Date: Sun, 7 May 95 17:29:07 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: spaz@u.washington.edu (John Utz) Cc: ponds!rivers@dg-rtp.dg.com, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Interesting sound card problems (in FreeBSD 2.0R.) Message-ID: <9505072329.AA29788@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91i.950507145255.2000A-100000@saul2.u.washington.edu> from "John Utz" at May 7, 95 03:18:39 pm
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> > I recently purchased an ISP-16 sound card from MediaMagic Inc. > > This card claims SoundBlaster Pro compatibility, and comes with > > some nice Windows bundled software. [ ... ] > > If I run (under DOS) the MediaMagic supplied initialition program > > (ISPINIT.EXE), then boot FreeBSD; things appear to work. The probe > > (usually) finds a SoundBlaster Pro. > > ummm, it kinda sounds to me like they are not compatible at the > hardware level! They may be running their own alien being hardware in > there and then running a little remapping deal ( TSR? ) under DOS to > trick all the soundblaster software..can u say implemtaion abstraction? Most likely not a TSR -- TSR's typically get their time slices from a DOS not busy interrupt (INT 27) and even if it didn't, the interrupts are going to be remapped, and BSD would eat the code area anyway. It's got to be either a board compatability configuration *or* a board download (to a DSP or something else on the board). to make it emulate. If you have a DOS debugger that can watch this sort of thing, I'd suggest using it while you run the DOS initialization. The other alternative (which would be better) would be to get board documentation and a recognition protocol (like ROM signature or whatever) from the board vendor. Probably the BSD DOS debugger is an ICE, but since they caost $100,000, the next best one is running WINICE under Win95 (really!). Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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