Re: Sound support (2), using hardware directly

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

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 .

Thanks,
Julius