Re: Sound support (2), using hardware directly

[Julius Schwartzenberg <julius@zgod.cjb.net>]

Stas Sergeev 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).

My AWE doesn't have hardware mixing, but the wavetable indeed allows me 
to have both at the same time. My laptop does have hardware mixing, but 
it isn't very fast (Pentium III 500MHz, 128MB RAM), so I don't know how 
fast a softsynth will work.

> 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.

Yes I noticed your pc-speaker driver in ALSA :)
Is the goal really to get full sound and music from Dosemu through a 
plain pc-speaker?
I know that the current sound support has many problems. I used to have 
many problems getting sound to work at all on real hardware though and 
several games that Dosemu runs with good sound, do not work in MS 
Windows 9x with sound for example. Which is why I am considering the 
Dosemu sound to work pretty well for me. I know there are many problem 
with it though and having even better sound support would be great of 
course!
I was able to fix the latency problem in Aladdin btw by changing a value 
in my dosemu.conf. I believe I have also mailed about that at some point.

>> 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.

I understand the current OPL3 modules aren't suitable to be used in this 
case? I personally indeed do not really care about needing root access, 
so a working solution using $_ports would work for me. Would you 
recommend sending an e-mail to the ALSA mailing list about this?

>> 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.

OK, that indeed makes sense. I could imagine having a system-wide 
library though (AdPlug maybe?) so that it would be more easy to maintain 
the emulator.

>> 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.

Woa, I'm really curious now.... :D

Thanks again for all the good stuff!

Julius