1
2     forte - an OSS/Lite driver for Fort�Media FM801 sound chips
3     ===========================================================
4
5This is a driver for cards using the Fort�Media FM801 audio
6controller.  The Genius Sound Maker Live card and the onboard audio in
7HP Workstation zx2000 has been tested.
8
9Both IA-32 and IA-64 architectures are supported, but the driver
10should work on any platform.
11
12The FM801 controller supports a variety of AC'97 codecs.  This driver
13lets the OSS core code figure the codec out, and should thus support
14any codec with support in the Linux kernel.
15
16The driver supports /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp for generic OSS audio
17support.  In general it adheres to the OSS spec to the extent it can
18be done with the way the hardware works.  The FM801 controller doesn't
19support scatter-gather, so if the application sets fragment size too
20low, it puts strict requirements on interrupt processing speed.  The
21driver tries to compensate by enforcing bigger buffers than requested
22by the application if the fragment size is low.
23
24The forte driver includes both standard read()/write() and the
25unsupported mmap() interface used by Quake.  mmap() is only supported
26in playback mode.
27
28U8 and S16 audio formats are supported, mono/stereo, as well as most
29all sample rates implemented by the chip.  Default is 48 KHz, 16-bit,
30mono.
31
32MIDI, FM audio, and the gameport controller are not currently
33supported.
34
35
36The latest version of this driver can be found at:
37
38    http://mkp.net/forte/
39
40
41Martin K. Petersen, July 2002
42