Re: Sound support (2), using hardware directly

[Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru>]

Hello.

Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> The current system seems to work pretty well for me
It doesn't even work with ALSA.
Also, your AWE probably have the
hardware mixing, but for those
with the cheap sound cards, it
is not possible to get the midi
together with sound (provided they
do not have the wave-table too).
I myself can't get this to work on
my pc-speaker, and that really annoyed
me enough to start writing the new
code. Now as for the DOS programs:
FT2 doesn't work, sound in DOOM
stutters, sound in Aladdin have a
big latencies, etc. It is not very
good.

> While OPL3 emulation would be really nice, wouldn't it be better to 
> implement support for real OPL3 chips and emulate and OPL3 at another 
> level in the system if one isn't availlable?
Problematic. Access to the real OPL3
will require root or the kernel module.
And then you can just use $_ports to
get this working that way, no need to
write anything (yes, I know it doesn't
work for you right now, but thats a
different problem). So the real value
is to have the good OPL3 emulation.

> Then also other
> applications such as FreeSCI and
> ScummVM would be able to make use of
> it.
They all use the MAME OPL3 emulation
engine. I don't think they'll want
something else. And really, having
the OPL3 emulation system-wide doesn't
sound sane to me - this is too specific
to the old-PC emulators.

> About the new system. If the new code isn't comparable to the current 
> code yet, maybe release 1.4 of Dosemu should still contain the old 
> code?
Noone knows when 1.4 will be released.

> I'm really looking forward to the new stuff.
You will get it and the sound code
is not even the main part.