[hpsdr] Potential New openHPSDR Project

[Jeremy McDermond]

A message from the all-too-vocal minority...

On Jul 11, 2010, at 6:48 AM, Graham / KE9H wrote:

> 
> It is just that the more I learn, Windows is a horrible realtime environment.  Microsoft
> would probably say that it is not realtime, and was not intended to be used that way.
> 
> So either we figure out how to get Windows to behave the way we want it to, or
> we allow for a signal processing resource that is separate, and use the PC as a
> thin client GUI.

I'm all for whatever as long as those operating systems that we can get to behave properly aren't punished to get those operating systems that can't behave properly to work.  I don't know how horrible a realtime environment MacOS X is from a technical perspective.  I do know there are lots of tweaks in the kernel to support low latency audio type devices because of the large contingency of people who use the OS to support Apple's Logic Pro or DigiDesign's ProTools.  These guys are doing significant amounts of DSP on audio signals coming into the computer and require really low latency.

My empirical experience with judicious use of realtime threads on MacOS X in MacHPSDR is that it works fairly well.  It's very difficult for me to get audio dropouts with the current architecture, even when playing HD video at the same time.

I probably sound like smug, whiny bastard.  I like the idea of having an embedded controller for the "I hate computers" crowd.  I just don't want to lose flexibility because we start designing around Microsoft's shortcomings.

--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcdermj at xenotropic.com




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