HardSID Mac OS X Blog

Welcome Mac lovers!

As some of you may already now, we didn’t plan OS X related developments. ..but the release of the HardSID 4U made many Mac users to nag me about the lack of OS X support.

Well, you won! ;)

While my friend prepares the fist stock of HardSID 4Us to be ready for the release date in April, I’ve jumped into OS X development.

Left picture: HardSID 4U AU showing up in Logic; right: HardSID 4U showing up in OS X USB Device Tree

Check out the roadmap below for the aims/objectives and the current status. Note: This is a spare-time hobby project and it is powered only by passion, devotion and enthusiasm. Please show us your interest by subscribing to our HardSID Mac OS X mailing-list and for the RSS feed via Feedburner (at the top of the sidebar)! Your interest is the thing that keeps us spinning!

Developers:

If you are an AU (Audio Units) developer and you are interested in developing your own HardSID 4U AU using a core communication library provided by us, contact us privately (support a.t. hardsid d.o.t. com) and subscribe to the HardSID Mac OS X mailing-list to discuss with other developers.

Roadmap (stage 1/2):

• Establishing basic communication between OS X and HardSID 4U (status: Done)
• Establishing low latency isochronous kernel streaming and also testing the 8000Hz update rate by beep sample playback (status: Done; comment: very good result!)
• Developing a basic test AU (Audio Unit) that plays simple low latency notes and low latency samples at 8000Hz update rate on the HS4U (status: in progress ~50%)

At this point we’ll be able to tell details about the core library to AU developers. If you plan to develop your own HS4U AU, contact us! (support a.t. hardsid d.o.t. com) Also subscribe to the HardSID Mac OS X mailing-list!

Roadmap (stage 2/2):

• Further development of our own AU. (it won’t be a direct port of the Windows VSTi, but a re-implementation)
• Consulting with other AU developers (if any contacts us) for helping them and testing their AUs.
• SIDPlay2 modification to achieve cycle-accurate playback on a HardSID 4U (won’t be a big work)

Note: I’m developing and testing on Intel (+Leopard), so required modifications (byte swapping macros mainly) for PPC will be applied a bit later, as soon as possible.

I’ll post any bigger progress here, so subscribe to the feed if you’re interested.