>After actually looking at the rme site, it appears that their cards >aren't actually a good example of openness for creative to follow; >they're concerned about the dsp functions on their chips (reverb and >what-not.) Still, it shows them some of their competitors are not so >secretive.
precisely. rme are quite happy releasing specs to right a driver; they are not planning on releasing specs to write new FX. its worth noting that rme have said publically that it took them quite a long time and quite a lot of really deep thinking to understand how to use an FPGA for what they are now doing. i don't know if this is accurate, or if it means that they were FPGA/DSP illiterate to start with, but if true, i could understand why they don't want to reveal what they learned (even though i don't agree with that mentality). >I'd still like to know if there are any other companies out there giving >out specs for their dsp chips.. can anyone canonically tell me yay or >nay? Yamaha used to. I have a the spec for a 5-6 year old chip that was used in the Tropez+. However, it too relied on microcode being preloaded, and no information was available on how to write or design the microcode. OTOH, I would imagine that both the SHARC and Motorola 56K chipsets can be considered pretty "open" given that there are gcc ports for both of them. --p
