From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Thu Nov 12 17:52:44 1998
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To: alsa-devel@jcu.cz
cc: conversy@lri.fr
Subject: Re: Aureal Driver 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 12 Nov 1998 14:31:42 +0100."
             <364AE33E.794B@lri.fr> 
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 11:50:09 -0500
From: Paul Barton-Davis <pbd@op.net>
Reply-To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Sender: alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz
Precedence: list

>For example, Jaroslav, what kind of information
>did you have when you want to develop a driver
>for the AudioPCI chipset ?

Note that a chipset driver can be a long way from writing a card driver.
Jaroslav, for example, has written a CS4232 driver, which is the main
chipset used on the Turtle Beach Tropez+ card. However, this driver
alone would allow access to very few of the cards capabilities. I
don't know what the Aureal does or how many chips its uses, so this
might not apply to your case.

Examples from writing a driver for the Turtle Beach WaveFront:

1) is there any driver development documentation (sometimes called an SDK) ?
2) does the card require a firmware download ?
3) does it use interrupts or rely on the host polling it ?
4) does the card require the use of DMA ? can it do DMA ?
5) what interrupts does it use, and how do I configure that if its
   not using PnP ?
6) how do I set the I/O base address, and what are the registers that
   are mapped to the card-side of the I/O address range ?

Some examples of the questions that weren't answered ...

1) how do I access the Yamaha YSS225 DSP chip that is on the board,
     but not documented, and what microprogram is it using ?
2) why does the board stop generating read-ready interrupts after the
     firmware is loaded ?
3) what does host command 0xf9 do ?

and many more besides.

--p


