As I've mentioned a couple times, I'm toying with and planning to develop a game or three that are targeted at unexpanded OCS Amigas (specifically, my goal is to have them run playably on an Amiga 500 with 512KB chip RAM and 512KB slow RAM.) Most of what I have planned for them isn't particularily intensive, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
But...four channels of sound just isn't enough for my compositional style. I could use chord samples, but that increases memory footprint (and loading times) and still carries limitations on the music I write. So I'm wondering about incorporating software mixing to give myself a boost.
Now, I do know that this is CPU-intensive, and I'm told that a 7-channel mixer only just barely runs on a stock Amiga, though I haven't actually tried it myself. I don't think I quite need that much, though - if I were able to mix four channels in software, double them up so that there's a copy on each speaker, and then use the remaining two channels as plain hardware channels (for drums and the like,) that would suit my needs fairly well. I also could do with fixed-length loop samples for the software channels (i.e. simple waveforms rather than full-length recorded audio,) which might make things faster.
My questions are as follows:
- How practical is this? I'm not looking at making a high-speed action game, so I don't need vast amounts of free CPU time, but if it's really as intensive as some folks make it out to be, it might conceivably impact the performance of even a less intensive game...
- Is there a noticeable drop in sound quality? Would oversampling the software channels during mixing help to alleviate it?
- Is there an example mixer for the Amiga whose source I could use as a guide?