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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!portc01.blue.aol.com!newsstand.cit.cornell.edu!news.acsu.buffalo.edu!news.drenet.dnd.ca!crc-news.doc.ca!nott!bcarh189.bnr.ca!bmerhc5e.bnr.ca!news From: Andrew Atrens <atrens@bnr.ca> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Soundblaster16 woes... Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:25:57 -0400 Organization: Bell Northern Research Lines: 75 Message-ID: <326F8A85.519D@bnr.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: bmerh278.bnr.ca Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (X11; I; HP-UX A.09.05 9000/712) Hi All, I'm running the 2.2 Oct 1(?) SNAP on a P-133 w. ASUS TP4XE motherboard. The system works beautifully, and has for quite some time. Recently I purchased a cheap Soundblaster 16 ISA card and began my quest to getting it working under FreeBSD. I would have blamed the card, but when I tried it with Windows 3.1 on the same box it worked flawlessly. Anyhow what follows is a description of the symptoms I see, and what I've tried to date. The Patient =========== P133 w. ASUS mb, 32 MB, 512K pb cache, award bios (recently updated) isa cards: soundblaster 16, ne 2000 clone pci cards: mach 64 pro w. 2MB VRAM The Symptoms ============ Using rplay, vplay, xanim, cat, and a few others get the following: 1. Short sound clips sound fine, although under certain conditions if I play a clip 2 seconds in length, then a clip 1 second in length the 1 second clip will be followed by 'junk' sounds left over from playing the first clip. For example: First clip: "Doh!" Second clip: "Meep Meep!" First clip played a second time: "Doh!Meep!" 2. After playing any clip, even using 'cat >>/dev/dsp', there is a two second pause following the clip ( 'cat' just hangs there for two seconds ). Rplay diagnostics indicate that rplayd is trying to close the device; and apparently this takes 2 seconds. This makes it impossible to play clips back to back. 3. Playing a clip longer than two seconds just doesn't seem to work at all. If I'm lucky I get the 2 seconds of mangled output, followed by silence. If I'm using rplay then there are no errors. If I try 'cat >>/dev/dsp' I often get a (repeated) kernel message: "DMA timed out, possible IRQ/DRQ conflict" I would believe this message if the darn thing didn't work so well unders Windows 3.1 ! What I've done ============== Looked at the differences between Voxware 3.01 and the kernel sources which I believe are Voxware 2.9, looking for changes/enhancements in the SB drivers and the DMA code. Experimented, to a degree with folding in some of these changes. Also played with the DMA buffer sizes in the driver. Modified the rplay port such that it uses /dev/dsp instead of /dev/audio ( hey, why not ), I did this by folding in code from the linux-specific audio stuff in the package. Seems to work okay. --- So, what am I doing wrong? / what can I try to get to the bottom of this? As always, any/all help/suggestion would be *greatly* appreciated. Regards, Andrew. ( opinions are mine, not Nortel's. )