Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

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reflex79
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Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by reflex79 »

Hello,

I'm trying to use my good old Delfina Lite on my amiga 4000 under Amiga OS 4.1FE but it seems to be some kind of problema, indeed using amplifier and delfinampeg.device i get a poor quality sound output and if I try to use delfinainit the sistem hangs on the boot. Is there any particular deflina.library I have to install? Under AHI all the delfina modes are blinded (that is they are not shown at all).

Moreover I'd like to use my spiderII USB installing poseidon but it's not seen by the system.

any suggestion?
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danbeaver
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by danbeaver »

The Spider uses DMA which is not allowed by the OS (only the on board SCSI of the PPC), and the Delfina is not supported.

See: http://www.hd-zone.com/2011/09/amigaos- ... lity-list/
reflex79
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by reflex79 »

danbeaver wrote:The Spider uses DMA which is not allowed by the OS (only the on board SCSI of the PPC), and the Delfina is not supported.

See: http://www.hd-zone.com/2011/09/amigaos- ... lity-list/
for delfina it's very bad that Hyperion didn't make any driver or support, it's by far the best audio card, especially for big box amigas.
Moreover the board indeed *WORKS* but the audio sometimes is not that clean (at least using aplifier for mp3 decoding), it should not be that hard to support, shame on the coders!

For Spider I knew, i was just asking if there was some kind of workaround.
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danbeaver
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by danbeaver »

Well I'm sure the Delfina board would perk up from its depression if it just thought about being a useful and productive little card running in a dual boot system; tell it that there are PC cousins in the PCI audioboard group that are very cheap and do great sound; perhaps the new Prisma will be selected to to run in OS4.1.

The DMA issue is a problem, but perhaps rather than criticizing the OS4 coders, you could design a PIO replacement (or use a supported USB solutions)?
reflex79
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by reflex79 »

danbeaver wrote:Well I'm sure the Delfina board would perk up from its depression if it just thought about being a useful and productive little card running in a dual boot system; tell it that there are PC cousins in the PCI audioboard group that are very cheap and do great sound; perhaps the new Prisma will be selected to to run in OS4.1.

The DMA issue is a problem, but perhaps rather than criticizing the OS4 coders, you could design a PIO replacement (or use a supported USB solutions)?
Delfina is not only a great soundcard, it is able to decode mp3s without any cpu load, it works great under 3.9 (yes I already have a dual boot amiga) it HAS to work as good under 4.1 at least for mp3s.

DMA issue is a coder problem, my problem is to find money to buy the software, and as mediator is a very common add-on for amigas the coder have to find a solution to make it work properly, it's a shame that some hardware works fine on AmigaOS 3.9 and doesn't work at all on OS4.1, this is something you can live with when you talking about old Z3 controllers just like fastlane (I have one for instance, used more for memory expansion, now i cannot even plug on my amiga 4000!) but is not acceptable for mediator and related hardware.
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danbeaver
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by danbeaver »

The OS4 SDK is a free download, so there is nothing stopping you from rewritting the kernel to support your boards.
Last edited by danbeaver on Mon Apr 20, 2015 3:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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tonyw
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by tonyw »

The coders have to find a solution to make it work properly
That's rather unfair, the OS4 coders can't work without documentation and support from the hardware manufacturers.

IIRC the Delfina device driver for OS 3.9 was produced by the manufacturers (as all Windows drivers are), and they have not released any information to allow a driver to be written for OS4. Probably no one remembers any more anyway. The Mediator is the same: the "DMA" support in the Classic Amigas was a hardware hack that won't work with a PPC CPU. The manufacturers said years ago that they would do a Mediator support for OS4 "when OS4 was finished". Nine years later and they still haven't done anything.

So don't blame us. Your hardware is twenty years old and not supported by the manufacturer any more. I suggest that you buy something more modern, like a Sam, then you can buy an off-the-shelf high performance audio card like a Terratec. If you buy an X-1000, you even get HD Audio built in at no extra cost.
cheers
tony
reflex79
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by reflex79 »

tonyw wrote:
The coders have to find a solution to make it work properly
So don't blame us. Your hardware is twenty years old and not supported by the manufacturer any more. I suggest that you buy something more modern, like a Sam, then you can buy an off-the-shelf high performance audio card like a Terratec. If you buy an X-1000, you even get HD Audio built in at no extra cost.
this is REALLY unfair indeed, if my hardware is too old why do you develop the software? why there is someone selling it?
If someone sells amigaOS 4.1 FE for classic may it's because it's still profitable, I read somewhere that AmigaOS 4.1 for classics is the best selling version, isn't that true?
I read that you are developing G-rex driver and supporting it even without documentation, why G-rex and not Delfina?

I appreciate your work, if not i wouldn't have bought and registered AmigaOS 4.1 but I want to tell you what is good and what is not and both the things (delfina and spider) are not good, isn't possible to use another USB board on mediator and make it supported by AmigaOS 4.1?
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danbeaver
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by danbeaver »

Unfair to rewrite an OS that supports 20 year old hardware? MorphOS doesn't do that. In the past 20+ years, hundreds of boards were manufactured by companies that went "poof" and you expect a small team coding for all the current PPC computers that can support OS4 to write drivers for just your hardware?

How fair is it for you to attack them on their SUPPORT forum?

And may God Bless you, for you do not understand what you do.
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tonyw
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Re: Delfina Lite and Spider.device on 4.1 FE

Post by tonyw »

reflex79 wrote:if my hardware is too old why do you develop the software?
We are not abandoning your hardware. If there is no support for it, it is because we do not have documentation to provide support. If it ran under OS3.x but not now, it's because the manufacturer has kept the documentation a secret.
I read that you are developing G-rex driver and supporting it even without documentation...
IIRC the G-Rex driver was reverse-engineered by third-party developers, not by the OS4 developers, who have no documentation for it.
Isn't possible to use another USB board on mediator and make it supported by AmigaOS 4.1?
If it's a board that has published documentation, then we can write a driver for it (and so can anyone else). If it's twenty years old and undocumented, then we can't do anything.

On my A4000s, I have the Thylacine USB cards. The drivers for that Thylacine were written for the manufacturer (15 years ago) by a third party programmer (I remember because I helped him debug the driver). The manufacturer does not exist any more, the programmer does not do Amiga stuff any more. There is no documentation for the board or the driver. So I have two Thylacine cards that work fine under OS3.9 (with the 68K drivers) but will never work under OS4. I don't expect anyone to ever develop OS4 drivers for them. Same problem with the Picasso IV graphics cards and my Opalvision card. I don't spend money on the Classic machines because their hardware is unsupported.

The industry moves on. These days I can buy a USB card for PCI-e for $30, a 1 GB/s network card for $40, and they are fully supported by OS4. I can buy any one of a hundred different graphics cards, all of them 100x more powerful than anything made for a Classic Amiga, for about $100, less than half what I paid for the Picasso IV boards years ago. I'm not going to bash my head against the wall trying to keep my A4000s running, I have better things to do with my time and money.
cheers
tony
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