Re: Sound support (2), using hardware directly

["John R. Sowden" <jsowden@americansentry.net>]

On Saturday 23 July 2005 04:16, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> Stas Sergeev wrote:
> > Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> >> I have ran it succesfully on my AMD Athlon @ 1GHz, and I know there
> >> are softsynths that need much less, although not for Linux.
> >
> > As I said, you can tune timidity++
> > to work even on 386, just disable
> > some effects processing.
>
> Ah, OK. I was more thinking of i386 and compiling Timidity without
> special instructions for P4.
>
> > There are also the alternative
> > synthesizers, like fluidsynth,
> > as someone pointed out to me, but
> > I am not sure if they work as an
> > alsa sequencer backend, or have
> > the server interface for midid.
>
> I think I'll just try Timidity :)
>
> >> running a softsynth inside Dosemu...
> >
> > That is possible for FM synth, but
> > you really don't want to distribute
> > the instrument patchsets with dosemu.
>
> This wasn't meant for distribution with Dosemu. I also do not know any
> FM synths that run in Dos. I've just tried WinGroove in Dosemu (which I
> haven't been able to run for a long time) and it didn't seem to run that
> bad!
> I still haven't been able to install the SB16 drivers for MS Windows
> though. (I'll probably have to get them of a real machine, since those
> annoying Creative installers think too much.) Those might improve the
> quality even more.
>
> >> Well, the problem seemed to be at the time that the (OPL3) driver from
> >> ALSA was conflicting with the OPL3 being accessed directly.
> >
> > In this case simply not loading the
> > OPL3 driver from ALSA would help,
> > but IIRC it doesn't.
>
> Yes, but it would be nice to still have sequencer support for other
> Linux apps too similar to how MS Windows seems to be able to do it.
> Also not loading the OPL3 driver doesn't seem to be possible, since the
> plain sounddriver seems to have a dependency on the OPL3 driver. At
> least on snd_opl3_lib. I do not know how serious this is though. Also
> what snd_opl3_synth does and what snd_opl3_lib does and why they're not
> combined, is not clear to me.
> I was thinking myself of some sort of special interface for applications
> like Dosemu, but if there already is full hardware access that doesn't
> really sound like an improvement.
> Maybe the OPL3 would just need some initialization first before it would
> work with most games, so it gets in the state where it is also when no
> driver has loaded. Then it might be possible to have some sort of Dos
> program that runs inside Dosemu before running the game to do it .

Since this thread has worked it way to "Dosemu talking directly to hardware", 
I am interested in using my linux/dosemu box to connect to a local area 
network that runs DOS only (we don't do windows).  Now I have to either boot 
into DOS on my linux box via grub or, using a kvm, switch to a different 
computer.  Neither of these options allow me to share data to/from 
Linux/Dosemu and DOS.  My net is "Little Big Lan".  It have served me well 
for about 10 years, but I will grudgingly let it go if I have to.

tia,

-- 
John R. Sowden
AMERICAN SENTRY SYSTEMS, INC.
Residential & Commercial Alarm Service
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Serving the San Francisco Bay Area Since 1967
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