Re: App database, libsynth

[Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru>]

Hello.

Ryan Underwood wrote:
>> Is there a planned solution for that? Or is there
>> something in ALSA that can help with the real-time
>> mixing even under that hostile conditions? dmix?
>  Yes, the dmix
Will this require an ALSA support plugin for
dosemu, or it is somehow possible to use dmix
via an OSS emulation layer?

> any soundcard that is modern enough to not have a OPL* cell on it 
> should support multiple opens.
I think there are many cheap PCI boards without
either. Btw, AFAIK WinXP decided against using
the HW mixing (I may be wrong), in which case it
(HW mixing, not XP) will not survive for too long:)

> If you think the mixing should be done inside
> the application
Actually I don't think so. But otherwise we have
to write another output plugin (you can't do too
much with OSS) and we may still need an internal
resampling anyway, because the program may alter
the sampling rate on the fly (without interrupting
the transferr) and I don't know if any of the
existing software can handle that properly.
Internal resampling will also help the current
OSS output a lot. So it is a matter of writing
another output plugin and internal resampling.
This is a good thing to do, but as noone has time...

> I tried to keep the application
> interface very simple and do most of the device management internal to
> the library, so the application programmer has to do no more than create
> a synth device, check if it was successful, and then write data to the
> device.
So does it interact with ALSA, or you decided to
do it a standalone?

> I can create a threaded interface to the library instead that operates
> within the process context, and returns a buffer to be mixed by the
> programmer of the application.
[]
> It also
> requires the program to have different behavior whether there is real 
> or emulated hardware.
OK, that makes sense of course. It is good that
your lib can use the real hardware and no point
to drop that only because noone wants to write
another sound plugin (and resampling!) for dosemu:)

> It didn't seem like as flexible a solution.
Yes, it is just cheap (I think) and is more
feasible under the current circumstances etc,
but after all it is rather poor.

> By the way, has anyone looked at using QEMU in dosemu?
Yes. Fabrice asked me to remove the coopthreads
from dosemu to make it qemu-compatible. The
replacement for coopthreads is already in CVS,
but the complete removal of coopthreads will
require also removing comcom.com, so the
coopthreads is still there.
OTOH I asked Fabrice to add some dos4gw support
to qemu.
He did that and dos4gw now runs, but not that
I was able to really get some of the prot. mode
apps running. Before qemu to support at least
the minimal amount of DPMI apps, I think it is
useless for dosemu (also even far not all the realmode
apps are working). After all qemu is officially
in an Alpha stage (the last time I checked),
so it may be too early for the integration
(but a good long-term ToDo if someone have enough
time and motivation).