Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 15:22:08 -0600 (CST) From: Conrad Sabatier <conrads@home.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What does "Voxware still supported in 4.0" mean exactly? Message-ID: <XFMail.000324152208.conrads@home.com> In-Reply-To: <24057.953780938@zippy.cdrom.com>
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On 23-Mar-00 Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>> It's rather disturbing to me to think that, as FreeBSD progresses along
>> through this and that version, I'll have no choice but to be left in
>> the dust, or sacrifice certain functionality that I've come to know
>> and love, or (God forbid) migrate to another platform altogether.
>
> Or get another sound card? Sorry, but I had to note this as an
> additional option which, unless you're incredibly poverty-stricken,
> should not be ruled out for *any* hardware.
I smell shades of M$ here. :-)
Seriously, isn't that one of the chief criticisms of Microsoft, that every
time they release a new version of Windows, you have to plunk down for
{more,better,faster,newer,bigger} hardware in order to make the best use
of it?
Despite this frequently noted complaint, the fact remains that Windows
still continues to work with much older hardware. Why shouldn't FreeBSD?
One particularly worrisome note (well, to me, anyway) that appeared in this
thread mentioned the requirement to use "options OLD_ISA" (or something
like that) to get Voxware to work in 4.0/CURRENT. Is support for older,
pure ISA machines going away, too?
Granted, sooner or later there comes a time in the life of every OS when
support for certain types of dinosaur hardware is finally abandoned, but I
hardly think the AWE boards could properly be described as ancient,
outdated, or seldom used anymore.
And yes, for some of us, money *is* a concern. If it weren't, I certainly
wouldn't still be running this 4-5 year old 166 MHz Pentium box. :-)
> I replaced my AWE32 board long ago, and purely because of its oversize
> form-factor. I now use the on-board Vibra16X audio capabilities of the
> motherboard I replaced my old one with.
I'm quite happy with my AWE 64 and see no need to replace it, and I've
expanded its onboard RAM to the maximum possible (24 MB) in order to use
those wonderful-sounding, super-duper 12 MB Soundfonts for MIDI, so you
might say I have a bit of an investment in it as well.
If the new pcm driver supported the card as well as Voxware, I'd certainly
have no complaint, and would readily make the switch. But until pcm
allows me to use the wavetable device (including support for user loading
of Soundfonts) and is capable of controlling the card's nifty added
features such as reverb and chorus, it makes no sense at all for me to
"upgrade" to 4.0, when doing so represents a definite "downgrade" in at
least one department.
And besides, where's the MIDI? :-)
While I can certainly appreciate the FreeBSD development team's desire for
a more modern, unified and well-integrated driver than Voxware, until such
time as it can provide the same functionality as the older driver, I do
strongly believe that Voxware should continue to be supported, and that
pcm still should be considered as an "experimental" option only.
In addition, I really would like to see user control over PnP devices (via
the pnp boot config command) brought back. It's just way too useful a
thing to throw away altogether.
--
Conrad Sabatier
http://members.home.net/conrads/
ICQ# 1147270
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