X68000

The Paula was made by Commodore and is used inside the Commodore Amiga, where it is part of the Original Chip Set (OCS). Besides being a soundchip it also has other functions like controlling the disk drives.

Technical Specifications

• Channels: 4
• Channel 1-4: Waveform Playback
• Waveforms: 8-bit PCM with a maximum sample rate of 28867 Hz.
• Stereo: 2 Channels (1 & 4) are always hard left, 2 channels (2 & 3) always hard right
• DAC: Build-in

Used in

• Commodore Amiga 500, 1000 and 2000 (OCS Chipset)
• Commodore Amiga 500+, 600 and 3000 (ECS Chipset)
• Commodore Amiga 1200 and 4000 (AGA Chipset)

The Chaos Engine

Emulation

• Commodore Amiga Music is usually stored in one of many different so-called Module-Formats. There are lots of players for this kind of files. Recommended players are XMPlay, Deliplayer (Google), or Oldsk00l (Winamp-Plugin)

Music Creation – Wavetable Synthesis

There were lots of so-called Trackers running on the Amiga. Most of them used predefined Samples to generate the Audio. Some famous or interesting Trackers are:

• Ultimate Soundtracker (1987)

The Ultimate Soundtracker was the first Tracker on the Amiga. It was created by Karsten Obarski for EAS Software and initially released as a commercial Software. It offered all the 4 Channels and was limited to 15 Samples (Instruments) per Song.

• OctaMED (1991)

This Tracker, although not the first one to support it, allowed a maximum of 8 channels to be used. This was achieved with Software Mixing (and quality loss, because the 4 channels of the Amiga are still a hardware limitation). It was rarely used for Game Music because the Mixing required a lot more CPU Power than normal playback. However, it gained a lot of popularity among Musicians.

Music Creation – Other

Some trackers did not use any samples at all but had some form of a synthesizer build-in. Others allowed to User to draw his own samples.

• Abyss’ Highest Experience (1998, Last Version)

AHX is one of the Trackers which do not support samples. Instead, you can use the build-in synthesis engine that offers several Waveforms for use within the 4 Channels of the Amiga. You can choose between Triangle / Sawtooth / Squarewave and White Noise, apply things like ADSR and use effects like Frequency Slides and speed changes.