For those of you who run NetBSD-current/i386:

I've been trying to get my PAS-16 to do something useful under -current/i386
lately:

1. my PAS-16's SoundBlaster "DSP" doesn't like the sb.c driver in 
   -current/i386.  It doesn't reset the board properly at boot-time.  What's
   strange is that, if I run Windows NT with its PAS-16 driver and then
   reboot into NetBSD, the sb.c driver *does* find the SB DSP on the
   PAS-16 and resets it, but any attempt to "cat sound.au > /dev/audio"
   does bad things.

   Trying to initialize the PAS-16 under MS-DOS and then rebooting into
   NetBSD doesn't work (never sees the PAS-16 SB DSP).

   Has anyone with a PAS-16 hacked the sb.c driver to make the PAS-16 
   emulate a SoundBlaster under -current/i386?

2. has anyone tried to port the Linux sound driver v2.4?  I know that in a 
   recent message on one of the comp.os.386bsd.* groups Charles said that 
   the BSD port of this driver is buggy and hacked, but short of hacking
   the sb.c driver or writing a pas-16.c driver from scratch, this seems
   like the quickest and dirtiest way of getting sound in NetBSD for me.

   I got v2.4 to compile without too much trouble, and even got the kernel
   to initialize the PAS-16, but immediately following this step in the boot
   sequence the kernel dies and the machine reboots without any diagnostic 
   message.

   The v2.4 README says something about allocating buffers for the sound
   driver at boot-time so that it will work with a NetBSD kernel (I'm 
   guessing this is because NetBSD/i386 has, or had, problems booting
   kernels > 640KB?), but whatever they've done to correct this problem
   certainly doesn't seem to work with -current/i386.  Unfortunatley that's
   the only specific mention of NetBSD in the entire v2.4 distribution.
 
   Anyone have any comments on the latter?

3. is anyone writing a pas-16.c driver akin to the sb.c driver in 
   -current/i386?  I'm considering trying this, but a) I've never written
   a UNIX device driver and b) I've never even programmed a sound board,
   let alone written any kind of device driver for one, so this may be more
   than I can handle on my first attempt.



-dwh-
dhess@cs.stanford.edu

------------------------------------------------------------------------------