Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the Master. Don't think I ever saw one. Pretty much all software was targeted at the 32K models anyway, and AFAIK your extended memory was implemented as swap pages rather than being directly addressable.
The 4 GB barrier was overcome a long time ago on 32 bit systems. The reason people still think its a problem is because Microsoft decided you as a customer shouldnt be able to use more than 4 GB memory on 32-bit since Windows 2000.
Er, ARM is not an x86 derivative. This new revision does seem to have added some flavour of PAE, but AFAIK 4GB is an absolute limit for all currently-manufactured ARM microprocessors.
I don't know the heat dissipation figures, but I can safely say I have never yet seen an ARM processor with a heatsink.
As for power consumption a quick google seems to show that an 800MHz OMAP3 draws around 750mW at full load. This new A15 core is supposedly going to have similar figures.
Unfortunately, the detailed A15 documentation is not available yet, so we're left to speculate over what this means. But at the same time, the supported architecture remains ARMv7 and there is no hint of any major changes on the instruction side. An easy implementation would use a MMU with 40-bit physical addresses to map this amount of memory, but the process size would remain at 4 GiB to avoid any drastic change to the programming model.
Yeah, that's the picture I'm getting from the collection of links provided to my query. A 64-bit address register would have been nice, but it looks more like they're aiming this at virtualisation, e.g. to provide multiple 'instances' of a 4GB address space to several VMs.
32-bit addressing was seriously impressive in 1987, compared to Acorn's then-current machine with 32KB, including video memory. But now even smartphones are starting to come with 512MB, 1GB of memory. Does ARM have a strategy for getting past 4GB?
An obvious approach: run apps virtualized. Under KVM say, this would impose a slight overhead but nothing remotely in the ballpark of the overhead imposed by Dalvik
I'm not sure ARM is very easy to virtualise, but I could be wrong - after all, VMware managed it for the x86 in pure software. Supposedly ARM have added some limited virtualisation extensions to the arch now, but they'll only be present on the very latest chips, if that.
They already have Linux running on them; now give us a libc and a widget library and we're off to a great start.
They already have a libc, you can get at it via the NDK.
The snag is that you can't - afaik - run a native application directly, it has to be done via Java/Dalvik and calling the native code via JNI. And also the NDK has no libraries to access the user interface.
If they could just solve those two little problems, you could do fully native GUI application development in C++.
What if we say that our Android devices are running JAndroid, that happens to be very compatible with Java...
but of course is not Java...
That's what they did - Android devices run Dalvik, which is actually not compatible with Java at all. However, you can recompile a Java class into a Dalvik class, which is what the SDK does.
I always felt that the original levels left something to be desired. In particular the way the level titles had no resemblance to the levels themselves. If it hadn't been for the masses of WAD files out there, it wouldn't really have had much staying power with me.
IMHO he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn, and 'DMBBATH' which while sadly incomplete does try really, really hard to make a hangar that looks like a hangar, a chemical plant that is full of machinery and so on and so forth.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
Now he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
And site owners and advertisers wonder why users go to such extremes with Adblock plus and NoScript to block ad's.
This. I don't mind advertisements, but after I got stung by a drive-by exploit on a work machine (either on Slashdot itself or one of its linked articles), I went straight for Adblock Plus.
I can't remember what the payload was now - something that installed 'XP Antivirus 2010' or whatever (*) - but at the time, only two AV suites could detect it and the company-mandated AV wasn't among these.
(*) Which gleefully detected 'viruses' in several ARM, MIPS and SH3 binaries before I was able to kill it
What just like the valid uk computer hardware store http://www.overclockers.co.uk/
vs the gay porn site. http://www.overcockers.co.uk/
Or at least it used to be years ago when i made an accidental typo infront of my boss at the time:/
At least he did see the honest mistake and saw the funny side of it
Heh. I think the site in question was adslguide.org.uk or something. The porn site was the same but with co.uk or.com or something more usual. This was about ten years ago, the site seems to have adslguide.com now, no idea if the porn site is still around.
Isn't passing personal information out for Europe without expressed permission a breach of the Data Protection Act? Though lets face it, peoples biggest privacy concerns here are their porn viewing habits. Perhaps some porn sites should set up shop that show up in the URL history as stocks and shares or Technology News.
There was once a porn site that had a very similar URL to an ADSL comparison site, presumably for that reason. It was particularly annoying when I was trying to find the ADSL site at work...
One can always decrease the GHz if heat is a problem. SSD is perfect for VST storage, and again silent and durable.
But having said all that, I can't see why it isn't possible to interpret a VST even without a full blown OS.
Depends what dependencies it has. If the DLL wants to create a pretty picture of a PPG Wave you'd have to at least stub most of the GDI subsystem. The fun part is when they've designed it badly so that the parameters can only be controlled by clicking on it, so to make those work you'd have to have the mouse, keyboard and screen. As for reducing the clock frequency, that SM Pro thing has a 1GHz processor, probably for that reason. You could probably run that nice and cool, but it's going to eat into your polyphony and complexity before it starts to drop out and stutter. That said, the V-machine is cheap enough for you to buy a bunch and dedicate them.
You mention about 'installing' the VST, but I know of many VSTs which are just single files and work off the bat (they're not even zipped up).
Before giving up on the whole idea I bought two VSTs, Lounge Lizard and the Waldorf PPG Wave, and came close to buying M-Tron. (Now replaced by the Triton and a MicroWave respectively - I use a PC for the 'Tron which boots DOS off a CF card and runs a sample playback engine I wrote a few years ago. Fun times.). While all of these are implemented as a Windows DLL (M-tron probably has a bunch of datafiles too), you have to run InstallShield to get them out and in the case of Lounge Lizard, you can't then copy it onto another machine because of the copy protection (I'm rather curious how SM Pro worked around that, maybe they eased off the protection..?).
That's a far more reasonable price, and they seem to have done away with the HDD, which is also good. Looks like they've done the linux approach like MUSE did, and as you say, not all VSTs are liable to work on it as a result.
If I hadn't given up on the whole VST thing and gone all-hardware, I'd definitely look at getting one.
Maybe you can tell me though why keyboard manufacturers haven't already done this. Whatever the OS it runs on (or maybe they can create their own mini OS inside the keyboard?),
I'm not a keyboard manufacturer so I can only make an educated guess, but to put it bluntly, your question is basically the same as "Why can't I run my old VB6 application on an iPad?".
The long answer: From what I do know, most keyboards are based around cheap embedded CPUs, and maybe half a gig of flash or ROM at most for the OS and waveforms. The basic design doesn't have to change very much over the product's lifespan as the components generally have long production lives. It's cheap to mass-produce, it runs cool without putting out too much heat and it doesn't need a fan. In short, it's an embedded system.
For example, the Triton uses a Hitachi SH3 and a bunch of ASICs to handle the DSP stuff. It's relatively slow to boot, taking about 11 seconds. The Antares ATR-1 has a Motorola 68k or something and IIRC, a SHARC DSP core. It takes a second or so to power up. Like everyone else, they're probably migrating to ARM cores nowadays, but that still won't allow you to run a VST.
Simply put, the way I see it, making a synth that can run a VST is like making an iPad that can run AutoCAD (or the VB6 app) - the only way you can sensibly do it is by turning it from a keyboard (or iPad) into a PC, and thereby negating all its advantages.
In order make something that can run a VST module, you have to have an x86 processor (that probably costs more than the entire Triton motherboard cost to build) and an OS compatible with windows. You have to add a video card and a screen so that the user can install and use the VST (so the keyboard becomes massive, or you have to lug around a monitor with it). You have to have a 500W power supply (Triton Extreme draws 38W), a fan and a hard disk that breaks when the roadie knocks it over, or an even more expensive SSD. You have to deal with installing windows. You have to redesign the entire motherboard each time Intel, AMD or VIA discontinue the processor. You have to live with Microsoft discontinuing the OS. By the looks, it took OpenLabs about three years to deal with losing XP. MUSE seem to have sidestepped that by using linux and WINE, but their system won't work with every VST.
Maybe now that you can get a netbook and a 7" screen at low cost, that kind of technology will become easier to integrate into something the size of a Triton, but it's not really a future I look forward to. I want to be able to turn it on and turn it off at will. I don't want to wait minutes for Windows to boot or have it brick itself if I forgot to shut Windows down first.
Are you asking for a keyboard that can run a VST module? Frankly I think having a Windows-based synthesizer is a ghastly idea and a maintenance nightmare (the digital equivalent of lining up a 24-track without a manual), but if you really, really want to do this, I know of two products which will allow it:
The MUSE Receptor/Receptor 2. This runs Linux, and AFAIK seems to be fairly self-maintaining. It's a 19-inch rack module that can run VSTs through some kind of WINE hackery. According to Google it costs approximately $1800, which is why I don't have one. It was too expensive for me even when it was half that price.
Since it's a rack unit, you will of course require a controller keyboard so you can get a nice weighted one with whatever action you prefer. Note that this thing is DRM'd to the hilt, has to be activated and will have to be returned to the manufacturer when the HDD crashes since you can't replace the disk yourself thanks to the DRM, at least according to their website. It is not compatible with all VSTs, or so I have heard.
The OpenLabs Neko, Miko and various others. It looks like most of them are discontinued now that XP has finally been buried, but for $4000-$7000 or so, you can have a brand new model running Windows 7 with a core i3 or i5 inside it. I don't know if it has to be connected to the internet every 90 days to prevent it self-destructing, their website doesn't say.
Frankly, I'd get a netbook and a controller keyboard.
DRI GEM Desktop should work in DOSbox. Not 100% sure about printing, though, I've never tried it. It will definitely break on 64-bit windows though, as they can't run DOS or Win16 applications.
The main reason is that AMD64 doesn't support V86 mode in the 64-bit modes. I'm sure Microsoft could have trapped the exceptions and virtualised them if they really wanted to, but they haven't, so it won't work. At that point you will have to run it under some kind of CPU emulation and it was rumoured a while back that Windows 7 was the last 32-bit Windows. I'm not 100% sure whether WINE will allow for running 16-bit apps under a 64-bit linux kernel.
It would fit with HP paying more - they get the patents and WebOS and they
weren't previously backing a mobile OS.
One slight correction, HP still make the iPaq, which runs Windows Mobile 6. Though arguably that particular mobile OS has come to the end of its piece of string.
Slashdot Mirror
Acorn's then current machine had 128K base.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the Master. Don't think I ever saw one. Pretty much all software was targeted at the 32K models anyway, and AFAIK your extended memory was implemented as swap pages rather than being directly addressable.
The 4 GB barrier was overcome a long time ago on 32 bit systems. The reason people still think its a problem is because Microsoft decided you as a customer shouldnt be able to use more than 4 GB memory on 32-bit since Windows 2000 .
Er, ARM is not an x86 derivative. This new revision does seem to have added some flavour of PAE, but AFAIK 4GB is an absolute limit for all currently-manufactured ARM microprocessors.
I don't know the heat dissipation figures, but I can safely say I have never yet seen an ARM processor with a heatsink. As for power consumption a quick google seems to show that an 800MHz OMAP3 draws around 750mW at full load. This new A15 core is supposedly going to have similar figures.
Unfortunately, the detailed A15 documentation is not available yet, so we're left to speculate over what this means. But at the same time, the supported architecture remains ARMv7 and there is no hint of any major changes on the instruction side. An easy implementation would use a MMU with 40-bit physical addresses to map this amount of memory, but the process size would remain at 4 GiB to avoid any drastic change to the programming model.
Yeah, that's the picture I'm getting from the collection of links provided to my query. A 64-bit address register would have been nice, but it looks more like they're aiming this at virtualisation, e.g. to provide multiple 'instances' of a 4GB address space to several VMs.
32-bit addressing was seriously impressive in 1987, compared to Acorn's then-current machine with 32KB, including video memory. But now even smartphones are starting to come with 512MB, 1GB of memory. Does ARM have a strategy for getting past 4GB?
The real question is why didn't he use DOSBox? He ran Wing Commander 1-4. The first three predate Windows 95, and so use DOS.
Apparently he had some weird collector's edition which was made up of later Windows ports - it may not have included the original DOS versions.
An obvious approach: run apps virtualized. Under KVM say, this would impose a slight overhead but nothing remotely in the ballpark of the overhead imposed by Dalvik
I'm not sure ARM is very easy to virtualise, but I could be wrong - after all, VMware managed it for the x86 in pure software. Supposedly ARM have added some limited virtualisation extensions to the arch now, but they'll only be present on the very latest chips, if that.
They already have Linux running on them; now give us a libc and a widget library and we're off to a great start.
They already have a libc, you can get at it via the NDK.
The snag is that you can't - afaik - run a native application directly, it has to be done via Java/Dalvik and calling the native code via JNI. And also the NDK has no libraries to access the user interface.
If they could just solve those two little problems, you could do fully native GUI application development in C++.
What if we say that our Android devices are running JAndroid, that happens to be very compatible with Java... but of course is not Java...
That's what they did - Android devices run Dalvik, which is actually not compatible with Java at all. However, you can recompile a Java class into a Dalvik class, which is what the SDK does.
To be fair, I did have to do this once. Kubuntu shipped with one that was broken by default, at least on my system.
I always felt that the original levels left something to be desired. In particular the way the level titles had no resemblance to the levels themselves. If it hadn't been for the masses of WAD files out there, it wouldn't really have had much staying power with me.
IMHO he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn, and 'DMBBATH' which while sadly incomplete does try really, really hard to make a hangar that looks like a hangar, a chemical plant that is full of machinery and so on and so forth.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
Now he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
Run your browser from a read-only device, that way you won't ever get stung.
I did the next best thing and installed Xubuntu on an old laptop for browsing. Some of us have to develop on Windows, though. Unfortunately.
And site owners and advertisers wonder why users go to such extremes with Adblock plus and NoScript to block ad's.
This. I don't mind advertisements, but after I got stung by a drive-by exploit on a work machine (either on Slashdot itself or one of its linked articles), I went straight for Adblock Plus.
I can't remember what the payload was now - something that installed 'XP Antivirus 2010' or whatever (*) - but at the time, only two AV suites could detect it and the company-mandated AV wasn't among these.
(*) Which gleefully detected 'viruses' in several ARM, MIPS and SH3 binaries before I was able to kill it
Hello? Did nobody READ the summary?
"100,000 kilometers away" ??????
The sun is about 150 MILLION kilometers away from Earth.
Two events occurred on/around the sun's surface, 100'000km apart. Not 100'000km from us.
What just like the valid uk computer hardware store http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ vs the gay porn site. http://www.overcockers.co.uk/ Or at least it used to be years ago when i made an accidental typo infront of my boss at the time :/
At least he did see the honest mistake and saw the funny side of it
Heh. I think the site in question was adslguide.org.uk or something. The porn site was the same but with co.uk or .com or something more usual. This was about ten years ago, the site seems to have adslguide.com now, no idea if the porn site is still around.
Isn't passing personal information out for Europe without expressed permission a breach of the Data Protection Act? Though lets face it, peoples biggest privacy concerns here are their porn viewing habits. Perhaps some porn sites should set up shop that show up in the URL history as stocks and shares or Technology News.
Anna.Techsupport032a2.jpg, Anna.Techsupport032a3.jpg
There was once a porn site that had a very similar URL to an ADSL comparison site, presumably for that reason. It was particularly annoying when I was trying to find the ADSL site at work...
One can always decrease the GHz if heat is a problem. SSD is perfect for VST storage, and again silent and durable.
But having said all that, I can't see why it isn't possible to interpret a VST even without a full blown OS.
Depends what dependencies it has. If the DLL wants to create a pretty picture of a PPG Wave you'd have to at least stub most of the GDI subsystem. The fun part is when they've designed it badly so that the parameters can only be controlled by clicking on it, so to make those work you'd have to have the mouse, keyboard and screen. As for reducing the clock frequency, that SM Pro thing has a 1GHz processor, probably for that reason. You could probably run that nice and cool, but it's going to eat into your polyphony and complexity before it starts to drop out and stutter. That said, the V-machine is cheap enough for you to buy a bunch and dedicate them.
You mention about 'installing' the VST, but I know of many VSTs which are just single files and work off the bat (they're not even zipped up).
Before giving up on the whole idea I bought two VSTs, Lounge Lizard and the Waldorf PPG Wave, and came close to buying M-Tron. (Now replaced by the Triton and a MicroWave respectively - I use a PC for the 'Tron which boots DOS off a CF card and runs a sample playback engine I wrote a few years ago. Fun times.).
While all of these are implemented as a Windows DLL (M-tron probably has a bunch of datafiles too), you have to run InstallShield to get them out and in the case of Lounge Lizard, you can't then copy it onto another machine because of the copy protection (I'm rather curious how SM Pro worked around that, maybe they eased off the protection..?).
That's a far more reasonable price, and they seem to have done away with the HDD, which is also good. Looks like they've done the linux approach like MUSE did, and as you say, not all VSTs are liable to work on it as a result.
If I hadn't given up on the whole VST thing and gone all-hardware, I'd definitely look at getting one.
Maybe you can tell me though why keyboard manufacturers haven't already done this. Whatever the OS it runs on (or maybe they can create their own mini OS inside the keyboard?),
I'm not a keyboard manufacturer so I can only make an educated guess, but to put it bluntly, your question is basically the same as "Why can't I run my old VB6 application on an iPad?".
The long answer: From what I do know, most keyboards are based around cheap embedded CPUs, and maybe half a gig of flash or ROM at most for the OS and waveforms. The basic design doesn't have to change very much over the product's lifespan as the components generally have long production lives. It's cheap to mass-produce, it runs cool without putting out too much heat and it doesn't need a fan. In short, it's an embedded system.
For example, the Triton uses a Hitachi SH3 and a bunch of ASICs to handle the DSP stuff. It's relatively slow to boot, taking about 11 seconds. The Antares ATR-1 has a Motorola 68k or something and IIRC, a SHARC DSP core. It takes a second or so to power up. Like everyone else, they're probably migrating to ARM cores nowadays, but that still won't allow you to run a VST.
Simply put, the way I see it, making a synth that can run a VST is like making an iPad that can run AutoCAD (or the VB6 app) - the only way you can sensibly do it is by turning it from a keyboard (or iPad) into a PC, and thereby negating all its advantages.
In order make something that can run a VST module, you have to have an x86 processor (that probably costs more than the entire Triton motherboard cost to build) and an OS compatible with windows. You have to add a video card and a screen so that the user can install and use the VST (so the keyboard becomes massive, or you have to lug around a monitor with it). You have to have a 500W power supply (Triton Extreme draws 38W), a fan and a hard disk that breaks when the roadie knocks it over, or an even more expensive SSD. You have to deal with installing windows. You have to redesign the entire motherboard each time Intel, AMD or VIA discontinue the processor. You have to live with Microsoft discontinuing the OS. By the looks, it took OpenLabs about three years to deal with losing XP. MUSE seem to have sidestepped that by using linux and WINE, but their system won't work with every VST.
Maybe now that you can get a netbook and a 7" screen at low cost, that kind of technology will become easier to integrate into something the size of a Triton, but it's not really a future I look forward to. I want to be able to turn it on and turn it off at will. I don't want to wait minutes for Windows to boot or have it brick itself if I forgot to shut Windows down first.
Correction: the Muse is $2600 - it is £1700 in British Pounds.
Are you asking for a keyboard that can run a VST module? Frankly I think having a Windows-based synthesizer is a ghastly idea and a maintenance nightmare (the digital equivalent of lining up a 24-track without a manual), but if you really, really want to do this, I know of two products which will allow it:
The MUSE Receptor/Receptor 2. This runs Linux, and AFAIK seems to be fairly self-maintaining. It's a 19-inch rack module that can run VSTs through some kind of WINE hackery. According to Google it costs approximately $1800, which is why I don't have one. It was too expensive for me even when it was half that price.
Since it's a rack unit, you will of course require a controller keyboard so you can get a nice weighted one with whatever action you prefer. Note that this thing is DRM'd to the hilt, has to be activated and will have to be returned to the manufacturer when the HDD crashes since you can't replace the disk yourself thanks to the DRM, at least according to their website. It is not compatible with all VSTs, or so I have heard.
The OpenLabs Neko, Miko and various others. It looks like most of them are discontinued now that XP has finally been buried, but for $4000-$7000 or so, you can have a brand new model running Windows 7 with a core i3 or i5 inside it. I don't know if it has to be connected to the internet every 90 days to prevent it self-destructing, their website doesn't say.
Frankly, I'd get a netbook and a controller keyboard.
DRI GEM Desktop should work in DOSbox. Not 100% sure about printing, though, I've never tried it. It will definitely break on 64-bit windows though, as they can't run DOS or Win16 applications.
The main reason is that AMD64 doesn't support V86 mode in the 64-bit modes. I'm sure Microsoft could have trapped the exceptions and virtualised them if they really wanted to, but they haven't, so it won't work. At that point you will have to run it under some kind of CPU emulation and it was rumoured a while back that Windows 7 was the last 32-bit Windows. I'm not 100% sure whether WINE will allow for running 16-bit apps under a 64-bit linux kernel.
Things like Oblivion tend not to run inside a VM very well.
It would fit with HP paying more - they get the patents and WebOS and they weren't previously backing a mobile OS.
One slight correction, HP still make the iPaq, which runs Windows Mobile 6. Though arguably that particular mobile OS has come to the end of its piece of string.