What to do with a NUBUS DSP Card? (besides Photoshop) — #19

Post #19 by beachycove

Source Forum	What to do with a NUBUS DSP Card? (besides Photoshop) — #19
Category	Development
Post Date	Sat, 19 May 2012 - 15:00
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/what-to-do-with-a-nubus-dsp-card-besides-photoshop.25414/

Post

From the developer document trag referenced, I see that the DSP ran on a separate operating system that made calls on the Mac Toolbox. The document makes some rather large claims that may be relevant:

"... the architecture supports the implementation of NuBus cards to make configurations of multiple DSPs possible." (p. 61)

and

"A sound driver provides the interface between the Macintosh Sound Manager and the Real Time Manager by means of a set of standard sound modules, including sound input and output, compression, filtering, sample rate conversion, and mixing." (p. 66)

Putting two and two together, a multiprocessing machine for sound work would appear to be possible.

What's more, p. 66 continues with an interesting observation:

"The purpose of the various toolbox drivers is to provide access to the capability of the DSP at the highest possible toolbox level. This allows applications that are not written for the DSP to use it automatically when it is available. Even with this level of toolbox support, it is clear that many applications will work better by directly accessing the DSP using the DSP API. Such applications provide significantly more functionality or speed when a DSP is available. However, an application that uses the DSP API either cannot run on a platform without the DSP, or must provide alternative main processor programming if a DSP is not available."