1Recording
2---------
3
4Recording does not work on the author's card, but there
5is at least one report of it working on later silicon.
6The chip behaves differently than described in the data sheet,
7likely due to a chip bug. Working around this would require
8the help of ESS (for example by publishing an errata sheet),
9but ESS has not done so so far.
10
11Also, the chip only supports 24 bit addresses for recording,
12which means it cannot work on some Alpha mainboards.
13
14
15/proc/sound, /dev/sndstat
16-------------------------
17
18/proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the
19driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading,
20check the kernel log (dmesg).
21
22
23ALaw/uLaw sample formats
24------------------------
25
26This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats.
27ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device
28using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is
29that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding
30conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly
31code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver.
32And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-)
33and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway.
34In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows:
35
36cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp
37
38does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from
39Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (or later, available from the URL
40below) to play many different audio file formats.
41The script automatically determines the audio format
42and does do audio conversions if necessary.
43http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html
44
45
46Blocking vs. nonblocking IO
47---------------------------
48
49Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag
50not only during open, but also during read and write.
51This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more
52regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch
53is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html.
54(Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free).
55
56
57MIDI UART
58---------
59
60The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with
61no ioctl's supported.
62
63
64MIDI synthesizer
65----------------
66
67The card has an OPL compatible FM synthesizer.
68
69Thomas Sailer
70t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch
71