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.

He really is an great guy

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!

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

Nicely said. Glen is brilliant and a gentleman

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.

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

Yes, Glen is a true gentleman

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!

Thank you!

Thanks Vincent! Yeah Anthony did great! -- Bill

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

You are welcome! Glad you enjoyed it Kokos! -- Bill

You are welcome! Glad you enjoyed it MIGs. Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks so much Roli! Appreciate the kind words very much. It means a lot. Glad you enjoyed it! -- Bill

Cheers! Thank you so much!

yep. And both Jay and Glenn are true geltleman

Thanks Gerul! -- Bill

Glenn is such a great person

Our pleasure! You are welcome and thanks for the support!

Ha ha! Glad you enjoyed the interview Alex. Thanks for watching!

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

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 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

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!

Very true! Pulling down the screens and multi-tasking really blew me away. It was so far ahead of its time.

sluggotg Excellent! Thank you for your service! Glenn is not only extremely smart, but a great person

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

ha ha true! He is such a humble guy.

He is great !

You are welcome! Thanks for the kind words Scotland! -- Bill

Sharing is where it's all at!

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!

Good morning! Glad you enjoyed!

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

Ha! Good point Amiga Lemming!

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

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!

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 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"

Great question. I don't know. He probably doesn't!

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!

Thanks so much Dan. Glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Glenn is brilliant and and absolute gentleman as well. AMIGA4EVER -- Bill

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

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

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 ?

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

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!

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" ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes I believe the Paula sound remained pretty much unchanged throughout the Amiga's life cycle

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.

I wish I knew the answer for you, sorry!

Yeah for sure. That and Microsoft bailing them out

I think you are correct

Hedley Davis

I think someone is working on replacement custom chips vis FPGA

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!

So true. Paula was so far ahead of her time and didn't really change throughout the Amiga's lifespan

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

Great question!

Ha ha, Glen is such a good guy

He is a very nice guy

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

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.

Oh yeah!

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.