sound cards

[Geoff Shang]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Steve Holmes wrote:

> Speaking of the older SB cards, how does alsa work with them? In
> particular, the sb16?

I used an SB16 with ALSA extensively for 3 years before retiring it 2
months ago for an SBLive.  The only reason I did this was because I needed
the multiple waveout capabilities of the SBLive.  Had this need not
arrisen, I'd still be using it.

You need to pass options to it so it can find the card.  Here's what I had
in my aliases file:

alias char-major-116 snd
options snd major=116 cards_limit=1
alias snd-card-0 snd-sb16
options snd-sb16 index=0 id="SB-16" \
        port=0x220 irq=5 dma8=1 dma16=5 \
        mpu_port=0x330

And this was followed by the OSS compatibility stuff.

> I have an old laptop that has an sb16 compatible
> card built in and I would like to switch to ALSA on that.

Please note that many cards claiming to be SB16 compatible are not.  This
is covered quite well in the OSS howto.  You'll need to find out what is
*really* in there before determining which drivers will work with it.

Geoff.