From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Hollis Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 18:33:08 +0000 Subject: Re: 4D-NXs (was Re: Sync Issues) Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-sound@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Paul Barton-Davis wrote: > >Well one would have to weigh the effort of reverse engineering it against > >the gains. Is there any point reverse engineering such ancient hardware? > >Compared to eg reverse engineering the emu10k or aureal chips. > what do you think the expected lifetime of any of the current > generation of chips is, given how long every previous equivalent has > lasted ? if we're reverse engineering a chip more than 18mths after > its first use in a PC soundcard, i'd say we might well be wasting our > time, in the long haul. The Cirrus Logic chips have been around a long time. The ESS chips have been around a long time too. The Creative Labs stuff has been around for more than 10 years. If these chipsets would have had to be reverse engineered, it would definitely not have been a waste of time since the data would still be useful today. Many chipsets go through incremental improvements (eg CS42xx, ESS1xxx) so reverse engineering one may prove to be useful later since future chips may be (mostly) backwards-compatible, with a few changes. I suspect this is the case with the YMF7xx chips and maybe even the AU8xxx ones. Definitely the YMF7xx chips and the DS-1x architecture look like theyre going to be around for some time. -Dan