@ddniUK

nice to know work on hdaudio continues apace. oh, and i love the memes generated from the amiwest 2012 pictures, by the way.

-- eliyahu

I'm happy to hear that they were able to discover the secret to making this work!

Having coded for certain ARM Peripheral hardware, as well as a few other things at the register level, documentation is not often perfect. For my ARM projects, I had the convenience at the time to look at the Verilog RTL and synthesized netlist for the chip to (very gradually) figure things out. Data fields are sometimes not even at the register address in the docs, sometimes have moved to different bit numbers on different addresses, and sometimes really just do not do what the datasheet says, in addition to the more common too vague or complete omission items.

I'm sure this was quite a challenge with only a datasheet, maybe some Linux code that works differently, and a lot of experimentation time for these guys. Congratulations on your accomplishment!

Why did intel not make it backwards compatible? Just to be annoying (as is often the case)?

Why did intel not make it backwards compatible? Just to be annoying (as is often the case)?

It's almost never the case, but it might appear that way.
 
 Backward compatibility costs and asking everyone to pay extra for a sound chip when you just need a new driver is unjustifiable. In the DOS days it made sense as a large number of your customers would be unable to use your hardware, but these days it doesn't.
 
 Often the backward compatibility would never be used, because you'd be losing out on new features and who would chose that?

Why did intel not make it backwards compatible? Just to be annoying (as is often the case)?

There are some real advantages to the new standard.. and they would not have been possible with AC97:

The case wiring of the old system was.. "less than ideal".. the line/headphone output was routed from the case to the front headphone jack. At the jack, audio runs though a couple normally closed contacts (open when headphones inserted) and then the audio is run from there to the normal green jack on the back panel. WHat this means is that under the best circumstances, your "line output" has run two trips through the case, and also through a pair of mechanical contacts.. this is a higher failure rate than needed, and if you don't connect the headphone jack, the line output doesn't work at all!

The same circuit on HDAudio: There are separate audio feeds for headphone out and line out.. a single contact on the headphone jack can be used to tell the driver when headphones are plugged in or not.. But it's now possible to have BOTH outputs active at the same time, and it is possible to have separate feeds to either of them, and the line out still works if the case jacks are not connected..

The old way had each card showing up in PCI space, and every card needed specific drivers. the new way has a stream of data through the southbridge that can support up to four separate cards, and they all (supposedly) can use the same driver.. Now I'll be the first to say that our current driver is not compatible with anything but the X1000 right now.. but it's a start.

I'm sure there's other changes as well.. but that's a start

Do we have USB audio working on any Amigalike yet?

I have code to record and play back audio over USB.
There are a few obstacles yet to overcome, and I have other
projects as well, but there is hope for the future.

running on hardware that is a decade or three behind what the rest of the world is using.

I respectfully disagree.

I'd say we're ahead the rest of the world; I mean show me one other motherboard with an in-built XMOS!

@ amigadave

My X1000 has a newer/better video card in it then my 3 year old PC. Yes I know we don't have full 3D to get the cards full benefit YET but we'll get there.

My X1000 has 4GB of ram and my 3 year old PC has 2GB. Yes I know we can't exactly access the full 4GB of ram YET but we'll get there.

I had to buy office 2013 for work and it's the biggest piece of buggy crap ever! Yes even the thousands of developers working on it & still headaches and down time messing up my time! Worst part is they're not paying me to be a beta tester lol