FACTORY NEWS - Excellent results on new Krystal Driver w/o DMA bus mastering

[admin]

Larry is removiong all DMA bus mastering operations for playing from the msnd32.dll Krystal driver.

Our tests have proven that Krystal now works with this new driver in the new Motherboards using Intel 815 chipset or the VIA chipset.

We still have about 2 months before this is finished. The VU meters, EQ and Record were disabled for this test to prove the DMA was the problem. It was! Praise The Lord!!! This means that one day when you folks want to upgrade your computers to a newer fast motherboard, you will be able to do it!

Until the new driver is released, MTU continues to ship BX chipset motherboards that Krystal will work with using the existing driver.

[clawson]

This sounds like great news!

How will the DMA bus mastering change affect Microeditor
operation, though? Will this change throughput in any negative way? Do we have any performance issues to worry about? Will this allow faster response time with the level meters?

Inquiring minds, you know...

Chas.

--
Charles Lawson
WETA Radio & Television
Washington, DC

[Bill Odom]

what are the symptoms of dma transfers people are having
i seem to be doing ok on my fast systems

do they show up in playback or record mostly ?

most of my current project (navavo NT) are plaing only one segment at a time with only a few overlaps

let me know when we can test the new driver

Bill

[admin]

OK Inquiring minds. Here it is. If your Krystal is working on your motherboard, there is no problem that you are experiencing. It is only with new motherboards using the VIA or Intel 815 chip sets that Krystal will simply FAIL to operate.

Chas, we currently have no hard facts on what will change as we remove DMA bus mastering. Larry doesn't think there will be any down side. Only testing will determine this.

Don't expect any improvement in the VU updates. We are not taking the time to rewrite this code.

Let me put it this way to you... if this fix did not work, Krystal would only work on older BX and earlier motherboard chipsets, and it will fail to work on ALL modern motherboards. What would that mean? Quite simply... the end of Microeditor!

Now that you have gulped good and hard, do you understand the magnitude of the success of this test? I Thought so.

[geezer]

----Seems like this is good news...I really want to know what the multitrack interface is looking like....I'm getting ready to make the jump to some PIII or other and probably install Nuendo on it. I would love to also have Microeditor live there as well, or maybe have it on a second newer computer with file/hard-drive swapping possible also.

Additionally, will these newer motherboards all be totally incapable of supporting MicroSync?...What's the fastest motherboard I can get that MicroSync will still work with?

[admin]

Geezer, the fastest motherboard that still works with Microsync is one that has an ISA slot, and the Intel BX440 chipset so Krystal will run. We can provide you with one if you wish.

As to multi-track, we have not advanced on this. There has been basically very little interest from our client base in wanting the Tascam interface. However, if we can find their special wave file format, we might be able to allow creating segments from their files in Microeditor V5.4, which is approaching. If it requres much time to study or code, we will have to make it an option, not in Microeditor.

Geezer, can you locate and email us the spec? I've tried to follow Tascam links in the past to get this data to no avail. Thus, please help us get the actual spec since you are the primary one who wants this. I would appreciate the help as we are in overload in several sectors.

The progress of Microeditor V5.4 is updated periodically, and can be found at; http://www.mtu.com/basics/news.htm . Check it out for scheduling.