[hatari-devel] STE DMA sound volume mixing level

[Troed Sångberg <troed@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I just had an interesting conversation on Twitter with Gunstick, gwEm and Dma-Sc. As you can guess from those nicknames, it's sound related :D

Apparently the volume is not emulated correctly (it's too high) when playing STE DMA sound. This causes issues for musicians who make YM+DMA songs - Dma-Sc even wrote he can't use Hatari for it at all. gwEm has apparently spent a lot of time with this since real Falcon and STE differ but Hatari does not. 

Anyway, this seems to be a simple (? famous last words .. ) thing to correct. Maybe with a usability setting (not default) where those who want to can increase the DMA volume to "normal". I recall an investigation by Putnik a few years ago that pointed to Atari actually having thought they had the hardware config to make DMA sound and YM sound the same level, but it's just not wired up correctly on the motherboard, and was then never fixed. 

Opinions? Hatari's YM emulation is so excellent now that it's sad to hear scene musicians skip using it for STE tunes. Since sc68 doesn't do STE DMA Gunstick is going to use Hatari for his radio show but needs to do post-processing because of this issue.

regards,

Troed