PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi,

I plan to revive an old P4-based DAW running on win2K 32bits.
I already have a Pulsar I (which is 1st gen card right?) with a Scope v4.5 licence. I also have 2 Luna II (2nd gen card) to give extra DSP power.
Since the Pulsar I is a 1st gen card and mixing it with 2nd gen cards won't reduce the minimal latency (as I have read here and there, but correct me if I'm wrong), I wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to replace the Pulsar I by a Pulsar II...

Is it possible to ''transfer'' a licence from a card to another one? For instance, the v4.5 I have on the Pulsar I, to a Pulsar II ?

i could also look for a Pulsar II with a Scope licence. And here are the questions about Scope versions differences. Does anybody know the main differences between Scope 4.5 and 5?
AFAIK, v5.1 differs from v5 only with the 64bits support right?
And no major difference between v5.1 and v7 except the plug-ins package which is greater in v7? XTC mode is also dropped in v7 isn't it?
I would like to keep the XTC mode.

So the v5/5.1 could be the best tradeoff in terms of plug-in package and ''period-correctness'' on a win2K 32bits system...

What do you think?

Cheers,
JB

you should get the 2nd gen lower latency.
a Pulsar2 has more dsp than a Pulsar1 and it also handles the PCI traffic better. both will work. the newer card is better.

it is possible to transfer plugin licenses to another card, but the Sxope software license is not transferrable. actually, if the card with a license is broken and either returned or destroyed with evidence, it is possible to transfer the Scope license.

v5 will work in win7 32bit, v5.1 allows 64bit windows. for win10 or 11, you probably want v7, as it has a signed driver. this is very important to win10 and 11 security since they require a singed driver. unsigned drivers are removed every update by windows and win10 and 11 must update ot you will have problems.

no, v7 dies not have XTC mode. personally, i don't like XTC mode, Scope mode is much more useful, and it's the way the card was made to work. XTC mode is popular in some circles, but it really wastes resources and eliminates a lot of the card's power. still, if you porefer it, that is your decision.

you cannot purchase v5/5.1 at this time. it also was twice the price of v7. write to support if that is a problem. XTC mode in v4.5 is identical to XTC mode in v5.1(or v3, which is where XTC mode came from, and where developement ceased), so if XTC mode is a big deal, stay with v4.5.

if you want to update(probably worth it for the plugins, depending on what you have) then get v7.

To support GaryB, XTC mode dates back to an era when CPU processing was very limited, and system bus bandwidth was better allocated to diverting processing to the DSP cards via XTC than processing audio via onboard devices and generating it with synths.

In our era, the time spent round-tripping all of that data via XTC mode is signifantly greater than what you would do via the Scope routing interface, and this causes the CPU to 'wait' for many simple things (in XTC time) that it could perform much faster on the native plugins that do the same things. Scope has its strengths, learn those and deploy them in the dedicated Scope environment and use that just as you do with outboard.

In fact I find the latter method so powerful that my Scope PCI system and my Xite system are both external to other machines here, and I use them exactly as I would outboard gear via analog and digital i/o (and MIDI etc). Scope 7 is a worthy update in that sense as it means I can run more modern motherboards, older systems are simply aging and provide less stability now. My motherboard(s) for each system date back to 2015, which is still almost 10 years old, and they run significantly cooler and quieter (and with the same or less power) than the system(s) they replaced. The Scope cards benefit from the cooler case too in terms of better cooling for them resulting in better longevity and stability. My P4 era system was simply too hot.

Thank you for these great pieces of information.
As I said, my goal here is to rebuild an old fashioned DAW. I really like old OS (98SE, 2k) for their snappiness with post-2000 hardware. Power limitation is also not a problem here since I already have a more modern setup with 2 Pulsar II and V7 which works like a charm.

In terms of plug-in package, is there any big difference between V4.5 and V5?