What to do with a NUBUS DSP Card? (besides Photoshop)

[eraser]

What can be done with a NUBUS DSP card besides speeding up Photoshop? Anything? I've heard that they will speed up JPEG operations. Are there any other operations they can be utilized in?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

How about doing the programming for getting enough DSPs running in a 68k or PPC NuBus Mac to get a SETI Work Unit completed fast enough to be worthwhile? }

 

[Unknown_K]

You need special software for Jpeg compression. Some audio apps use the DSP. Video editing apps used DSP for video compression but those were proprietary boards for each brand needing special cables.

 

[Bunsen]

Some audio apps use the DSP.

While there were Nubus DSP cards made for audio - notably the Digidesign Audiomedia series - and audio apps that used the AV Quadra's motherboard DSP, I'm unaware of any audio apps or drivers that were able to use the far more common (and in some instances, far more powerful) Nubus cards made for visual DSP work - the Photoshop and QuickDraw accelerators and the like. If you know of any, I would be very keen to hear of them.

 

[beachycove]

I think the Storm dsp card that was later absorbed into/by Radius used the same dsp chips as are found in the 840av, and as the system software was multi-processor aware in the case of the AV Quadras, such a machine could simultaneously use all the dsp cards you can pop in.

As for software, Picture Press, a copy of which has been on eBay forever, used the Storm card for photo compression and for photoshop filter add-ons.

I have one of these Storm cards in a Q650, in which the acceleration is very noticeable. I suspect, however, that the card might be better suited to a 68030, where the speed would be even more impressive.

 

[eraser]

SETI Work unit

Now that would awesome!

I think the Storm dsp card that was later absorbed into/by Radius used the same dsp chips as are found in the 840av, and as the system software was multi-processor aware in the case of the AV Quadras, such a machine could simultaneously use all the dsp cards you can pop in.

So adding DSP cards (as long as they use the same type of chip) to a 840AV will add a speed boost? So the apps that are 'DSP aware' are Photoshop (see question below) and Picture Press. Does anyone know of others? I always wondered if anything actually used the DSPs in the 68K AV Macs.

Which versions of Photoshop support DSP cards? From what I understand it's 2.5 and 3.0. Any later versions work with them?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Dunno about my 840AV offhand but the NuBus Card in front of me:

SuperMAC

c1992 STORM TECHNOLOGY, INC.

. . . has two DSPs on it that say:

45871

C 88 AT&T M

WE DSP16A

M14 033

9232S 40

. . . on them.

I also have the Storm Technology Software package for it, might be PicturePress, I got that from macmetex a while back.

Do they match the 840AV DSP spec?

 

[Unknown_K]

Photoshop 2.5 and 3.0 use the DSP if you have the device drivers installed. My IIfx has a Supermac Thunder/24 with DSP add-on and a Storm Technologies (also sold under other names)Nubus card and the control panel sees all of the DSP chips.

I think the 840AV uses an AT&T DSP 3210 , the Supermac branded Storm card uses the AT&T DSP 16A, Supermac GX card for the Thunder/24 (and others?) uses AT&T DSP 3210, Spectral Inovations MacDSP uses AT&T DSP32C, Digidesign Audiomedia II uses Motorola DSP 5600.

Don't recall if DECK II uses just built in DSP chips or ones on add-on cards.

Some of the very early quickdraw video accelerator add-on cards were just a Nubus card with 2 DSP chips on them (sometimes with RAM cache).

 

[eraser]

Some of the very early quickdraw video accelerator add-on cards were just a Nubus card with 2 DSP chips on them (sometimes with RAM cache).

Hmm. I know that Apple made a QuickDraw accelerator that was a PCI card with no outputs. Was that what that card was?

I wish the chips on these cards could be used for the same purpose.

 

[Bunsen]

the system software was multi-processor aware in the case of the AV Quadras

It was? Are you suggesting that any app which can access the onboard AV-Quadra's DSP can transparently access DSPs on a Nubus card?

such a machine could simultaneously use all the dsp cards you can pop in.

For audio work?

The reason I am looking for specific confirmation here (ie, beyond "I think") is that all the research I have done (admittedly, which was a while back now) indicated that there were no drivers or apps which could use a card created for PShop/QT as an audio DSP - and that the abstraction layers between the OS, Nubus and DSP cards essentially made this impossible without a card specific driver.

See for comparison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/ROSE

This is one of those situations where I would be delighted to be proven wrong!

Don't recall if DECK II uses just built in DSP chips or ones on add-on cards.

It can use the 56001 on the AudioMedia/AMII card for real-time effects on output, and compression/limiting/EQ on input while recording. It may be able to use other Digidesign/ProTools DSP cards, but I don't recall.

 

[beachycove]

Well, I am chastened because it turns out that I was wrong about the DSP being identical on the Storm card and on the 840av, so take that as a sign that I do not know what I am talking about half the time (as my wife would happily tell you).

However, it is certainly the case that the Control Panel (or was it Vu-meter? I forget, it was a long time ago) shows all DSPs as active in Photoshop in an 840av with a Storm card inside. So there would appear to be some sort of load balancing under ARTA (Apple Real Time Architecture) in effect, that is to say, for DSP-aware Photoshop filters. I am not sure how efficient it was, but I remember a technical paper from the engineers that I read years ago that explored the question of ARTA capabilities, so one could go a-googling for more info.

I also don't know about audio, except that there there were very few programs that were DSP-aware. Digitrax, maybe?

Another piece of evidence that supports the notion that more than one DSP could be used is the fact that more than one DSP was often present on these accelerators.... They must have popped two on the Storm card for a reason.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Some Cards had four of the little suckers on board! :approve:

 

[spiceyokooko]

What can be done with a NUBUS DSP card besides speeding up Photoshop? Anything? I've heard that they will speed up JPEG operations.

With the correct software installed they will speed up Photoshop, specifically in opening, saving, changing the file format and compressing files within photoshop. Back in the day these were being made and used, Photoshop was horribly slow when manipulating, opening and saving large high resolution images. I think a lot of people forget just how slow the processors were and just how horribly expensive even moderate amounts of RAM was - and Photoshop gobbles RAM like there's no tomorrow.

Just to put things into perspective I personally (through the company I was working for) purchased some 16Mb SIMMS for a Apple Macintosh Quadra 950 for the specific purpose of speeding up Photoshop (or in this instance making it actually useable for practical photographic retouching) and each 16Mb SIMM cost about £600, that's just under $1,000 for one 16Mb SIMM. Now work out how much it would have cost to put 16 x 16Mb SIMMS into that machine.

The DSP accelerator card and software to go with it was relatively cheap compared to installing so much RAM and any speed boost you could get when running photoshop was vital given how hungry Photoshop was in terms of resources.

Are there any other operations they can be utilized in?

Erm, what else do you want to do with a DSP card designed specifically to speed up Photoshop?

 

[eraser]

Erm, what else do you want to do with a DSP card designed specifically to speed up Photoshop?

Well, I was hoping that there were more uses for the card. After all, those DSP chips weren't designed for Photoshop, companies just wrote the code to make Photoshop filters use them. I was also hoping there were more uses for the chips in the AV Macs. I do realize that with any specialty hardware that unless the code is compiled for the chips then they simply aren't going to work.

This has also turned into an awesome discussion.

 

[spiceyokooko]

companies just wrote the code to make Photoshop filters use them.

Yes and there's the rub.

To use them for anything else, you need the software to interface with them and the most common software that does that was written for Photoshop filters.

They're not much good for anything else if you can't find the software that use them.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Hence, my suggestion for somebody doing the programming necessary to do unit crunching code for the SETI project on 68k once more! )

That A-Rose link seems to fit well into this scenario.

 

[trag]

Well, I was hoping that there were more uses for the card. After all, those DSP chips weren't designed for Photoshop, companies just wrote the code to make Photoshop filters use them. I was also hoping there were more uses for the chips in the AV Macs. I do realize that with any specialty hardware that unless the code is compiled for the chips then they simply aren't going to work.

There is a substantial amount of information in the "The Macintosh Quadra 840AV and Macintosh Centris 660AV Computers" Hardware Developer Note: http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/#documentation/Hardware/hardware2.html. Pages 231 to 289 or about 68 pages of information titled "DSP Operating System".

I would start there. I think that was probably the documentation for developers who wanted to make use of the on-board DSPs. I don't think it will clearly tell you how to use DSPs on NuBus cards, but it might give you some ideas of what to look for.

You'll also need datasheets for the model of DSP with which you are interfacing. And absent developer tools, I imagine most of the work you'd be able to do will be in assembly (or machine code) for the DSP(s) in question.

 

[CelGen]

Avid VideoShop 3 came with a Photoshop Plug-In. I believe through the use of it you could indirectly accelerate VideoShop when it was using Photoshop for various effects.

 

[beachycove]

From the developer document trag referenced, I see that the DSP ran on a separate operating system that made calls on the Mac Toolbox. The document makes some rather large claims that may be relevant:

"... the architecture supports the implementation of NuBus cards to make configurations of multiple DSPs possible." (p. 61)

and

"A sound driver provides the interface between the Macintosh Sound Manager and the Real Time Manager by means of a set of standard sound modules, including sound input and output, compression, filtering, sample rate conversion, and mixing." (p. 66)

Putting two and two together, a multiprocessing machine for sound work would appear to be possible.

What's more, p. 66 continues with an interesting observation:

"The purpose of the various toolbox drivers is to provide access to the capability of the DSP at the highest possible toolbox level. This allows applications that are not written for the DSP to use it automatically when it is available. Even with this level of toolbox support, it is clear that many applications will work better by directly accessing the DSP using the DSP API. Such applications provide significantly more functionality or speed when a DSP is available. However, an application that uses the DSP API either cannot run on a platform without the DSP, or must provide alternative main processor programming if a DSP is not available."