What a remarkable, impressionable and smart man Glenn Keller is. Anybody who played an important part to bring the Amiga to life warrants the respect of every Amiga enthusiasts respect and admiration.
Glenn Keller: One of the most polite persona within the Amiga development universe. Guru Medic: Thanks for catching him and thanks for the interview! And thanks for not asking stupid questions, but relevant ones!
Thank you so much for the kind words Spring. Yeah, we just caught him after a presentation and weren't really prepared for an in-depth interview, but Anthony did a great job winging it on the fly!
@@TheGuruMeditation It's great to see these interviews, helps shed light on the behind the scenes of what went on then, so it's not someday lost. Thank you.
That's what I call a great interview - the interviewer doesn't interrupt and asks relevant questions and no fancy camera work or added sound effects. A pleasure to watch and listen.
Glenn has defined the sound of my life. I played a lot of Amiga games as a kid and today I'm involved in the demo scene creating songs in protracker 🙂 Thank you and thank you Glenn 🙂
I wish I had a laser to laser "Design by Glenn Keller" onto every Paula chip. Thanks to this man we were able to enjoy the wonderful AMIGA music. Thank you
Back in the days in demo scene i was much in music and stuff. I can say that mr Keller defined my life... thank you for that. I will always have great respect for people like Glenn Keller. Big respect.
The Guru Meditation I thank Glenn Keller for his chip! It got me started in the house music and tracker scene. Still loving the 8 bit sample sounds. The Amiga was the machine that started hardcore house in the Netherlands.
really great interview thanks , its not easy to put in words how interesting it is to hear from these lords of the dark arts, could never have imagined getting this kind of access back in the past. the whole thing from the ground up really was an art that we shared in, every day that passes it just seams all the more amazing. cheers
bastardtubeuser aw man thanks for the super kind words. Agreed. Back then we never imagined talking to these legends let alone interviewing them. Really appreciate your comment. We plan to do more interviews like this in the future when we cross paths with these great engineers
The Amiga's sound capabilities were light years ahead of the time in 1985, but I do wish that they had been updated for later Amigas. Four channels just wasn't enough, and the lack of panning capabilities was really hard to work with. Six to eight channels each with at least three point panning would have been amazing!
humm i wish people would make up their minds 4 channels 2 channels oh yeah do u know that pc =mac people say they had 32 channels when they have 1 bit sound.. Also , creative was sued .i know I was there. They said they where 32bit ,,they still use the same chip its 32voices or 1bit. Funny ,pc=mac lie by giving themselves higher specs... ,but Amiga or maybe so called Amiga community belittles the Amiga ,,,illumanti influence who knows david pleasance ,and rj influence yes
okay yeah this is like 2 years ago, but I'm a noob to this and I'm realizing the genius of Anthony being the person interviewing this Amiga engineer. It's awesome
Through the absolutely wonderful work Glen and many other Commodore/Amiga engineers were able to put together, they were able to inspire so many young, would be engineers to broaden their horizons. Me being very glad to be one of them... Oh, and also would like to thank you guys for your efforts to bring us this footage :-)
Wow, that is great to hear! Thank you TheFanGoth! Awesome that the Amiga and its engineers inspired you to become a hardware engineer. It inspired me to get into the creative and video field. It is an absolutely special machine that inspired a great many people in all walks of life. Thanks for the awesome comment. Really appreciate it! -- Bill
Thank you for this interview - and thank you Mr. Keller and team for the genius creation. Kind of expected him to be named Paul, but Glenn is just fine! :)
Yes, we would like to do some more in-depth interviews in the future. If you want more Glenn you can listen to Adam's podcast: soundcloud.com/remotelyinterested/rip-16-glenn-keller-chip-design-camera-sensors-micro-electronics
That really fantastic, thanks! But that podcast name prefix made my heart stop for a while... then I decoded it ;) I really appreciate what you are doing. Looking forward listen more of interviews.
What a great guy, see you at amiga made a product that was so far ahead of its time, most could not even figure just how much more powerful it was. I think people like the AMIGA because it says how it should be done. I remember pulling down the screens to change apps being blown away how lag less it was. 2020 and everything else still lags. Amiga pull down screen to next app is faster than anything else I have ever see or used.
Great job on the interview! We don't hear much about Glenn Keller, but I spent some time awhile ago getting closer to Paula and even traded a couple emails with Glenn once I tracked him down. Glenn seems like a great guy, and I think interviews like this really help round out the material online. This makes me want to go to VCF in 2019!
Yes, he is an incredibly nice person. It was a pleasure spending time with him all weekend. He is a class act. Love your handle BTW. I live in in Tarrytown right next to Sleepy Hollow, NY. -- Bill
I had always been fascinated by the unique sound of the Paula chip, so I hooked my A1200 to an oscilloscope to look at the waveforms. Amazingly, you can see the cap charging and discharging patterns on the output (~50KHz if I remember correctly), and the way the two left and two right channels interfere with each other. Interesting stuff you don't see on modern audio chips and doesn't get emulated. I can only imagine what it was like to be one of the early pioneers working in the wild west in the days of POKEY, SID, Paula, etc.. 8)
Waccoon Wow that is neat! Didn't realize that. Thanks for the comment Waccoon. Yeah it must have been amazing bring one of these pioneers. The ironic thing is that they didn't even realize just how important and long lasting their work would be. Also the Paula chip didn't change much all throughout the Amiga's life span. It is a great design.
Thanks so much Anthony! Really glad you enjoyed it. Yes I think the AAA is the holy grail for people who loved and still love the Amiga. It would have been amazing. -- Bill
@@TheGuruMeditation just out of interest, why can't it still be made as a passion project and as an indie handheld, with the true limitations of the AAA hombre chipset. And sold for the 40th anniversary of Amigas debut and see how many program games for it
@@marcozolo3536 In that case it would have to be called something other than an Amiga. Just like A-EON had to call it an A-EON X5000. It would be a cool project, but a heck of a lot of work and massive cost for a hobby project. And what software would use the Hombre hardware after you go through the trouble of manufacturing it? In theory it would be a cool project, but it isn't practical. I can't see anyone doing it just as a "what if"
Great interview! Paula was fundamentally different from SID so I wonder whether Glenn was "gently nudged away" from synthesis and towards PCM sample playback by someone (maybe Jay) at Amiga who had amazing foresight. Why try to synthesise any sound - we just need to be able to play it back! I bet SID chips were dirt cheap back then - Paula plus 2 SIDs (one left, one right) would have been a dream come true!
Thanks Jamie! Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah the hardcore chiptune guys would take a synth chip like the SID over PCM chip any day, but hearing them together would be amazing! Also, back then I didn't really appreciate the difference between them, I just thought the Amiga just sounded better with amazing music and those digitized voices were to die for. I used to use a Perfect Sound module to make my own recordings. It was incredible. Amiga still sounds great today but I respect the syth chips more than I did back then. I have heard some c64's with 2 SIDs for stereo and it is really cool. Thanks again!
Great times! Proud owner of 7 working Commodore machines from C16 to Amiga. I bought a sound sampler for my A500+ in '92 - can't remember the make and model and it's long gone, but I felt like I was Deadmau5 back then. Spent crazy amounts of time on OctaMED lol. I use FLStudio (aka Fruity Loops) on my PC every once in a while - don't know what I'm doing but I know it wouldn't exist without the Amiga in it's history...
You have to consider that at the time the architecture decisions were made for the Amiga custom chips, the engineers could not predict the machine would later be manufactured by Commodore.
Digital audio was something people paid good money for, as it allowed processing digital audio - from a hardware standpoint, digital audio fit neatly into the DMA architecture that was there to offload the CPU just like what North & South Bridge would become in PC much later. With that, they could offer this feature without any processing penalty, unlike sound cards where you had to transfer and buffer the audio, which would take until about 2003 to overcome in consumer PCs. By contrast, it would be very easy to connect an analog sound chip to e.g. the parallel port and have it play sounds without delay. So he wasn't "gently nudged away" from putting in an analog sound chip; Jay wanted to offer this for free sound card feature as part of the DMA architecture, and consequently "Amiga was Multimedia before Multimedia was cool" ;)
It would be amazing to locate the AAA chipset and/or the designs, or, if that's not possible, a detailed description of them, to then build the next generation Amiga they had planned for the world. Long live the Amiga.
Thanks Glenn! I was stationed in the Bay area from 83 till 91 when I was in the Navy, (5 years on the USS Enterprise and 2.5 years on shore duty.. in Alameda ).
A seriously underrated soundchip. Despite having only 4 channels, it produced a great sound. Really performed well up to about 1993 - when it did start to get seriously overtaken by the Atari Falcon, the Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes and some of the new soundcards for the PC. One of the big mistakes that Commodore made was not upgrading it when the AGA chipset came out.
It's a shame it's only now that I've learned the name of the Man behind Paula. And too bad Paula was all to be had - I craved so much for 16-bit sound in the 1990s... Nonetheless, the Amiga proved to be a wonderful tool to express oneself, making me spent countless days and nights on messing with various trackers. Kudos to Mr Keller who made it all possible.
Love my PC but they never did have personality. Amigas do! Seems like that's what people are craving today and that fuels the scene. Windows 10 hates and spies on the user and the blowback is pushing many of us back to our old computers. Thank you for the interview!!!
Well said and agreed! The other interesting thing for us is to meet the people behind our favorite machines. They have great personalities and you can feel that in their creations. They we computers created by passionate people vs. large corporate committees.
Commodore was one of those companies where you look at the technical people and say, "dang, he's smart", but when you look at the people in charge you just shake your head in disappointment.
Fascinating insight into how Paula and subsequent technologies came about from one of the designers. I'd have offered the guy a seat for doing an interview, it's more relaxed including for those watching.
Cool. Glad you enjoyed it. All of us had been sitting on the panel for the past few hours so I think we wanted to stretch out legs, but point well taken. Will certainly consider that in the future. Thanks for the feedback. -- Bill
The Amiga 1200 was really the first computer back in 1996 that I produced my first ever computer sequenced composition/song with, using Octamed Soundstudio .It was recorded to my cassette deck, and it was all sample based and programmed from the qwerty keyboard. Today I'm producing 150 track + orchestral trance filmscore music which you can listen to here soundcloud.com/scott-moncrieff-1 . My A1200 is still working today and lives in my studio where I play the amazing Super Stardust AGA. :-) Essentially the Amiga was the birth place to let my musical endeavors thrive..
Glad you like it. We were going for an informal conversational vibe. The problem with sitting him down is once you do that if feels like you want to get the lighting perfect and have the camera on a tripod. Since we were there to be on the panel vs. shoot a video I just threw the camera in my bag and didn't bring any lights or even a tripod so figured we would just keep it relaxed. But Skyhawk's comment is helpful. We actually do have a few episodes coming up with proper sit-down interviews. In this situation I feel that it could go either way. Personally the standing doesn't bother me, but I really do appreciate all the feedback. We want to make the best videos possible for you guys! -- Bill
I've really enjoyed this excellent interview, thanks for sharing. However I wish I hear opinions of original Amiga designers of current NG Amiga projects.
Great Zool! Thanks for the kind words. Glad you enjoyed it. That would be a good question to ask them. From my experience speaking to may of them - it seems that they are surprised that people are still interested in Amiga. -- Bill
Wouldn't it be cool if someone with the smarts got access to the original AAA chipset design and continued work on it and got it made up in an FPGA or something. Anything seems possible these days. Great interview there guys.
I think from a historical standpoint it would be cool, but I know there are two bug hurdles. one is as Glen points out, that they had just gotten to silicon and they would have had to start debugging it then. That is work that would have to be done on the designs even in FPGA. Following that, people would have to write software to actually start to use that chipset. I'd love to see it in action even knowing that AAA by now would not be something so advanced. But I think any of us who love Amiga would be super stoked to have an actual working AAA (even an emulated one) chipset machine. Look at the 8-bits. You have people making an FPGA Commodore 65. A system in much the same boat as AAA, but further along in the design process where you had chips complete and much more debugged. The system was near production ready when cancelled. But still we are all looking forward to seeing teh Mega65 and what it can do.
Paula is 40 next year. Just think... If Paula's 14 bit mode was popular in 85, it would have been better than most of the cd players at the time(they very rarely could actually "deal" with all 16 bits at a time back then. Up until oversampling/mash etc). 1984. Before Geldof hit the "big time/charidee" even...
so, if i understand it right, the development of the paula was part of the Lorraine project before it way bought by commodore. so paula was finished before having access to the interna of the SID chip. that is something that is a little bit sad. combining 6 SID voices with a stereo-pan register for each voice with the sampling would have been a very cool thing. also with the memory speed it would have been possible to integrate wavetabe synthesis too. so at the end an enhanced stereo sid plus sampling would have been really awesome. maybe it is time that i do something like that in an fpga version of the sid for the c64/c128. i really enjoy the interviews and lectures from all these commodore and atari guys on youtube. now the history gets much more alive and inspires people much more. and with the possibilities today and cheap fpgas everyone can be a chip designer in his own garage :-)
Thanks! glad you like the interview and you are correct about Paul being designed before having access to the SID. Love your idea and thought. if you ever make that chip please let us know. Would love to see & hear that!
This is something I regret since years: that a dual SID was not integrated in Paula. Now it can be understood because of the schedule of the Lorraine project. A combination of 4xPCM + 6xPSG with the possibility to use the analog filters on all of them would have been a really good combination... Plus adding a 6-voice OPN, but here it's becomes a fantasy, it would have been a great music machine. A simple wavetable synthesis à la NEC PC-Engine could have been interesting too, and very cheap. As you mention, the panning function is a big lack in Paula, sigh.
Wonderful interview! I’ve been trying to write a program to turn on Paula’s channel modulation, AM & FM, but have had no luck with GFA Basic, so going to try assembler next (found a tutorial). Do you know anyone who could help me? Perhaps Paula test tools already exist. Early soundtracker versions (DOC 2-4) have these features but they’re really buggy and only run on Kick 1.2. I’d really like to set a Med module running, and then click on an icon to make all hell break loose with clangy sci-fi sounds :)
Wow what a cool project. I can ask Glen but he is now working on camera sensors and hasn't been involved with Amiga for a while so I don't know how much of his Amiga work he has. But I will ask around
Someone on the English Amiga board helped me with some assembler code. I can now turn on and off amplitude and or frequency modulation. The FM seems a little uncontrollable, but the AM works well, it gives clangy sci fi Dr Who sounds, or, when a high synth note modulates a channel with drums on, very fat sounding cool drum effects. I run Med and then the script and it works fine :) I’m very happy to be able to play around with a very niche, hidden part of Paula’s sound. Yeah 9/10 it’ll sound odd or rubbish, but that 1/10 could be an amazing unique sound.
Hi Bill, I just made another page showing your work over on the Lemon Amiga forums in the General section. I promote your stuff from time to time, usually your interviews, on the Lemon pages, but securing the amazing Glenn Keller on the show this week made me promote you even more. Would you guys be interested doing an interview for Lemon Amiga? If so, just PM me on the forum and I'll send you some questions. :)
oh wow, thank you so much Lifeschool! This is really nice of you. I will go check the LemonAmiga forum and PM you! Sure, would love to do an interview. -- Bill
Isn't it funny. We look to them like Gods almost and they are really just normal people. It is true what he says - "It's just luck how it happened, there are many more amazing engineers that have done great things". Another fantastic insight guys. Thanks.
So true Bumble. Very well said. Although Glenn is extremely humble. I think he is more special than he gives himself credit for and Paula wouldn't be the same without him.
Even when Paula was technically surpassed by 16-bit sound in the PC, I generally preferred the Amiga sound, it had a great quality to it. Has, I should say; I still enjoy it through emulation.
Really great interview with a very likeable man! I don't know if I understand the following passage correctly, as I'm not a native speaker: "it only had 8 bit period and no pulse modulation" (9:58). What does Keller mean by that in concrete terms? The final design also only had 8 bit and what, if not PCM, should have been used as the "output format"?
Ok, I hope I figured out a bit by myself. "8 bit period" should refer to the AUDxPER registers, that define the sampling period and hence the actual playback frequency of a sample (they have 16 bit in the final design). The concept of variable sampling frequency was new to me even though it's quite logical and resource-efficient. But what about "no pulse modulation"? 🤔
The pulse modulation seems to refer to the actual (strange) D/A conversion that PAULA uses. As far as I understood, it outputs voltage pulses whose voltage is linear to the difference between two samples. If anyone has more detailed information on how this works and/or what this method is called in the literature, I would be grateful for any comments.
The "flicker" of Amiga NTSC/PAL output was more a "problem" of display then anything else. It was (for me at least) one of the greatness of the Amiga line, the PAL (50 hz) output, and the awesome hardware/software combination that could actually display different resolutions on one single screen. But anyway as far as audio they never changed audio part of the Paula right? it was until the end pretty much the same 8 bit audio (but with a different filter in the end as I remember). The C64 got some real squeeze at the software department with the audio (sampling, and 4 channel stuff) and just before I left the Amiga AHI (MED Soundstudio) got 14 bit audio with almost the same technics (as I remember it) as with the C64... Volume register and so on...
Woo-hoo! Thanks so much SledgeFox. I hope you enjoy the channel. We try to make at least one video a month and we have so much planned we'll be going at this for years! Appreciate it! -- Bill
The Guru Meditation Thank you for your kind reply, I am looking forward to your next episodes, in the meantime I have plenty to watch! I still have my A-1000 and A-4000/040. Thank you very much!
Again, wonderful video fellas, I actually really enjoy listening to these engineers who wield the rather mystical talent of chip design, fascinating, one day those AAA chipsets and Hombre will be discovered, recently a chap found by looking through, albeit with great difficulty, Ataris archives and found ASIC schematics for the unfinished 'Panther" console...Im curious about the "bell chime in your video title, its so familiar, a fiend and I used to mess around editing Amiga sound fx back in the very early 90's, was it from a demo or a game?
Thank you again Simon! It was a privilege to meet Glenn. He is such a nice guy. I have to try to remember where I got the bell chime from. I am pretty sure our composer JMD integrated it into his awesome track
The best thing that ever happened to Apple was the vendetta between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. Both destroyed each other's companies, leaving the 32-bit field clear for the Macintosh.
I would assume that the chips in the 3DO were not clocked slower due to the clock speed limitation of the wires in the breadboard chip prototypes, and that the prototype "chips" ran slower than the actual, final chips. Or did the chips end up running at the same limited speed of the prototype versions? On the Amiga, AFAIK, the prototypes run at full speed, since the final chips weren't clocked very high. Presumably the same for the Lynx.
That is a good idea. We met him at the FriendUP meeting in Philly, but it wasn't the appropriate time to interview him. We should reach out to him. Thanks. I am editing the Trevor Dickinson video now...
I spoke to him briefly on E-mail recently and he sent detailed Commodore documentation on Hombre. It went down to the register level including how the Blitter would support hardware texture mapping and a built in HP RISC CPU. I'm not sure these documents have been released before.
Oh WOW! That is incredible. Yeah, there were some amazing people in that room and all of them were extremely respectful of Dr. Hepler. Would love to speak with him further. If you ever have the time or inclination, jot down a few questions or topics that you would like to hear about. I don't think we will be able to interview him in the immediate future, but there is no reason why we can't do it some time in the future. My email is bill@thegurumeditation.org if you are interested.
I googled "The Handi" and got nothing on it! Was it top secret? Also, I always wondered why the sound on the Amiga, as awesome as it is, didn't really improve much even after the Amiga 500 came out. Surely the Amiga 2000 warranted a 16 bit, 8 voice sound system, etc. JW3HH
The "Handi" or "Handy" (not sure how they spelled it) is the code name for the Atari Lynx which Glenn worked on with RJ Mical. But some people don't think of electronics when they want a handi ;-) Yes, it is amazing that the Paula chip never really changed much through the lifespan of the Amiga. -- Bill
*is the code name for the Atari Lynx which Glenn worked on with RJ Mical. But some people don't think of electronics when they want a handi ;-)* *LOL!* But, yeah, I know the Hombre chipset had some major changes and improvements to the Amiga's sound, but that was never to be :( JW3HH
That would be great! The Wikipedia page has a lot of info on it and probably even the names of all the guys who worked on it. Maybe they live nearby! (Or would be willing/able to do a Skype/Google Hangout conference interview thingy). JW3HH
super interview :) was nice to see and hear Glenn Keller... it was really great things for 80s. Anyway from today "music" point of view of course SID is 100 times better device than 8bit D/A Paula, because it's real SYNTH. But connection of 2xSID + paula in one device would make really killer music machine... I'm curious why they didn't continue such great synth chip (SID) in next machines after C64. Maybe if Jack Tramiel still would be there... :)
With respect, to say SID is "better" because it is a synth is massively subjective in my opinion. Having had both a C64 (when I was very young) and a series of Amigas (from the age of 11, used regularly until I was 19) - living through those times and with the benefit of hindsight; SID was great, musically interesting and quirky. But the first time I heard well-made sounds coming out of the Amiga it was like a quantum leap forward. Obviously this is my opinion and therefore also massively subjective ( ;) ), but listening to SID music today I think it's great, musical and quirky - however it will always be easily identifiable as "chiptune" music. Whereas I'd argue that with the best examples of Amiga music (e.g. Shadow Of The Beast, Turrican 2) if you took the output and mastered it well, some people might not know they were listening to music from a computer game. This is particularly true of the Turrican 2 intro music, which is like a magnum electronic opus in its own right in my opinion. SID wan't developed further at CBM because designer Bob Yannes quit after the C64 project. According to the Bagnall book, one of the main reasons he (and a lot of other bright young engineers) quit was burnout due to Jack Tramiel's management style (particularly with scheduling and deadlines). This is why CBM ended up "buying in" their next-generation technology (i.e. Amiga); Tramiel's 16-bit home computer project was the Atari ST which used a lot of off-the-shelf parts, including the YM2149 sound chip - which was in many ways a backwards step compared to SID.
turricaned - Thank you for your detailed explanation about SID development. Of course you have right about "new quality of game music" in Amiga. Agreed. But as I wrote - D/A converter togther with SID would be BEST setup for Amiga. I'm not against D/A for drums, pads and many other sounds. Just synth LEAD sounds with big range of filtering, joining oscillators, detuning one of them and many other analog synth features can't be beaten by samples and always will sounds much better (for lead parts, filtered bass parts etc). Of course nothing change that Amiga was amazing BIG STEP in computer history and best "games" home computer these times... I just love anlog synths and I love SID sounds and crazy SID filters :) so I'm still using them in music...
Cheers for the reply. I thought SID was (like the Juno-106) a "hybrid" synth - i.e. digitally-controlled, partially analogue signal path (as opposed to pure analogue). In my opinion, if the Los Gatos Amiga folks were going to put in a synth IC alongside Paula it would probably have been better to have a more modern FM unit (similar to the YM2151 used in arcades) rather than SID, which was showing its age by 1985.
Thank you Turricaned! Yeah I agree. I have the utmost respect for the SID and I love that it is generating its own sounds, but back then I didn't care about that, I just knew the Amiga sounded "better" - obviously subjective. OT - have you heard any stereo SID stuff? It is really great. I heard one fore the first time at VCF. Fun stuff
Back then I had a multisync monitor and would use some odd monitor drivers giving me some really high resolutions that were not standard. I guess my eyes weren't as sensitive as some, as I never had an issue even on interlace (yes I saw the flicker but it really didn't bother me) so even 1280 x 512 was amazing to use when using any number of productivity programs and Ray tracing looked incredible at that resolution.
@@daishi5571 Yeah, the AGA machines had DblNTSC and DblPAL modes that uses scan doubling to get rid of the flicker. I think the max res was 640x1024 in PAL 640x800 in NTSC
Haha... this poor guy looked so guilty when he was saying he didn't use Amiga anymore... screen flickering?! That's the least of the worries! :) We live in a different age. Oh well.
what a luvlie interview with an incredible nice guy. his work paula is for some kind of music still unreached by other dac+. she sounds so fontal - so close. but maybe he doesn't like the style of music =).
Ha ha, well I agree with you. I love listening to MODs from my Amiga through my hi-fi system. It is beautiful. And Glenn is a really nice person. We are so lucky to have been able to spend some time with him. Thanks so much for watching and glad you enjoyed it!
That was surely a big problem - even with the release of the AGA machines. At this time 16 or even 32 channels has been a must. I cant understand until today, why the soundchip (more channels, 44 khz) was not improved. It was the time, a lot of musicians moved to the pc, using 16 up to 32 channels and 16 bit 44 khz samples.
My guess it was because of the notion at Commodore that music played from CD was the future (which for a little while was the norm, until it that concept was abandoned), plus they had to rush the A1200 out the door before xmas 1992. So they just didn't do a new chip and stuck with ol' Paula. The A3000+ did have a DSP, but I think they couldn't agree with AT&T (which did the DSP) about the proper software to make the OS deal with the DSP, so that too was abandoned.
While it would have been nice to have an improved sound chip, the original was still good enough and sounded better than a lot of PC created music, technical specs not withstanding. There were other elements of the Amiga that needed to be improved by that time, but the sound of the Amiga was still enviable in the early 90s when you compare it to consoles of the time.
The Amiga would have beneficiated from having a SID or a dual SID with a 6502, alongside Paula. After all, Paula is only 4 channels 8 bit linear, and only 2 stereo positions, and frequency doesn't go high. It is very limited : the Apple IIGS did much better at the time (1985). 2 years later, in 1987, the Acorn Archimedes provided 8 channels, 8 bit logarithmic, 7 independent stereo positions per channel. The chip (VIDC) can also output sound at a much higher frequency than Paula. The video side of the chip also outperforms the Amiga video capabilities. With the power of the ARM chip and the MEMC chip and overall intelligent architecture of the Acorn Archimedes, an 8 Mhz Archie can do mixing in realtime and play converted S3M tunes up to 32 channels, as demonstrated on my YT channel, and the quality of the audio output is just outstanding. The well designed architecture of the Archimedes allowed easy evolution of the chip to provide 16 bit sound for the RISC PCs, and still maintaining 100% compatability with the 8 bit audio system of the Archies. The video part provided 16 bit and 24 bit screen modes, this time. All these evolutions Commodore never managed to deliver. All in all Acorn was the technological leader, and not Commodore. Gadgets like the Amiga600, without a numeric keypad, and the CD32 are a disgrace. The A1200 has no Akiko chip, and the long boasted DSP was never implemented. Even Atari with its Falcon had better technology at the time.
The Acorn Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga or the Atari ST. But you should be happy to know that RJ Mical and Dave Needle went on - after creating the Epyx Handy/Atari Lynx - to develop the 3DO which used an ARM CPU. Just to cover all bases, the Sharp X68000 was also an amazing computer system in terms of graphics and sound but it too was a lot more expensive than the Amiga or the Atari ST, and almost exclusive to Japan. The Apple IIgs came out after both the Amiga and the Atari ST, and also a lot more expensive than both. It had a WDC 65816 CPU - nearly 100% backwards-compatible compatible with the 6502 - that was gimped Mhz-wise because the Macintosh division didn't want serious next-gen competition from the Apple II division. The Apple IIgs used a fantastic Ensoniq sound chip. Ensoniq was set up by Bob Yannes who created the SID. And that Ensoniq sound chip would've been used in the Atari Panther console had it not been scrapped. The Atari Falcon rocked. Shame Atari Corp didn't get the Falcon040 out the door.
@@TheJeremyHolloway It wasn't. The A305 was actually cheaper than the A1000, and if you want to compare an A500 with an Archimedes, please add the cost of all the expansions you need to add to the A500 to be more or less like an Archie. Truth is that expansions at the time didn't even exist to match the video and sound capabilities of the Archimedes.
these gentlemen KNEW what they were doing while admitting they weren't experts at the time ... and guess what: they created THE best micro computer, ever, TO THIS VERY DAY! while losers like those who own and started money mongering businesses like Micro$oft, barely knew a thing or two about computers and software ... but by selling software licenses of all kinds, they are considered the TOP GUYS in the computer industry! world is a weird place at times, isn't it? so unfair ... no wonder many businesses fail because of either mismanagement (such as it happened to Commodore and killed the Amiga!) or because the people involved aren't very much money oriented and do things simply because they love to do it ...
Yes Amiga was behind PC regarding resolutions. But why? That is the question... bad decisions. I do not blame the developers there. The decisions were done by incompetent managers
That guy had quite the influence in my life. Thanks Glenn, you created something awesome.
What a remarkable, impressionable and smart man Glenn Keller is. Anybody who played an important part to bring the Amiga to life warrants the respect of every Amiga enthusiasts respect and admiration.
He really is an great guy
Glenn Keller: One of the most polite persona within the Amiga development universe.
Guru Medic: Thanks for catching him and thanks for the interview! And thanks for not asking stupid questions, but relevant ones!
Thank you so much for the kind words Spring. Yeah, we just caught him after a presentation and weren't really prepared for an in-depth interview, but Anthony did a great job winging it on the fly!
What an incredible interview, thank you and thank you Glenn Keller.
Thanks so much! So glad you enjoyed it! -- Bill
@@TheGuruMeditation It's great to see these interviews, helps shed light on the behind the scenes of what went on then, so it's not someday lost. Thank you.
That's what I call a great interview - the interviewer doesn't interrupt and asks relevant questions and no fancy camera work or added sound effects. A pleasure to watch and listen.
Cheers! Thank you so much!
Glenn has defined the sound of my life. I played a lot of Amiga games as a kid and today I'm involved in the demo scene creating songs in protracker 🙂
Thank you and thank you Glenn 🙂
Nicely said. Glen is brilliant and a gentleman
I wish I had a laser to laser "Design by Glenn Keller" onto every Paula chip.
Thanks to this man we were able to enjoy the wonderful AMIGA music.
Thank you
really appreciate anyone who contacts these old industry folks to get interviews while we still can. thank you
Thank you!
I like his honesty and humility. A true geek: a genius and yet not arrogant.
Yes, Glen is a true gentleman
Loved the interview and how Glenn shows how glad he is that his amazing chip is so loved and used to this day!
Glenn Jay Keller, thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it Hiro! It was an absolute pleasure to get to spend a little time with Mr. Keller. He is a class act.
Back in the days in demo scene i was much in music and stuff. I can say that mr Keller defined my life... thank you for that. I will always have great respect for people like Glenn Keller. Big respect.
Well said! After meeting him we have even more respect for him because he is an absolute gentleman as well as being brilliant. -- Bill
The Guru Meditation I thank Glenn Keller for his chip!
It got me started in the house music and tracker scene.
Still loving the 8 bit sample sounds. The Amiga was the machine that started hardcore house in the Netherlands.
Excellent! Glenn is a wonderful person. Didn't realize the Amiga played such a large role in the music scene in The Netherlands. That is awesome!
I love it that these engineers / designers get some of the love and attention that they really deserve. Still not enough, but better than 0
9:13 haha love how Glenn is so modest about his work, you can see in the interviewers face how much he is understating.
bastardtubeuser He is very modest. He is a really great person. It was amazing to hang out with him that weekend. He is a class act. Great guy.
really great interview thanks , its not easy to put in words how interesting it is to hear from these lords of the dark arts, could never have imagined getting this kind of access back in the past. the whole thing from the ground up really was an art that we shared in, every day that passes it just seams all the more amazing. cheers
bastardtubeuser aw man thanks for the super kind words. Agreed. Back then we never imagined talking to these legends let alone interviewing them. Really appreciate your comment. We plan to do more interviews like this in the future when we cross paths with these great engineers
The Amiga's sound capabilities were light years ahead of the time in 1985, but I do wish that they had been updated for later Amigas. Four channels just wasn't enough, and the lack of panning capabilities was really hard to work with. Six to eight channels each with at least three point panning would have been amazing!
Totally agree. The sound chip basically stayed the same from the 1000 through the 4000
humm i wish people would make up their minds 4 channels 2 channels oh yeah do u know that pc =mac people say they had 32 channels when they have 1 bit sound.. Also , creative was sued .i know I was there. They said they where 32bit ,,they still use the same chip its 32voices or 1bit. Funny ,pc=mac lie by giving themselves higher specs... ,but Amiga or maybe so called Amiga community belittles the Amiga ,,,illumanti influence who knows david pleasance ,and rj influence yes
okay yeah this is like 2 years ago, but I'm a noob to this and I'm realizing the genius of Anthony being the person interviewing this Amiga engineer. It's awesome
Smarter than Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney on SNL. Of course that was a comedic skit. But the reverence and awe is the same
It is true, Anthony did a great job with very little prep! Go Anthony
Through the absolutely wonderful work Glen and many other Commodore/Amiga engineers were able to put together, they were able to inspire so many young, would be engineers to broaden their horizons. Me being very glad to be one of them... Oh, and also would like to thank you guys for your efforts to bring us this footage :-)
Wow, that is great to hear! Thank you TheFanGoth! Awesome that the Amiga and its engineers inspired you to become a hardware engineer. It inspired me to get into the creative and video field. It is an absolutely special machine that inspired a great many people in all walks of life. Thanks for the awesome comment. Really appreciate it! -- Bill
Great interview. Glenn comes across as a really nice, extremely clever and humble man.
What a humble man! Great job Glenn Keller.
Glenn is such a great person
It was pleasure to witness this conversation. Thank you!
You are welcome! Glad you enjoyed it Kokos! -- Bill
Thank you for this interview - and thank you Mr. Keller and team for the genius creation. Kind of expected him to be named Paul, but Glenn is just fine! :)
Ha ha! Glad you enjoyed the interview Alex. Thanks for watching!
Glenn Keller, what an amazing guy! Thank you for sharing this interview!
Huge respect for Glenn Keller, what a clever guy
For sure! Can't believe that Paula was his first chip. Not only is he brilliant, but he is really down to earth and kind. -- Bill
Thank you Mr. Keller for this amazing chip :D Amazing interview
George Ntavelis he is a great guy. Glad you enjoyed it George!
Absolutely brilliant mind :) I still remember the shock i had when i listened first time to the beautiful sound of my Amiga :)
For the first time I see the guy who enabled me to do a lot of crazy stuff with the audio... R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
Yes! Much respect. I can't believe Paula was the first ship he ever designed. And now he designs image sensors, wow! He is a great guy. -- Bill
And to you to for such interview. I would love to see longer conversation with Mr. Keller if possible.
Yes, we would like to do some more in-depth interviews in the future. If you want more Glenn you can listen to Adam's podcast: soundcloud.com/remotelyinterested/rip-16-glenn-keller-chip-design-camera-sensors-micro-electronics
That really fantastic, thanks! But that podcast name prefix made my heart stop for a while... then I decoded it ;)
I really appreciate what you are doing. Looking forward listen more of interviews.
seekandhide LOL! I agree. Adam has to change that acronym. you certainly haven't been the first person to have that scare!
What a legend. Kudo's to Jay.
yep. And both Jay and Glenn are true geltleman
What a great guy, see you at amiga made a product that was so far ahead of its time, most could not even figure just how much more powerful it was. I think people like the AMIGA because it says how it should be done. I remember pulling down the screens to change apps being blown away how lag less it was. 2020 and everything else still lags. Amiga pull down screen to next app is faster than anything else I have ever see or used.
Very true! Pulling down the screens and multi-tasking really blew me away. It was so far ahead of its time.
What about disclosing the chip design of Paula? We all want to know how ingenious chips work!
Great job on the interview! We don't hear much about Glenn Keller, but I spent some time awhile ago getting closer to Paula and even traded a couple emails with Glenn once I tracked him down. Glenn seems like a great guy, and I think interviews like this really help round out the material online. This makes me want to go to VCF in 2019!
Thanks Keith! Yes Glenn is a really great guy and now designs camera sensors. He is amazing. We will do more interviews in the future.
@@TheGuruMeditation I'm sure everyone knows this, but Glenn actually shares the patents on a number of important Amiga ones!
Such a great person, for sure he is.
Yeah, he is a really great guy in addition to being absolutely brilliant! It was a pleasure to spend time with him that weekend. -- Bill
Seems like a lovely guy
Yes, he is an incredibly nice person. It was a pleasure spending time with him all weekend. He is a class act. Love your handle BTW. I live in in Tarrytown right next to Sleepy Hollow, NY. -- Bill
I wonder if he's aware that through some trickery we can coax an effective 14-bits of audio resolution from Paula?
Great question. I don't know. He probably doesn't!
Could listen to this guy for hours
Love this Guy - Gave Birth to the UK Hardcore Scene without even knowing it .
ha ha true! He is such a humble guy.
Amazing interview, great job guys
Thanks Gerul! -- Bill
Excellent video and interview, thanks for sharing that with us!
Thanks so much Roli! Appreciate the kind words very much. It means a lot. Glad you enjoyed it! -- Bill
Thank you Mr.Glenn!
Amazing interview Anthony.
Thanks Vincent! Yeah Anthony did great! -- Bill
I had always been fascinated by the unique sound of the Paula chip, so I hooked my A1200 to an oscilloscope to look at the waveforms. Amazingly, you can see the cap charging and discharging patterns on the output (~50KHz if I remember correctly), and the way the two left and two right channels interfere with each other. Interesting stuff you don't see on modern audio chips and doesn't get emulated. I can only imagine what it was like to be one of the early pioneers working in the wild west in the days of POKEY, SID, Paula, etc.. 8)
Waccoon Wow that is neat! Didn't realize that. Thanks for the comment Waccoon. Yeah it must have been amazing bring one of these pioneers. The ironic thing is that they didn't even realize just how important and long lasting their work would be. Also the Paula chip didn't change much all throughout the Amiga's life span. It is a great design.
Great interview, thanks! I'm editing this, that was a brilliant interview. What a decent, humble man. Would love to have seen the AAA in action.
Thanks so much Anthony! Really glad you enjoyed it. Yes I think the AAA is the holy grail for people who loved and still love the Amiga. It would have been amazing. -- Bill
@@TheGuruMeditation just out of interest, why can't it still be made as a passion project and as an indie handheld, with the true limitations of the AAA hombre chipset. And sold for the 40th anniversary of Amigas debut and see how many program games for it
@@marcozolo3536 you could do it as a passion project, but you couldn't sell it because Cloainto own the rights to the Amiga ROMs
@@TheGuruMeditation but wouldn't an Amiga 5000 use an entirely newer kickstart rom? Just saying
@@marcozolo3536 In that case it would have to be called something other than an Amiga. Just like A-EON had to call it an A-EON X5000. It would be a cool project, but a heck of a lot of work and massive cost for a hobby project. And what software would use the Hombre hardware after you go through the trouble of manufacturing it? In theory it would be a cool project, but it isn't practical. I can't see anyone doing it just as a "what if"
From ocean waves to sound waves - looks like a pretty natural connection to me. :-)
Ha! Good point Amiga Lemming!
Great interview! Paula was fundamentally different from SID so I wonder whether Glenn was "gently nudged away" from synthesis and towards PCM sample playback by someone (maybe Jay) at Amiga who had amazing foresight. Why try to synthesise any sound - we just need to be able to play it back! I bet SID chips were dirt cheap back then - Paula plus 2 SIDs (one left, one right) would have been a dream come true!
Thanks Jamie! Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah the hardcore chiptune guys would take a synth chip like the SID over PCM chip any day, but hearing them together would be amazing! Also, back then I didn't really appreciate the difference between them, I just thought the Amiga just sounded better with amazing music and those digitized voices were to die for. I used to use a Perfect Sound module to make my own recordings. It was incredible. Amiga still sounds great today but I respect the syth chips more than I did back then. I have heard some c64's with 2 SIDs for stereo and it is really cool. Thanks again!
Great times! Proud owner of 7 working Commodore machines from C16 to Amiga. I bought a sound sampler for my A500+ in '92 - can't remember the make and model and it's long gone, but I felt like I was Deadmau5 back then. Spent crazy amounts of time on OctaMED lol. I use FLStudio (aka Fruity Loops) on my PC every once in a while - don't know what I'm doing but I know it wouldn't exist without the Amiga in it's history...
I would rather hear PCM than synthesis like SID anyday - I just think samples for audio work better over anything else in audio.
You have to consider that at the time the architecture decisions were made for the Amiga custom chips, the engineers could not predict the machine would later be manufactured by Commodore.
Digital audio was something people paid good money for, as it allowed processing digital audio - from a hardware standpoint, digital audio fit neatly into the DMA architecture that was there to offload the CPU just like what North & South Bridge would become in PC much later. With that, they could offer this feature without any processing penalty, unlike sound cards where you had to transfer and buffer the audio, which would take until about 2003 to overcome in consumer PCs. By contrast, it would be very easy to connect an analog sound chip to e.g. the parallel port and have it play sounds without delay.
So he wasn't "gently nudged away" from putting in an analog sound chip; Jay wanted to offer this for free sound card feature as part of the DMA architecture, and consequently "Amiga was Multimedia before Multimedia was cool" ;)
It would be amazing to locate the AAA chipset and/or the designs, or, if that's not possible, a detailed description of them, to then build the next generation Amiga they had planned for the world. Long live the Amiga.
Thank you so much for that great interview!!
You are welcome! Glad you enjoyed it MIGs. Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks Glenn! I was stationed in the Bay area from 83 till 91 when I was in the Navy, (5 years on the USS Enterprise and 2.5 years on shore duty.. in Alameda ).
sluggotg Excellent! Thank you for your service! Glenn is not only extremely smart, but a great person
A seriously underrated soundchip. Despite having only 4 channels, it produced a great sound. Really performed well up to about 1993 - when it did start to get seriously overtaken by the Atari Falcon, the Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes and some of the new soundcards for the PC.
One of the big mistakes that Commodore made was not upgrading it when the AGA chipset came out.
It's a shame it's only now that I've learned the name of the Man behind Paula. And too bad Paula was all to be had - I craved so much for 16-bit sound in the 1990s... Nonetheless, the Amiga proved to be a wonderful tool to express oneself, making me spent countless days and nights on messing with various trackers. Kudos to Mr Keller who made it all possible.
It would have been great to see he do a 16 bit chip. He is a smart and great guy. Now he is designing camera sensors for Sigma. Amazing!
Not much people knew but on OCS you already had 14th as long as you had a stronger CPU
Love my PC but they never did have personality. Amigas do! Seems like that's what people are craving today and that fuels the scene. Windows 10 hates and spies on the user and the blowback is pushing many of us back to our old computers. Thank you for the interview!!!
Well said and agreed! The other interesting thing for us is to meet the people behind our favorite machines. They have great personalities and you can feel that in their creations. They we computers created by passionate people vs. large corporate committees.
I believe that Windows PC is a characterless and a soulless humdrum machine
Agreed!
Brilliant interview, so engrossing and informative. Where can you get that Amiga t-shirt from btw? 🙂
Commodore was one of those companies where you look at the technical people and say, "dang, he's smart", but when you look at the people in charge you just shake your head in disappointment.
Fascinating insight into how Paula and subsequent technologies came about from one of the designers. I'd have offered the guy a seat for doing an interview, it's more relaxed including for those watching.
Cool. Glad you enjoyed it. All of us had been sitting on the panel for the past few hours so I think we wanted to stretch out legs, but point well taken. Will certainly consider that in the future. Thanks for the feedback. -- Bill
The Amiga 1200 was really the first computer back in 1996 that I produced my first ever computer sequenced composition/song with, using Octamed Soundstudio .It was recorded to my cassette deck, and it was all sample based and programmed from the qwerty keyboard. Today I'm producing 150 track + orchestral trance filmscore music which you can listen to here soundcloud.com/scott-moncrieff-1 . My A1200 is still working today and lives in my studio where I play the amazing Super Stardust AGA. :-) Essentially the Amiga was the birth place to let my musical endeavors thrive..
Good idea. had not thought of that and there certainly were enough chairs around. Something to keep in mind in the future.
I like this format. It keeps things lively.
Glad you like it. We were going for an informal conversational vibe. The problem with sitting him down is once you do that if feels like you want to get the lighting perfect and have the camera on a tripod. Since we were there to be on the panel vs. shoot a video I just threw the camera in my bag and didn't bring any lights or even a tripod so figured we would just keep it relaxed. But Skyhawk's comment is helpful. We actually do have a few episodes coming up with proper sit-down interviews. In this situation I feel that it could go either way. Personally the standing doesn't bother me, but I really do appreciate all the feedback. We want to make the best videos possible for you guys! -- Bill
I've really enjoyed this excellent interview, thanks for sharing. However I wish I hear opinions of original Amiga designers of current NG Amiga projects.
Great Zool! Thanks for the kind words. Glad you enjoyed it. That would be a good question to ask them. From my experience speaking to may of them - it seems that they are surprised that people are still interested in Amiga. -- Bill
Thank you guys for this good job!
Our pleasure! You are welcome and thanks for the support!
Wouldn't it be cool if someone with the smarts got access to the original AAA chipset design and continued work on it and got it made up in an FPGA or something. Anything seems possible these days. Great interview there guys.
oh man, that would be awesome. Same with the Hombre chipset. They must be somewhere!!! Glad you liked the video. Thanks Aron! -- Bill
I think from a historical standpoint it would be cool, but I know there are two bug hurdles. one is as Glen points out, that they had just gotten to silicon and they would have had to start debugging it then. That is work that would have to be done on the designs even in FPGA. Following that, people would have to write software to actually start to use that chipset. I'd love to see it in action even knowing that AAA by now would not be something so advanced. But I think any of us who love Amiga would be super stoked to have an actual working AAA (even an emulated one) chipset machine. Look at the 8-bits. You have people making an FPGA Commodore 65. A system in much the same boat as AAA, but further along in the design process where you had chips complete and much more debugged. The system was near production ready when cancelled. But still we are all looking forward to seeing teh Mega65 and what it can do.
Definitely agree. Can always dream but didn't even think of the software and debugging aspect of it all.
I'd still love to see it. I'm sure at some point if there was an FPGA emulated AAA, people would debug it and write software for it.
You know you want that Mega 65. Put that baby in your hand!
Paula is 40 next year. Just think... If Paula's 14 bit mode was popular in 85, it would have been better than most of the cd players at the time(they very rarely could actually "deal" with all 16 bits at a time back then. Up until oversampling/mash etc). 1984. Before Geldof hit the "big time/charidee" even...
So true. Paula was so far ahead of her time and didn't really change throughout the Amiga's lifespan
I owe to this man
He is great !
Great interview - thanks for sharing!
You are welcome! Thanks for the kind words Scotland! -- Bill
Sharing is where it's all at!
so, if i understand it right, the development of the paula was part of the Lorraine project before it way bought by commodore. so paula was finished before having access to the interna of the SID chip. that is something that is a little bit sad.
combining 6 SID voices with a stereo-pan register for each voice with the sampling would have been a very cool thing. also with the memory speed it would have been possible to integrate wavetabe synthesis too. so at the end an enhanced stereo sid plus sampling would have been really awesome. maybe it is time that i do something like that in an fpga version of the sid for the c64/c128.
i really enjoy the interviews and lectures from all these commodore and atari guys on youtube. now the history gets much more alive and inspires people much more. and with the possibilities today and cheap fpgas everyone can be a chip designer in his own garage :-)
Thanks! glad you like the interview and you are correct about Paul being designed before having access to the SID. Love your idea and thought. if you ever make that chip please let us know. Would love to see & hear that!
This is something I regret since years: that a dual SID was not integrated in Paula. Now it can be understood because of the schedule of the Lorraine project.
A combination of 4xPCM + 6xPSG with the possibility to use the analog filters on all of them would have been a really good combination... Plus adding a 6-voice OPN, but here it's becomes a fantasy, it would have been a great music machine. A simple wavetable synthesis à la NEC PC-Engine could have been interesting too, and very cheap.
As you mention, the panning function is a big lack in Paula, sigh.
Wonderful interview! I’ve been trying to write a program to turn on Paula’s channel modulation, AM & FM, but have had no luck with GFA Basic, so going to try assembler next (found a tutorial).
Do you know anyone who could help me? Perhaps Paula test tools already exist. Early soundtracker versions (DOC 2-4) have these features but they’re really buggy and only run on Kick 1.2.
I’d really like to set a Med module running, and then click on an icon to make all hell break loose with clangy sci-fi sounds :)
Wow what a cool project. I can ask Glen but he is now working on camera sensors and hasn't been involved with Amiga for a while so I don't know how much of his Amiga work he has. But I will ask around
Someone on the English Amiga board helped me with some assembler code.
I can now turn on and off amplitude and or frequency modulation.
The FM seems a little uncontrollable, but the AM works well, it gives clangy sci fi Dr Who sounds, or, when a high synth note modulates a channel with drums on, very fat sounding cool drum effects. I run Med and then the script and it works fine :)
I’m very happy to be able to play around with a very niche, hidden part of Paula’s sound.
Yeah 9/10 it’ll sound odd or rubbish, but that 1/10 could be an amazing unique sound.
Good morning ! cool !
Thanks!
Gracias Amigos !
Good morning! Glad you enjoyed!
Awesome work guys!! Superb interview. :)
Thanks! So glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for letting us know! -- Bill
Hi Bill, I just made another page showing your work over on the Lemon Amiga forums in the General section. I promote your stuff from time to time, usually your interviews, on the Lemon pages, but securing the amazing Glenn Keller on the show this week made me promote you even more. Would you guys be interested doing an interview for Lemon Amiga? If so, just PM me on the forum and I'll send you some questions. :)
oh wow, thank you so much Lifeschool! This is really nice of you. I will go check the LemonAmiga forum and PM you! Sure, would love to do an interview. -- Bill
Isn't it funny. We look to them like Gods almost and they are really just normal people.
It is true what he says - "It's just luck how it happened, there are many more amazing engineers that have done great things".
Another fantastic insight guys. Thanks.
So true Bumble. Very well said. Although Glenn is extremely humble. I think he is more special than he gives himself credit for and Paula wouldn't be the same without him.
Even when Paula was technically surpassed by 16-bit sound in the PC, I generally preferred the Amiga sound, it had a great quality to it. Has, I should say; I still enjoy it through emulation.
Really great interview with a very likeable man!
I don't know if I understand the following passage correctly, as I'm not a native speaker: "it only had 8 bit period and no pulse modulation" (9:58).
What does Keller mean by that in concrete terms? The final design also only had 8 bit and what, if not PCM, should have been used as the "output format"?
Ok, I hope I figured out a bit by myself. "8 bit period" should refer to the AUDxPER registers, that define the sampling period and hence the actual playback frequency of a sample (they have 16 bit in the final design).
The concept of variable sampling frequency was new to me even though it's quite logical and resource-efficient.
But what about "no pulse modulation"? 🤔
The pulse modulation seems to refer to the actual (strange) D/A conversion that PAULA uses. As far as I understood, it outputs voltage pulses whose voltage is linear to the difference between two samples.
If anyone has more detailed information on how this works and/or what this method is called in the literature, I would be grateful for any comments.
The "flicker" of Amiga NTSC/PAL output was more a "problem" of display then anything else. It was (for me at least) one of the greatness of the Amiga line, the PAL (50 hz) output, and the awesome hardware/software combination that could actually display different resolutions on one single screen.
But anyway as far as audio they never changed audio part of the Paula right? it was until the end pretty much the same 8 bit audio (but with a different filter in the end as I remember).
The C64 got some real squeeze at the software department with the audio (sampling, and 4 channel stuff) and just before I left the Amiga AHI (MED Soundstudio) got 14 bit audio with almost the same technics (as I remember it) as with the C64... Volume register and so on...
Yes I believe the Paula sound remained pretty much unchanged throughout the Amiga's life cycle
Great Interview, you got a new subscriber, thank you very much!
Woo-hoo! Thanks so much SledgeFox. I hope you enjoy the channel. We try to make at least one video a month and we have so much planned we'll be going at this for years! Appreciate it! -- Bill
The Guru Meditation Thank you for your kind reply, I am looking forward to your next episodes, in the meantime I have plenty to watch! I still have my A-1000 and A-4000/040. Thank you very much!
Again, wonderful video fellas, I actually really enjoy listening to these engineers who wield the rather mystical talent of chip design, fascinating, one day those AAA chipsets and Hombre will be discovered, recently a chap found by looking through, albeit with great difficulty, Ataris archives and found ASIC schematics for the unfinished 'Panther" console...Im curious about the "bell chime in your video title, its so familiar, a fiend and I used to mess around editing Amiga sound fx back in the very early 90's, was it from a demo or a game?
Thank you again Simon! It was a privilege to meet Glenn. He is such a nice guy. I have to try to remember where I got the bell chime from. I am pretty sure our composer JMD integrated it into his awesome track
@@TheGuruMeditation : Isn’t that bell from Populous ?
The best thing that ever happened to Apple was the vendetta between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. Both destroyed each other's companies, leaving the 32-bit field clear for the Macintosh.
Yeah for sure. That and Microsoft bailing them out
I would assume that the chips in the 3DO were not clocked slower due to the clock speed limitation of the wires in the breadboard chip prototypes, and that the prototype "chips" ran slower than the actual, final chips. Or did the chips end up running at the same limited speed of the prototype versions? On the Amiga, AFAIK, the prototypes run at full speed, since the final chips weren't clocked very high. Presumably the same for the Lynx.
I wish I knew the answer for you, sorry!
Great interview thanks for this.I know a little bit more about how the Amiga was made and the brains behind it.
Great! Glad you enjoyed it Toffeemeister. Thanks for the comment. -- Bill
Just need you to interview Dr Ed Hepler the guy behind AAA and Hombre next please :0)
That is a good idea. We met him at the FriendUP meeting in Philly, but it wasn't the appropriate time to interview him. We should reach out to him. Thanks. I am editing the Trevor Dickinson video now...
I spoke to him briefly on E-mail recently and he sent detailed Commodore documentation on Hombre. It went down to the register level including how the Blitter would support hardware texture mapping and a built in HP RISC CPU. I'm not sure these documents have been released before.
Oh WOW! That is incredible. Yeah, there were some amazing people in that room and all of them were extremely respectful of Dr. Hepler. Would love to speak with him further. If you ever have the time or inclination, jot down a few questions or topics that you would like to hear about. I don't think we will be able to interview him in the immediate future, but there is no reason why we can't do it some time in the future. My email is bill@thegurumeditation.org if you are interested.
I googled "The Handi" and got nothing on it! Was it top secret?
Also, I always wondered why the sound on the Amiga, as awesome as it is, didn't really improve much even after the Amiga 500 came out. Surely the Amiga 2000 warranted a 16 bit, 8 voice sound system, etc.
JW3HH
The "Handi" or "Handy" (not sure how they spelled it) is the code name for the Atari Lynx which Glenn worked on with RJ Mical. But some people don't think of electronics when they want a handi ;-) Yes, it is amazing that the Paula chip never really changed much through the lifespan of the Amiga. -- Bill
Actually it is "Handy" I will change the description.
*is the code name for the Atari Lynx which Glenn worked on with RJ Mical. But some people don't think of electronics when they want a handi ;-)*
*LOL!*
But, yeah, I know the Hombre chipset had some major changes and improvements to the Amiga's sound, but that was never to be :(
JW3HH
Yeah too bad about Hombre. What could have been. We hope to talk to some of the guys about Hombre in the future. -- Bill
That would be great! The Wikipedia page has a lot of info on it and probably even the names of all the guys who worked on it. Maybe they live nearby! (Or would be willing/able to do a Skype/Google Hangout conference interview thingy).
JW3HH
What a great man. I'd like to have him as a mentor.
super interview :) was nice to see and hear Glenn Keller...
it was really great things for 80s. Anyway from today "music" point of view of course SID is 100 times better device than 8bit D/A Paula, because it's real SYNTH. But connection of 2xSID + paula in one device would make really killer music machine...
I'm curious why they didn't continue such great synth chip (SID) in next machines after C64. Maybe if Jack Tramiel still would be there... :)
Humm that would have been a good question KATOD. Thanks for the kind words and glad you enjoyed it! -- Bill
With respect, to say SID is "better" because it is a synth is massively subjective in my opinion. Having had both a C64 (when I was very young) and a series of Amigas (from the age of 11, used regularly until I was 19) - living through those times and with the benefit of hindsight; SID was great, musically interesting and quirky. But the first time I heard well-made sounds coming out of the Amiga it was like a quantum leap forward. Obviously this is my opinion and therefore also massively subjective ( ;) ), but listening to SID music today I think it's great, musical and quirky - however it will always be easily identifiable as "chiptune" music. Whereas I'd argue that with the best examples of Amiga music (e.g. Shadow Of The Beast, Turrican 2) if you took the output and mastered it well, some people might not know they were listening to music from a computer game. This is particularly true of the Turrican 2 intro music, which is like a magnum electronic opus in its own right in my opinion.
SID wan't developed further at CBM because designer Bob Yannes quit after the C64 project. According to the Bagnall book, one of the main reasons he (and a lot of other bright young engineers) quit was burnout due to Jack Tramiel's management style (particularly with scheduling and deadlines). This is why CBM ended up "buying in" their next-generation technology (i.e. Amiga); Tramiel's 16-bit home computer project was the Atari ST which used a lot of off-the-shelf parts, including the YM2149 sound chip - which was in many ways a backwards step compared to SID.
turricaned - Thank you for your detailed explanation about SID development. Of course you have right about "new quality of game music" in Amiga. Agreed. But as I wrote - D/A converter togther with SID would be BEST setup for Amiga. I'm not against D/A for drums, pads and many other sounds. Just synth LEAD sounds with big range of filtering, joining oscillators, detuning one of them and many other analog synth features can't be beaten by samples and always will sounds much better (for lead parts, filtered bass parts etc).
Of course nothing change that Amiga was amazing BIG STEP in computer history and best "games" home computer these times...
I just love anlog synths and I love SID sounds and crazy SID filters :) so I'm still using them in music...
Cheers for the reply. I thought SID was (like the Juno-106) a "hybrid" synth - i.e. digitally-controlled, partially analogue signal path (as opposed to pure analogue). In my opinion, if the Los Gatos Amiga folks were going to put in a synth IC alongside Paula it would probably have been better to have a more modern FM unit (similar to the YM2151 used in arcades) rather than SID, which was showing its age by 1985.
Thank you Turricaned! Yeah I agree. I have the utmost respect for the SID and I love that it is generating its own sounds, but back then I didn't care about that, I just knew the Amiga sounded "better" - obviously subjective. OT - have you heard any stereo SID stuff? It is really great. I heard one fore the first time at VCF. Fun stuff
Paula also handled the floppy disk drives as I recall.
I think you are correct
Hmm.... Redo the amiga, swappping each custom chip out, with a replacement chip. Then add some usb interface for programming each fpga's.
I think someone is working on replacement custom chips vis FPGA
AGA had "Productivity Mode" which was a clear 640x480 VGA resolution.
Neat. I actually never used that mode
Back then I had a multisync monitor and would use some odd monitor drivers giving me some really high resolutions that were not standard.
I guess my eyes weren't as sensitive as some, as I never had an issue even on interlace (yes I saw the flicker but it really didn't bother me) so even 1280 x 512 was amazing to use when using any number of productivity programs and Ray tracing looked incredible at that resolution.
@@daishi5571 Yeah, the AGA machines had DblNTSC and DblPAL modes that uses scan doubling to get rid of the flicker. I think the max res was 640x1024 in PAL 640x800 in NTSC
Haha... this poor guy looked so guilty when he was saying he didn't use Amiga anymore... screen flickering?! That's the least of the worries! :) We live in a different age. Oh well.
Ha ha, Glen is such a good guy
Arrrgghhh! There's a Super Paula out there somewhere and it's never been released.....WHO HAS HER!!!??!!
Great question!
what a luvlie interview with an incredible nice guy. his work paula is for some kind of music still unreached by other dac+. she sounds so fontal - so close. but maybe he doesn't like the style of music =).
Ha ha, well I agree with you. I love listening to MODs from my Amiga through my hi-fi system. It is beautiful. And Glenn is a really nice person. We are so lucky to have been able to spend some time with him. Thanks so much for watching and glad you enjoyed it!
Regarding oceans : I think autotune is also derived from work with oceans / waves / similar
19:35, Hadley Davison? Is he talking about Dave Haney?
Hedley Davis
Il suono dell'Amiga è magico ha la perfezione del digitale ma nello stesso tempo il calore dell'analogico difficile da spiegare...
very very cool!
great interview with a guy who's apparently as smart and sympathic as he was important for the Amiga, thanks for sharing 👍
Thanks so much Dan. Glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Glenn is brilliant and and absolute gentleman as well. AMIGA4EVER -- Bill
The Amiga stole the show when it came to audio in the 80s and early 90s
He looks and talks like Mr Rogers. Cool.
He is a very nice guy
Never designed a chip before, comes up woth Paula. How cool is that.?!
sad that Paula only had 4 sound channels
That was surely a big problem - even with the release of the AGA machines. At this time 16 or even 32 channels has been a must. I cant understand until today, why the soundchip (more channels, 44 khz) was not improved. It was the time, a lot of musicians moved to the pc, using 16 up to 32 channels and 16 bit 44 khz samples.
My guess it was because of the notion at Commodore that music played from CD was the future (which for a little while was the norm, until it that concept was abandoned), plus they had to rush the A1200 out the door before xmas 1992. So they just didn't do a new chip and stuck with ol' Paula. The A3000+ did have a DSP, but I think they couldn't agree with AT&T (which did the DSP) about the proper software to make the OS deal with the DSP, so that too was abandoned.
While it would have been nice to have an improved sound chip, the original was still good enough and sounded better than a lot of PC created music, technical specs not withstanding. There were other elements of the Amiga that needed to be improved by that time, but the sound of the Amiga was still enviable in the early 90s when you compare it to consoles of the time.
💖💖💖Dankeschön 💖💖💖
OCTAMED!!!!!!!!
Oh yeah!
The Amiga would have beneficiated from having a SID or a dual SID with a 6502, alongside Paula.
After all, Paula is only 4 channels 8 bit linear, and only 2 stereo positions, and frequency doesn't go high.
It is very limited : the Apple IIGS did much better at the time (1985).
2 years later, in 1987, the Acorn Archimedes provided 8 channels, 8 bit logarithmic, 7 independent stereo positions per channel.
The chip (VIDC) can also output sound at a much higher frequency than Paula.
The video side of the chip also outperforms the Amiga video capabilities.
With the power of the ARM chip and the MEMC chip and overall intelligent architecture of the Acorn Archimedes, an 8 Mhz Archie can do mixing in realtime and play converted S3M tunes up to 32 channels, as demonstrated on my YT channel, and the quality of the audio output is just outstanding.
The well designed architecture of the Archimedes allowed easy evolution of the chip to provide 16 bit sound for the RISC PCs, and still maintaining 100% compatability with the 8 bit audio system of the Archies.
The video part provided 16 bit and 24 bit screen modes, this time.
All these evolutions Commodore never managed to deliver.
All in all Acorn was the technological leader, and not Commodore.
Gadgets like the Amiga600, without a numeric keypad, and the CD32 are a disgrace.
The A1200 has no Akiko chip, and the long boasted DSP was never implemented.
Even Atari with its Falcon had better technology at the time.
The Acorn Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga or the Atari ST. But you should be happy to know that RJ Mical and Dave Needle went on - after creating the Epyx Handy/Atari Lynx - to develop the 3DO which used an ARM CPU. Just to cover all bases, the Sharp X68000 was also an amazing computer system in terms of graphics and sound but it too was a lot more expensive than the Amiga or the Atari ST, and almost exclusive to Japan.
The Apple IIgs came out after both the Amiga and the Atari ST, and also a lot more expensive than both. It had a WDC 65816 CPU - nearly 100% backwards-compatible compatible with the 6502 - that was gimped Mhz-wise because the Macintosh division didn't want serious next-gen competition from the Apple II division. The Apple IIgs used a fantastic Ensoniq sound chip. Ensoniq was set up by Bob Yannes who created the SID. And that Ensoniq sound chip would've been used in the Atari Panther console had it not been scrapped.
The Atari Falcon rocked. Shame Atari Corp didn't get the Falcon040 out the door.
@@TheJeremyHolloway It wasn't. The A305 was actually cheaper than the A1000, and if you want to compare an A500 with an Archimedes, please add the cost of all the expansions you need to add to the A500 to be more or less like an Archie. Truth is that expansions at the time didn't even exist to match the video and sound capabilities of the Archimedes.
these gentlemen KNEW what they were doing while admitting they weren't experts at the time ... and guess what: they created THE best micro computer, ever, TO THIS VERY DAY! while losers like those who own and started money mongering businesses like Micro$oft, barely knew a thing or two about computers and software ... but by selling software licenses of all kinds, they are considered the TOP GUYS in the computer industry! world is a weird place at times, isn't it? so unfair ...
no wonder many businesses fail because of either mismanagement (such as it happened to Commodore and killed the Amiga!) or because the people involved aren't very much money oriented and do things simply because they love to do it ...
Camera ......... 😫
Yes Amiga was behind PC regarding resolutions. But why? That is the question... bad decisions. I do not blame the developers there. The decisions were done by incompetent managers
Get the name right, it's called Portia FIRST :D
Macintosh was B&W with no custom chips. It wasn't better than anything, it was the worst computer of its time.