[Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Emmanuel Fleury]

Hi all,

I did try to look for Alsa drivers for the new X-Fi chip from Creatives
(http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050818/), but I didn't find any.

I there something running around this chip ? Or no plan yet ?

Regards
-- 
Emmanuel Fleury

Assistant Professor          | Office: B1-201
Computer Science Department, | Phone:  +45 96 35 72 23
Aalborg University,          | Mobile: +45 26 22 98 03
Fredriks Bajersvej 7E,       | E-mail: fleury@cs.aau.dk
9220 Aalborg East, Denmark   | URL: www.cs.aau.dk/~fleury

Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 11:55 +0200, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I did try to look for Alsa drivers for the new X-Fi chip from Creatives
> (http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050818/), but I didn't find any.
> 
> I there something running around this chip ? Or no plan yet ?

Are these even on the market yet?

If this is the long awaited emu10k3, then there's a good chance we can
support it.  But we'll need at the very least a hardware sample from
Creative.

Lee

Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 18:52 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> If this is the long awaited emu10k3, then there's a good chance we can
> support it.  But we'll need at the very least a hardware sample from
> Creative. 

OK, it's the ca20k1 (!).  So it's likely to be as different from the
emu10k1 and emu10k1 as those were from the AWE32 or whatever came
before.

IOW there's no way we can write a driver for this without some docs from
Creative.  Unless they are planning on submitting their own driver of
course.

Lee 

Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Emmanuel Fleury]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 11:55 +0200, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> 
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I did try to look for Alsa drivers for the new X-Fi chip from Creatives
>>(http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050818/), but I didn't find any.
>>
>>I there something running around this chip ? Or no plan yet ?
> 
> 
> Are these even on the market yet?

If not yet, it will be soon.

> If this is the long awaited emu10k3, then there's a good chance we can
> support it.  But we'll need at the very least a hardware sample from
> Creative.

No, it seems to me to be a totally new chip (ca20k1). I don't think you
can use any existing driver to start with. :-/

As you say, documentation from Creatives about the chip will be needed.

So, there is no project about this yet ?

Regards
-- 
Emmanuel Fleury

Assistant Professor          | Office: B1-201
Computer Science Department, | Phone:  +45 96 35 72 23
Aalborg University,          | Mobile: +45 26 22 98 03
Fredriks Bajersvej 7E,       | E-mail: fleury@cs.aau.dk
9220 Aalborg East, Denmark   | URL: www.cs.aau.dk/~fleury

Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 08:48 +0200, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> So, there is no project about this yet

No, not yet.  The ALSA team has a contact at Creative, I guess the next
step is to ask them.

Lee

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Takashi Iwai]

At Sat, 20 Aug 2005 03:08:07 -0400,
Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 08:48 +0200, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> > So, there is no project about this yet
> 
> No, not yet.  The ALSA team has a contact at Creative, I guess the next
> step is to ask them.

Maybe James knows at best...


Takashi

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Takashi Iwai wrote:
> At Sat, 20 Aug 2005 03:08:07 -0400,
> Lee Revell wrote:
> 
>>On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 08:48 +0200, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
>>
>>>So, there is no project about this yet
>>
>>No, not yet.  The ALSA team has a contact at Creative, I guess the next
>>step is to ask them.
> 
> 
> Maybe James knows at best...
> 
> 
> Takashi
> 

We are not going to get any support from Creative for the X-Fi chip.
We do not get support from Creative for any Creative chip that has a DSP 
in it.

James

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 21:38 +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> We are not going to get any support from Creative for the X-Fi chip.
> We do not get support from Creative for any Creative chip that has a
> DSP in it. 

Well, except for the emu10k1 driver that Creative wrote and released
years ago.  I don't see why they can't do something similar with the
X-Fi stuff.  We don't need or expect the DSP programming docs, just the
minimum to get sound in and out of the thing.

So do you expect Creative to leave thousands of emu10k1/emu10k2 Linux
users with no upgrade path?  I think if they tried to do this we could
make it a real PR nightmare for them.

Lee

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Peter Zubaj]

This is too expensive card to be only able use it as simple card.
My advice buy something else.
I don't think fight with creative can bring anything good to linux.
Leave Creative as is. There is plenty of other hardware from other
manufacturer worth money.

Peter Zubaj

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 17:54 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 21:38 +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > We are not going to get any support from Creative for the X-Fi chip.
> > We do not get support from Creative for any Creative chip that has a
> > DSP in it. 
> 
> Well, except for the emu10k1 driver that Creative wrote and released
> years ago.  I don't see why they can't do something similar with the
> X-Fi stuff.  We don't need or expect the DSP programming docs, just the
> minimum to get sound in and out of the thing.
> 
> So do you expect Creative to leave thousands of emu10k1/emu10k2 Linux
> users with no upgrade path?  I think if they tried to do this we could
> make it a real PR nightmare for them.
> 
> Lee

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 09:41:11PM +0100, Peter Zubaj wrote:
> This is too expensive card to be only able use it as simple card.
> My advice buy something else.
> I don't think fight with creative can bring anything good to linux.
> Leave Creative as is. There is plenty of other hardware from other
> manufacturer worth money.

If I could get the same level of support as my sb live has, I would be
quite happy.  I don't need EAX, but I do want midi synth and multi
channel audio playback and recording and such to work, and all the line
in and out on the device.  We have that on the emu10kx cards as far as I
can tell (at least everything I have used on my sb live platinum works).

I don't mind if the fancy DSP algorithms and EAX is windows only, since
it really only applies to games, and if I want to play a windows game, I
will reboot to windows.  Doesn't happen very often lately, but with an
athlon 700, it isn't that surprising really.  Maybe when someday I get
an athlon 64 instead.

So I would buy creative's new card if it had the same level of support in
alsa as the current emu10kx cards do.  Any more I don't expect, but any
less would mean I don't buy one.  The emu10k1 sb live was the first
creative product I was ever willing to buy and with the support it has
in linux I have been happy with it.  I didn't want their older cards,
and I don't want most of the other cheap crap cards that have been
around (I used to have a few gravis cards and liked those).

Most onboard audio seems to pretty decent these days, but if you expect
midi to work, you want something a bit better.

So I for one would love to see creative offer enough documentation or
example code to replicate the features of the emu10kx on the new chip,
even if we still don't get DSP algorithms.  If they don't, well I won't
buy one, and I won't recomend it to anyone either.  If they do, I will
highly recomend it (if it works as well as it appears it should), and I
will buy one too.

Len Sorensen

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 14:48 -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> I don't mind if the fancy DSP algorithms and EAX is windows only

Actually the emu10k1 DSP code to implement EAX 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x is
known.  Someone could easily implement it on Linux, it's just never
happened.

Lee

Re: [Alsa-devel] Re: [Alsa drivers] Creatives X-Fi chip

[Lee Revell]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 21:41 +0100, Peter Zubaj wrote:
> This is too expensive card to be only able use it as simple card.
> My advice buy something else.
> I don't think fight with creative can bring anything good to linux.
> Leave Creative as is. There is plenty of other hardware from other
> manufacturer worth money.

I agree, but the fact is that the emu10k* devices own the Windows gamer
market and like it or not these devices will sell millions of units, and
they've worked perfectly in Linux for years.  So these users have a
reasonable expectation that Creative will provide them an upgrade path,
just like they did for SBLive! -> Audigy1 and Audigy1 -> Audigy2.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with Creative, but regardless of what I
(or any Linux developer) does, there's going to be a fight if they try
to lock out Linux users.

Lee