1da177e4c3
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!
81 lines
2.5 KiB
Text
81 lines
2.5 KiB
Text
/proc/sound, /dev/sndstat
|
|
-------------------------
|
|
|
|
/proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the
|
|
driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading,
|
|
check the kernel log (dmesg).
|
|
|
|
|
|
ALaw/uLaw sample formats
|
|
------------------------
|
|
|
|
This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats.
|
|
ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device
|
|
using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is
|
|
that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding
|
|
conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly
|
|
code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver.
|
|
And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-)
|
|
and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway.
|
|
In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows:
|
|
|
|
cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp
|
|
|
|
does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from
|
|
Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL
|
|
below) to play many different audio file formats.
|
|
The script automatically determines the audio format
|
|
and does do audio conversions if necessary.
|
|
http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html
|
|
|
|
|
|
Blocking vs. nonblocking IO
|
|
---------------------------
|
|
|
|
Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag
|
|
not only during open, but also during read and write.
|
|
This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more
|
|
regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch
|
|
is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html.
|
|
(Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free).
|
|
|
|
|
|
MIDI UART
|
|
---------
|
|
|
|
The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with
|
|
no ioctl's supported.
|
|
|
|
|
|
MIDI synthesizer
|
|
----------------
|
|
|
|
The card both has an OPL compatible FM synthesizer as well as
|
|
a wavetable synthesizer.
|
|
|
|
I haven't managed so far to get the OPL synth running.
|
|
|
|
Using the wavetable synthesizer requires allocating
|
|
1-4MB of physically contiguous memory, which isn't possible
|
|
currently on Linux without ugly hacks like the bigphysarea
|
|
patch. Therefore, the driver doesn't support wavetable
|
|
synthesis.
|
|
|
|
|
|
No support from S3
|
|
------------------
|
|
|
|
I do not get any support from S3. Therefore, the driver
|
|
still has many problems. For example, although the manual
|
|
states that the chip should be able to access the sample
|
|
buffer anywhere in 32bit address space, I haven't managed to
|
|
get it working with buffers above 16M. Therefore, the card
|
|
has the same disadvantages as ISA soundcards.
|
|
|
|
Given that the card is also very noisy, and if you haven't
|
|
already bought it, you should strongly opt for one of the
|
|
comparatively priced Ensoniq products.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thomas Sailer
|
|
t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch
|