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Spacewalker Sound System HOT-255 Sound Card
The Spacewalker Sound System HOT-255 Sound Card is designed based
on ENSONIQ’s breakthrough AudioPCI
TM
technology to take full advan-
tage of the PCI bus’ architecture, while maintaining compatibility with
older legacy software. Legacy game compatibility was originally a prob-
lem when considering a PCI based sound card solution. The problem was
that existing software and games for the PC had been designed to run on
ISA based sound cards. To function properly, those cards must write di-
rectly to the inherently slow ISA Direct Memory Access (DMA) control-
ler. These signals are not present on the PCI bus. AudioPCI™ allows legacy
software to function as if the ISA signals are present, while utilizing the
faster speed of the PCI bus.
AudioPCI™ technology was developed by ENSONIQ, a recognized leader
in the electronic musical instrument industry. The same advanced chip
designs that function as the engines for ENSONIQ’s line of professional-
level synthesizers, samplers, and effect processors have been used in
AudioPCI™.
What is AudioPCI™ ?
AudioPCI™ technology is a combination of hardware and software that
provides the highest quality in PC sound and the greatest compatibility
with current standards.
Why PCI?
The PCI bus is far superior to the ISA bus. It is capable of transferring data
on a wider 32-bit bandwidth bus. This allows much more data to pass from
the PCI bus to the host processor. The ISA bus is only capable of 16-bit
bandwidth transfers. Using the PCI bus will allow a 4 to 20 times increase
in speed over much slower DMA transfers on the ISA bus. This drastically
reduces the overhead on the host CPU. This tremendous processing power
opens up new possibilities for sound cards. Real-time software based sound
fields are now possible without bogging down the host CPU.
Here’s a brief overview of Spacewalker Sound System HOT-255 Sound
Card’s main features:
Synthesizer
•
Provides up to 32 voices of wavetable synthesis.
1
1
PART
INTRODUCTION
