3 ms·
i bought one of these used back when i was in high school. at the time mono 040 slabs could be had for a few hundred dollars. without a doubt, the coolest thin
by a-dub 5y ago
i bought one of these used back when i was in high school. at the time mono 040 slabs could be had for a few hundred dollars. without a doubt, the coolest thing about it was the hardware. oversized flat screen monitors, 2.88mb disk drives, onboard mc56k dsp.
the audio output hardware only operated at 22khz when in stereo, if i recall correctly... however, the presence of the mc56k dsp made realtime resampling of any stream possible without burdening the mc68040 cpu.
perhaps the most interesting component of the next hardware was the "geekport" which was some oddball connector, like a db-19 or something that was a mix of ttl digital lines and analog in/out attached to a/d and d/a that were convenient to the dsp.
- MegaDeKay 5y agoI think with the geekport that you might be getting mixed up with the BeBox. "The BeBox aimed to be the ultimate multimedia workstation. It had dual PowerPC CPUs and tons of I/O options including four MIDI ports, multiple sound ports, and the "GeekPort", a 37-pin connector that had power plus digital and analog I/O with a built-in ADC and DAC. Less than 2000 BeBoxes were sold so it's very rare to see one today." https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtualbox https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtu...
- a-dub 5y agoyou may be right on the name, but the next also had a "weird dsp port"
- a-dub 5y agoso apparently it was a db-15. i think the dac lived in the monitor, and devices that connected were things like modems and voicemail units. line level audio could be noisy so i wonder if it was just 8 bits of data (or more) and a few control pins that were attached directly to the m56k... i think the native width was 24 bits...