Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 11:32:00 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Alex <garbanzo@hooked.net> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AWE32/64 support? Message-ID: <19970810113200.09723@ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <199708092031.NAA07209@rah.star-gate.com>; from Amancio Hasty on Sat, Aug 09, 1997 at 01:31:37PM -0700 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970808174412.4871E-100000@zippy.dyn.ml.org> <199708092031.NAA07209@rah.star-gate.com>
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Amancio Hasty:
|>From The Desk Of Alex :
|> I've noticed a lack of documentation ofSoundBlaster AWE[32,64] support,
|> outta curiosity, is there something obvious I missed? I did notice some
|> 'drivers' for it.
|>
|> - alex (not subscribed to this list)
|
|Randall Hopper is our resident AWE expert just bug him 8)
Well, I'm no expert, but let me try to fill-in here.
The AWE driver provides wavetable support for the the SB cards that
have the EMU-8000 synth chip (SB32s, AWE32s, and AWE64s), giving you synth
music in Doom, great-sounding MIDIs, MODs, 669s, S3Ms, GUS sequencer
compatibility, etc. As Doug mentioned, the SB16 drivers are used for DSP
support since effectively that's what's on these cards (SB16 or the
compatible Vibra16 chipset).
This AWE driver is port from Linux. I ported it last fall and work
with the driver author to keep new versions compiling on both Linux and
FreeBSD.
The driver revision checked into 2.2 and 3.0-current (as well as what
I re-integrated into the 3.5 PnP drivers) is the latest non-GPLed version
of this driver. It works, however you'll want to drop in a later version
to build your kernel since:
1) the ports I submitted last fall to use this driver strangely
weren't pulled into the ports/packages trees (...no clue), and
2) the newer driver versions have some nice features you'll want
(e.g. they can load soundfont SBKs & SF2 directly)
Having the non-GPLed version in our source tree makes popping in a more
recent version to build a kernel very trivial, which is why I merged it
into the 3.5 stuff too.
If you want to try the AWE driver, surf to:
http://multiverse.com/~rhh/awedrv
which has my links to a recent AWE driver and ports for several packages
that make use of the synth on your SB32 or AWE card. It describes how to
build everything, and it also links to the Linux AWE driver page where you
can find more documentation.
If you want to port some GUS software to work with the AWE that isn't
on the web page, you'll likely only need to change refs to "(type ==
SAMPLE_TYPE_GUS)" to "(type = SAMPLE_TYPE_GUS) || (type ==
SAMPLE_TYPE_AWE32)" since the driver supports the GUS patch format as well
as its own.
Side note: I'd like to pull in a more recent AWE driver version into
the tree for everyone, but my understanding is that since its GPLed, this
prevents inclusion in our kernel source tree. If we made the sound driver
an LKM, and if the driver author would agree to change to LGPL, I think
that would let us. But as far as I know, right now we can't so folks have
to update themselves.
Hope this helps.
Randall
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