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Date:      Fri, 03 Jan 2003 01:39:33 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Josh Tolbert <hemi@scoundrelz.net>
Cc:        freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Sound frustration.
Message-ID:  <3E155A55.79A06BB4@mindspring.com>
References:  <20030103012017.K6469-100000@view.scoundrelz.net>

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Josh Tolbert wrote:
>         Thanks for the suggestions. The PC164LX doesn't have integrated
> sound and PCI_PARITY was disabled a while ago. What sound cards use this
> magic ES1888 chip that everyone says works?

It's the integrated sound chip on the PC164LX that you say it
doesn't have.  8-) 8-).  You may want to look at the labels on
the chips on your motherboard, and look for 4 pins in a line
that aren't connected to anything.

As far as ISA vs. PCI, I believe there are problems with the
DMA on the PCI, as I noted previously, and if you use the
on-board ATA controllers, ou use up all your DMA channels that
you can use in non-host-master mosde with your PCI bridge,
before you start hving problems with negotiation, which is
what your problems sounded like to me.

Realize that I haven't had access to a 164 for years, now,
though.

One experiment you might try is to halve the amount of memory
(so you have less than 1G in the thing), and see if this is a
window problem.  Note that ISA devices don't have such problems,
because they don't use a large-but-limnited mapped window for I/O.
If you were to rewrite the sound driver code to use the bus space
stuff (not usefully documented, from what I can tell), then you
might see the problem "go away": ISA bounces all it's I/O in
buffers under 64M, which would avoid the window issue.

Actually, the sound data rate is always going to be low enough
that you should be able to live with an ISA interface.

If you want reinforcement about some of the things I've said,
google for `PC164LX sound alpha PCI'; Linux and NetBSD both
have issues, except with specific cards (users in both camps
recommend the DEC/Microsoft Sound System card, which is to say,
an ISA card).

-- Terry

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