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Date:      Thu, 16 Oct 1997 07:24:48 +0100 (MET)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        rhh@ct.picker.com (Randall Hopper)
Cc:        multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Who is interested in /dev/midi and /dev/synth ?
Message-ID:  <199710160624.HAA10739@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <19971015171047.05325@ct.picker.com> from "Randall Hopper" at Oct 15, 97 05:10:28 pm

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> Luigi Rizzo:
>  |> Luigi Rizzo:
>  |> |I am wondering if there is anyone who really needs /dev/midi and
>  |> |/dev/synth, and used them on the old sound driver.  If you do, (Uncle
>  |> |Sam's finger pointed at you) speak up, telling which apps you use
>  |> |which do not work with the new audio driver, where I can find them,
>  |> |and how are you going to help in implementing these devices.
...
> If the functionality is there from the old driver, why rip it out?

neither the original driver nor the new one do everything we would like
to. So either choice you make, it will leave some people disappointed. 
I am well aware of that and so I am perfectly comfortable with
people using the old driver if it works for them. I would be more than
happy to add missing features to the new driver, but I have only so
much time and especially not enough expertise and hardware for
developing and testing /dev/synth, so it will be necessary that someone
steps in and helps. I will be more than glad to help on this.

It is not a matter of "ripping out functionality", the new driver is a
complete rewrite and we cannot simply cut&paste files from the old one
without understanding what they do.

I also want to point out that the new driver with support for a ton of
different cards and extensive comments amounts to about 5000 lines of C
code. The synth-related functionalities in guspnp10a are as following:

prova# wc *c
    3384   10481   90014 awe_wave.c
    4877   16389  124344 gus_wave.c
     679    2065   15823 midi_synth.c
    1632    4532   36632 mpu401.c
    1132    3531   27447 opl3.c
    1769    4959   37811 sequencer.c

and others. Assuming that there is some severe code bloat, still it
will be a non trivial task to extract the useful stuff from these big
files which in some cases come straight from the SDK of the various
manufacturers.

One of the goals of the new driver was to have a high-quality piece of
software, documented and easy to follow even from other people than the
author. Importing large files from some vendor's SDK is not the way to
achieve this result.

> You originally asked for those that use the synth devices with the old
> sound driver to speak up and I did.  Though the AWE driver and sequencer
> apps, I play MIDIs, MODs, 669s, S3Ms, etc. (while I work on other things)
> and the Doom Music server (on occasion) on the wavetable side of my SB32.
> It sounds like I didn't give you the answer you wanted.

well you missed the last sentence :) really I hoped that people
like you could help in adding support for the synth since you
certainly have quite some expertise and maybe even interest in
these features. But of course you also might have limited time and
cannot work on everything.

	Cheers
	Luigi
-----------------------------+--------------------------------------
Luigi Rizzo                  |  Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it    |  Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533           |  via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522           |  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
_____________________________|______________________________________



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