linux and soundcards

[Kerry Hoath]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 05:58:22PM -0600, Adam Myrow wrote:
> releases and the developer who I finally got in touch with claimed that
> there was a hardware bug in the SB16 cards.  If that were the case, no
> driver would work with them.  So, if you are going to use Alsa on an old
There are indeed bugs in the sound blaster cards; bugs that drivers work around.
Also; sound blaster cards also need dma bounce buffers below the 16-meg limit that don't cross a
64k boundary for 8-bit and 128k boundary for 16-bit dma.
Certain revisions of the sb dsp chips had various quirks. you'd be horrified to
see the filthy hacks that allow them to work under Windows.
I believe there are coding problems in the later alsa drivers. It is a sad
reality that the ISA slot may soon be a thing of the past.
the latency problems; the bandwidth limitations and the legacy interfaces
have basically discouraged most programmers from keeping the evil code up to 
date with modern pci cards that just work so much better.
I won't be surprised if the next version of windows drops support for isa sound blaster cards
or in fact most isa cards except for the
fact that creative would have a rather large complain.
Frankly there are newer and better cards to write drivers for; and I
have about 5 sb cards here with 3 eeing awe32 cards
with 8megs on them.
Certain via boards also have bugs in the ISA dma logic that sound cards use which
don't occurr ont he pci bus.
I also have gravis cards so in my isa only machines I tend to
install gravis because they have better wavetable,
are quieter rf wise when sampling and have better
aliasing filters.
One of the better cards was the pas16 but there is no alsa driver for it
and if the oss drivers go from the kernel the cards will be unusable.
I also have a Turble beach Tropez with 12megs on it; and a pile of other
isa cards. They all gather dust because
I either don't have isa slots to put them in;
or the pci sound works better on the boards even
if it is sometimes onboard.
Even my pentium 100 machines have pci sound in them since the slots
are shared isa/pci for 2 of the 3 slots and it makes sense to run
pci sound and isa network (these machines don't require 100megabit so I run 
3c509 Etherlink III cards in them).

Regards, Kerry.

-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
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