> >
> >       Thanks!
> 
> Only in software.  Several music programs and all digital sound players
> use the IIGS' main RAM to store samples and simply use the 64k of
> the Ensoniq as a buffer, dynamically moving data through the 64k.
> This gives you potentially megabytes of sound data to use.
> 
> The Ensoniq 5503 can only access 128k at a time directly, so even
> on Ensoniq synthesizers that used the chip, you didn't get much
> more than the IIGS.  In fact, you didn't get the benefits of the main
> RAM of the IIGS on a real Ensoniq synth based on the 5503.

-- 
"Heisenberg may have slept here."