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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] playmidi and aumix
  • Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 14:49:03 +0000 (UTC)


What does initialization do?

It tells the PnP card what IO address and IRQ to live at. It's
like setting the jumpers on a non-PnP card.

With the sb I specify the address and IRQ with insmod - is this
instead of initialization?

It is a (very crude) form of "initialization" which is built into
sb.o.

Does this mean I don't really need to initialize SB cards in DOS in
order to use them in linux without isapnp?

Maybe. The sb.o initialization is a little too crude to get MPlayer
or mpg123 working on its own, but play will work. OPL3 won't work,
either. Does AWE32 work without DOS/isapnp initialization?


I just cold booted (power off, power on) this computer with a non-awe SB16 card in it. For some reason there is no high DMA (5, 6, or 7) available and hwinfo and linux don't see that they are taken. Maybe some computers simply don't have those. (This is also the computer where resizecons does not work right except with Matrox).

If I run DOS diagnose /s (in autoexec.bat or from CLI) the speakers start to hiss. If I then insmod sb with settings, they stop hissing.

If I cold boot and hit F5 to skip autoexec.bat (don't run diagnose) and
insmod sb (dma=1, no high dma16 at all, 5 6 and 7 are not available) I can STILL play wav files with play and mplayer. I can also play mp3 files with mplayer or mpg123. I was also able to play .wav files on the mad16 opti 931 card but I did not test mplayer or mpg123 on it.

Maybe these would sound better after initialization? I can't here a difference but this is downloaded internet radio. Perhaps higher sampling rates need initialization? /proc/dma shows that 0 is SoundBlaster8.
What does high DMA do? Would things sound better if low and high were not the same DMA?

The Crystal ISA card did not tell me there were any errors when I insmodded it (no DOS initialization). I still have to try aumix on it but it is in the Ubuntu computer (which did not find it or the ISA network card).

Do you have the SB16 DOS diagnose program and if not, would you like a copy to test with?
So if I typed play sound.wav it would insert the modules without me
telling it to. Would it remove them afterwards?

There is no automatic module removal with kmod at this time.

We noticed that Ubuntu inserted all modules at boot time rather than using kmod. This is likely to cause problems if you have three ISA cards, but it conveniently ignored both our sound and our network ISA card. wvdial was able to find the plugnplay ISA modem but says there is no dial tone. We hear a dial tone. (I think it accepted a 720K floppy disk, which Redhat 6 would not do).

The scsi and ethernet card are not in use and have not grabbed any
modules, same for parport, but IRQ3 is taken (serial port - the
modem I am currently using, I presume) and IRQ9 by the sound card
ever since I inserted its modules. IRQ 14 and 15 are taken by ide0
and ide1. I have one hard drive. Is ide1 the DVD-ROM drive (hdc)?

Yes. hda and hdb are on ide0. hdc and hdd are on ide1 (master and
slave, respectively).

Could I free up an IRQ by not using ide1 (secondary controller)? I was told that hard drive and CD-ROM drive should if possible be on different controllers so they can transfer data faster (or access hd and DVD-ROM drive at the same time with two IRQs while playing DVDs, or is mplayer in RAM already?). I don't seem to need that IRQ now that I have PCI sound.


In DOS the IRQs are all taken by scsi, ethernet, lpt1, modem,
com1, but here 4 5 7 10 and 11 are free. Clever linux!

DOS is doing some PCI initialization on its own? Or perhaps it's
the BIOS?
The BIOS, I think. It reports the IRQs at boot time before DOS starts.
Linux seems to ignore the BIOS.

I have an nvidia with 64MB, and the other cards I had until now are 1-4MB.
(Is the Nvidia also vesa frame buffer?)

Yes. I'd be surprised if there was any card with that much memory that
didn't do vesafb.

The ATI and Trio3D are not vesafb, I tried them with your kernel. They need their own fb drivers. I think you compiled without those modules, but I want to recompile anyway to add sound.

ATI
later Mach64s

Mach64 3D Rage Pro is what I have. It was one of the first consumer-level
cards (1997) to get hardware motion compensation. 1997 was when the DVD
craze was just beginning.

Rage128 - we were given one of these (ATI) but it beeps and the
300MHz computer will not boot. We can try a different computer.
128MB? Big heat sink but no fan.

128-bit. Graphics card manufacturers seem to like confusing labels.
And big numbers.

Hardware motion compensation frees up the cpu? Does the large heat sink and fan sit on top of some sort of graphics cpu? The fan is as large as a 486 cpu fan.

There's a relatively new nVidia driver out there, it's known to
work on Riva 128, TNT and GeForce2 chipsets, also others have
been reported working.

I have Nvidia GeForce MX420 which is probably too old. And the
other two cards we were given both have fans on their heat sinks
and are:

inno3D MX(400) 64MG AGP MX-128 Rev 2.1
ASUS AGP-V7700/32MB G-Force Pure DDR 32MB - is this an older Nvidia too?

MX is a stripped-down Geforce something. Somewhat like a Celeron
and the various Pentium incarnations.

If the MX-420 with 64MB works, the MX-128 with 64MB will probably work equally well, but not better, unless 128 is important.

Not Xvesa. But I thought xvidix did not require X11.

VIDIX doesn't, per se. It can work with -vo vesa, too. But this
particular vidix driver seems to need some card initialization.
I've read somewhere that you can use the cvidix output driver
instead and bypass all of this. This seems to conflict with the
statement above.

I am very confused. Should I try one of the above cards with xvidix? -vo xvidix or -vo vidix or -vo cvidix? I can put in an AGP card along with my PCI nvidia and just tell BIOS which one to use.


What I have right now works fine - Nvidia and vesa (or Xvesa for non-DVD).
I will experiment some other time with nVidia X drivers if you want
to help.

I would want to stay as far away from nvidia x drivers as possible.

Fine with me.

I will try again now that I have a PCI sound card..............
Hey, this time (in 10 seconds) it mounted my AOL test CD without
any complaints about IRQ or DMA. Maybe you need to replace an ISA
card to avoid your DMA problem too. Hurray for PCI!

This DMA problem doesn't appear to be a conflict. It looks like
the drive itself doesn't like DMA. If I turn DMA on and try to
read anything from the disk in the drive, I get a DriveReady
SeekComplete error. The whole computer freezes. The keyboard
and mouse completely die, and I need to hard reset it. It does the exact same thing if I remove the two ISA cards.
I have plenty of free DMAs.

So did I, but it would not use them. It seemed to want the same DMA as the sound card (DMA 1).


This PCI sound card does not seem to need DMA, nor does the modem,
in linux. In DOS (hwinfo) it said DMA 0 was the plugnplay modem.
Why did DOS use DMA for a card but linux does not?

This is PCI, huh? I think Linux can directly access serial ports
which are on PCI boards. DOS probably naively assumes that all
PCI cards need a DMA. Caution: this will only work for 1 to
4 serial ports (internal modems have a built-in serial port,
unless they're winmodems) depending on the number of existing
serial ports.

Why do ISA sound cards need DMA but PCI cards don't, even in linux?

Anyway, SB Live is good for BL3/BL2 OSS sound and can solve
problems if you have three ISA cards and resulting conflicts.

I wonder if it has an OPL3 or AWE chip for MIDI?


All Live (emu1k01) cards are supposed to work with awesfx. Since it is PCI and does not require isapnp I can try it with OPL after getting awe to work. Not today. I still have to find the jumper on the three AWE cards to enable added RAM.


"Totem could not startup. (movie player?). Resource busy or not available. "

Never heard of Totem.
It tried to use this movie player to play sound. No play or mplayer there.


Ubuntu has not found this sound card. BL2 did a lot better with it
(I have not yet tried aumix to actually get sound out of it but the
modules inserted just fine). Does Debian normally include isapnp?

Yes.

It said we had no network card. We had an old jumpered 3COM ISA network card that does not need to be initialized to work in BL2. Maybe Ubuntu simply omitted ISA card support to fit into one CD.


Any ideas why four CD-ROM drives would not work with linux in one computer, and now the one that does work in linux won't work in Windows? They all work in DOS. We are still trying to update a X2 modem which insists on SE for the program. 20X, no jitter.



David





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