Audio sink service (src/audio/)

src/audio/mod.rs defines the host-facing sinks (AudioSink, NullSink, CpalSink, and WavSink). src/audio/mux.rs defines AudioMux, which routes the master mix and individual sources to playback or WAV capture. Mixing, LED filtering, volume, and stereo width are applied in Paula::push_mixed_frame (src/chipset/paula.rs).

Getting Paula onto the host grid¶

Paula’s four channels are a staircase: each holds its 8-bit sample for AUDxPER colour clocks, so a channel steps at up to ~28.6 kHz and the summed output only ever changes on the 3.546895 MHz colour-clock grid. Landing that on the mixer’s 44.1 kHz grid is a decimation by ~80.4, and doing it by reading the staircase at each output instant would fold everything above the mixer’s Nyquist straight back into the audible band. The staircase is rich up there: a full-scale 10 kHz square (two samples at AUDxPER 177, what Amiga Test Kit’s audio page plays) carries harmonics at 30, 50 and 70 kHz, which point sampling turns into tones at 14.0, 6.0 and 18.1 kHz -- inharmonic, so heard as ringing rather than brightness, and loud, the worst of them only 10 dB under the tone itself.

So the mix runs in two stages, both in Paula::advance_audio:

1. Exact integration to an oversample grid. PAULA_OVERSAMPLE (4) times the mixer rate, so 176.4 kHz. advance_audio splits its span so that no oversample instant and no channel period expiry falls strictly inside a step (cck_until_mix_input_changes), which means each channel’s contribution is constant across the step and channel_area can accumulate sample * volume * clocks exactly. Dividing by the interval width at each oversample instant is then a true box average of the staircase, not a sample of whichever step the instant landed on.

2. Windowed-sinc decimation to the mixer grid. One audio::resample::Decimator per channel, 4:1, sharing the 64-tap Blackman-windowed kernel Resampler uses. Per channel rather than per side because decimation is linear -- filtering each channel and summing is the same signal as filtering the sum -- which keeps the per-channel stem taps exactly consistent with the mix they add up to.

Neither stage touches the emulated timeline: advance_audio runs the same channel state machine over the same colour clocks either way, and the extra splitting only changes how often it is re-entered. The box stage needs the oversample rate well above Paula’s own; the sinc stage needs it low enough that the kernel’s transition band stays clear of the top of the audio band. Four satisfies both, and puts the worst surviving image about 47 dB under the tone. Raising the oversample rate or lengthening the kernel does not measurably improve on it.

The genuine zero-order-hold images of Paula’s own sample rate are not filtered out, because they are real output: the 500 Hz sine test at AUDxPER 177 keeps its images at 19.5 and 20.5 kHz, exactly as the hardware produces them ahead of its analogue filter.

Level¶

One channel’s DAC level is sample * volume, -8192..8128. Two channels reach each side, so full scale is both of them saturated at full volume -- and then the band-limited waveform overshoots the steps it came from, since taking the harmonics away leaves something taller than the square that carried them. A full-scale 10 kHz square keeps only its fundamental, at 4/PI of the square’s peak; a 25% pulse train does better still.

How much better depends on how fast the staircase is allowed to move, and nothing bounds that. AUDxPER has no floor in the hardware or in aud_percntrld, PAL_AUDIO_MIN_PERIOD_CCK and NTSC_AUDIO_MIN_PERIOD_CCK describe what audio DMA can sustain rather than what a channel will accept, and a CPU feeding AUDxDAT in IRQ mode is not held to either. So the headroom comes from the decimation kernel instead: the sum of its absolute taps, 1.5792, is the most it can make of input bounded by full scale, whatever that input is. PAULA_RECONSTRUCTION_HEADROOM rounds that up to 1.58 and PAULA_MIX_SCALE divides it out, so nothing Paula can play leaves [-1.0, 1.0] and nothing downstream has to clip it. The bound is held to the kernel it is claimed for by the_mix_headroom_covers_the_decimation_kernel. A real Amiga’s analogue reconstruction filter overshoots its own DAC the same way; this is just where a line input would have to be set.

Everything line-mixed alongside Paula (drive sounds, CD-DA, an in-process synth, Toccata, MHI) is added after this scaling and keeps its level relative to a Paula channel. Their sum with Paula is not separately limited, so a CD32 playing a full-scale CD track under a full-scale module can still ask for more than full scale.

The LED filter sits after all of this¶

StereoLedFilter runs at the mixer rate, on the decimated sum, which is where hardware puts it -- after the channel mixer’s summation. That only works because the decimation above is band-limited. Filtering a point-sampled mix instead would attenuate the real tone while leaving untouched the aliases that had already folded below the cutoff: with the filter engaged, the 10 kHz test used to come out as a 2 kHz buzz nearly 6 dB louder than the tone it was supposed to be attenuating.

Mixing and capture¶

Paula::audio owns an AudioMux. The mixer calls push_master for the final stereo output, push_source for individual devices, and push_source_channel for Paula’s four channels. The master sink selects live playback (CpalSink), a mixed WAV (WavSink, --audio-wav), or no output (NullSink, --noaudio). Optional stem writers capture the source taps alongside it.

The taps¶

push_mixed_frame pushes seven named sources, each at the point in the signal chain described below (not necessarily the point that ends up in the master mix -- see each entry):

The master signal (push_master) is the final out_left/out_right after master volume and stereo width. Live playback and --audio-wav receive these same samples.

Stem capture (--audio-stems)¶

AudioMux::enable_stems(dir, granularities, sources) opens hound WAV writers (the same stereo f32 @ 44.1 kHz framing as WavSink, factored into audio::open_wav_writer) for whichever files the selected StemGranularity values and registered SourceSpecs imply:

• Master -- DIR/master.wav.

• Source -- DIR/{id}.wav for each registered source.

• Channel -- DIR/{id}-{channel}.wav for each named sub-channel of each registered source. Select Channel explicitly; Source does not include it.

main.rs::configured_audio_stem_sources selects sources once at startup:

• paula and drivesounds always register. Disabled drive sounds produce a silent stem.

• cdda registers for CD32/CDTV, a configured [cd] image, or a CD image attached through IDE, LIDE, or SCSI.

• mt32 registers when selected as MIDI output and both ROMs are configured or remembered from menu selections.

• coppersynth registers when selected and the build includes the feature.

• toccata and mhi register when their boards are configured.

With --load-state, all seven sources register because restored hardware can differ from the startup configuration. Unused sources produce silent files. Registration does not change during capture: adding a source later will not create a missing stem writer.

Determinism¶

Paula::advance_audio schedules master and stem samples in emulated time. Warp changes host pacing without changing that schedule. tests/audio_stems_determinism.rs compares the output files from repeated runs. Reproducibility still depends on repeatable source input; see the host boundary and MHI’s floating-point limits.

Savestates¶

Paula::audio: AudioMux is skipped by serde because it is host output. Bus::adopt_host_resources moves the live mux, including open stem writers, onto the restored Bus. A capture therefore continues in the same files across a save-state load.

The decimation state does ride the state: channel_area/area_cck carry the partly integrated oversample interval, and each Decimator carries its tap history (but not its kernel, which Deserialize rebuilds from the factor, as Resampler does). host_sample_acc keeps the meaning and range it always had -- colour clocks times the mixer rate, rolling at PAULA_CLOCK_HZ -- with both the oversample grid and the mixer frame read off it as thresholds, so the PAUL chunk needed no version bump. All three fields are #[serde(default)]: a state written before the decimation existed resumes with silent tap histories, which is a millisecond of filter warm-up and no click.

Nothing else tracks where in a mixer frame the machine is. A Decimator holds tap history and nothing more -- it is advance_audio that says when an output is due, from the accumulator. Had the decimators counted their own way to each frame, a state restored with the accumulator part way through one would have set them counting from zero, and the mix would have come out a slice or three late from then on, permanently.

Web build¶

AudioMux and the stem-writer code compile without the frontend feature. The browser wrapper uses WebAudioSink as the master sink and does not call enable_stems; --audio-stems is available through the native CLI.