MacroSystem Toccata 16-bit sound card
One might wonder if any mainstream Amiga owner needs a 16-bit soundcard in their Amiga. It is not like every game or application which uses sound takes advantage of the sound card, not at all. Most games, if not all important Amiga titles, uses the native 8-bit four channel sound. Some music/sound applications do support sound cards but most music made on the Amiga was made in a tracker program, a kind of music composing software in which music modules could be created and which did not usually support sound cards.
Amiga is capable of playing MP3 music. You need at least a Motorola 060 processor to be able to play MP3 music without loss of audio quality but without a soundcard music will be played in 8-bit. With a soundcard you can enjoy MP3 music in 16-bit. Another classic use for sound cards in Amiga system was in video editing.
MacroSystem made some very nice hardware for the Commodore Amiga. They also created one of the few commercial Amiga clones called the Draco. The Draco was a 040/060 based hi-end computer running Workbench 3.1 intended to be used for video editing. The Draco lacked the custom chipset of the Amiga and ran only ‘system friendly’ application. MacroSystem was also the company behind the Vlab and Vlab motion Zorro 2 card for the Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 systems. The Vlab was a video digitizer, you could grab images from a video source and save them out as pictures. The Vlab motion was a video editing card and could digitize 24-bit video.
The Toccata soundcard (also made by MacroSystem) could be used with the Vlab motion to edit non linear sound and video. The Toccata soundcard is a nicely designed Zorro 2 card. The board layout is quite classy with chips dominating the left part of the card and the sound chip firmly planted in a PLCC-socket in the middle of the card. The right side of the card is dominated by three massive 6.3 millimeter stereo sockets accessible from the back of the card and two internal 3.5 millimeter internal stereo sockets. The three 6.3 millimeters stereo sockets are, “sound out”, “sound in” and “aux”. The two internal 3.5 millimeter sockets are “aux2″ and “mic”. There are no hand soldered “last minute” patch cables running between chips on this piece of hardware.
The “aux” ports are highly useful since the native Amiga sound is outputted from the motherboard connectors. By routing native Amiga audio in to the Aux port user do not have to switch cables when listening to 16-bit audio or native 8-bit Amiga audio. However this will only work inside Workbench so any software which is “banging the hardware” directly wont sound anything if speakers are hooked up to the Toccata card.
It might seem weird at first to find internal 3.5 millimeter stereo sockets on the side of the card not accessible from the outside of the computer but it makes perfect sense. It is for example possible to route audio from the CD-rom to the “aux2″ socket so music from the CD is mixed in with the 16-bit and 8-bit audio.
The MacroSystem Toccata sound card was not the first sound card for the Amiga and there are newer sound cards for example the Prelude and the Delfina (made by other manufacturers). MacroSystem do not make Amiga hardware anymore but all hardware I have used which was made by them have been great and stable hardware, so if you happen to find a Toccata, get it, it is well worth it if you are an Amiga enthusiast with a big box system.