| I assume, given that Avid owns Digidesign, you have already asked them!
The short answer is Yes - lots. BUT, they are 'development systems' for
the most part, and usually come with a hefty price tag. I have one such,
for the Motorola 56K (the chip used by not only Digidesign, but also
Turtle Beach and several other soundcard manufacturers) - it cost over
£1000 way back in 1992 or whenever, and the development software from
Motorola (assembler, simulator - all excellent) another £350. But this
did not include analog i/o; the card has a NeXT-compatible i/o port, and
it was a major personal triumph to get this correctly interfaced to the
special CDP connector on my Sony PCM!
The big advantage of a development system is that as well allowing you
to communicate directly with the chip and memory (on your terms - you
get to write ALL the software, and blow your own EPROM!), such cards
provide access to all the address, data and clock lines so that,
indeed, you could chain several of them - possibly even with direct pin
to pin connections. The hard part would be writing all the code to get
them all cooperating with each other! It also has to be said that
connecting DSP's this way does require you to be ready to study clock
diagrams, chip manuals, understand the basics of digital logic
circuitry, and so on - this is all serious engineering territory.
An increasingly common type of development card is one that serves as
a backplane, supporting multiple DSP plug-in modules. In such cases, an
analog i/o module is usually available. Again, not cheap.
You can now get very inexpensive 'evaluation kits' from most DSP
manufacturers (notably Motorola, TI and Analog), but these are usually
external boards connected to the PC via a parallel port, rather than
internal ISA/PCI cards (so no Windows MM drivers!); they also don't have
generous amounts of memory. The good news is they mostly do have
analogue i/o; the bad news is that you can't assume it will be 16bit.
The essential data and clock signals probably are available on
J-connectors, but again, you will have to program everything, and
probably build a few simple glue-logic circuits to link them up.
An obvious alternative is to get the Digidesign AudioMedia III, or one
of the Turtle Beach cards (eg the Pinnacle), and register with the
manufacturer as a developer. They would supply you with a Software
Development Kit (SDK), and vital hardware information; you would also
need to get the reference manuals for the DSP chip too, and a dsp
assembler if they don't supply one with the SDK. I have not seen these
cards closely enough to know if it is possible to link data pins, as
well as clock pins. Even if this is the case, unless the capability has
been designed in from the outset, and directly supported with their SDK,
you are going to have to program them the hard way.
An upcoming possibility is the Analog Csound card, using the seriously
powerful SHARC floating-point DSP (available for now only to
developers), but I have no detailed info on the hardware yet, and the
few web links I did have are no longer active. I have heard a possibly
scurrilous rumour that the data lines are NOT accessible externally
(despite the fact that the SHARC has several sets of them!). Probably
those on this list who know lots about that card will set me right on
that...
So the other short answer, if you want an off-the-shelf Windows
plug-n-play system - I don't know of any.
I should have asked earlier - what applications do you have in mind for
your dsp farm? Anything actually involving Csound?
Also try the music-dsp list:
music-dsp@shoko.calarts.edu
If you do get a satisfactory answer from anywhere, please let me know!
Richard Dobson
Jim Ravan wrote:
> I am just getting my feet wet in the Wintel world. I was wondering if
> there were manufuacturers of DSP boards for Wintel hardware? I'm
> searching around the Web looking for the equivalent of a Digidesign.
> That is, I'd like to be able to put more than 1 DSP board in my Wintel
>
> box and have them intercommunicate sample data a la Digi's TDM.
>
> regards,
> -jim
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