Sphere478 wrote on 2021-01-28, 06:42:
did anything ever come of the bitchin fast audio 3000?
I wish. There's nothing new on his blog, and no mentions on the VCFed forums.
If you watch the video, eeguru honestly gets ahead of himself with all of the things the card could do, just because there's space in the FPGA, as opposed to what the card should do, especially in a first version. Like, first he's talking about putting every sound card in a single FPGA. Ambitious, OK, I get it, but a lot of them are really very simple (Tandy 1000, SID, CMS), while others are very well understood (SoundBlaster) and there's even an open-source FPGA implementation out there already for the OPL3. Doing Gravis UltraSound? That's quite hard because the chip is pretty complicated, and is definitely not as throughly reverse-engineered as the SoundBlaster. Doing wavetable synth inside the FPGA instead of just letting a WaveBlaster module do it? The complexity of this thing keeps going up and up and up.
Then the feature creep really sets in. Adding an ESP32 to get WiFi, Bluetooth Audio, and USB audio is just way beyond what a sound card needs. Throwing the XTIDE in there is nice, but this is a 16-bit ISA card, and AT class machines already have an ATA connector (by definition, it stands for "AT Attachment"), and there's already easy ways to mate an SD card to IDE!