Christopher P. Gill wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Aug 1999, Colin Wood wrote:
> 
> > This is a Pro Audio Spectrum 16, right?
> 
> Yeah, that's it.

cool.
 
> > I assume that it's similar to the ISA-based PC cards?
> 
> I'm pretty sure that they also made EISA/ISA versions.

sound's like it's the one, then.

> > If so, we already have an ISA-based pas driver in the
> > tree.  If they are similar enough, it might not be too hard to figure out
> > how to hook up a nubus-specific frontend and use the pre-existing backend.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "not too hard", but I'll follow along...

well, it'll just involve a little bit of digging into pre-existing kernel
code :-)  of course, i'm looking at the pas driver now, and it might be a
little more difficult than i originally thought.  it's pretty damn
i386-specific at the moment (yuck!).

> > Actually hooking in the MI audio driver isn't too difficult.  I've finally
> > got it working with EASC hardware (well, we do 22kHZ 8-bit u-law and 8-bit
> > linear at the moment, but i do get recognizable sound out of it :-)  If
> > you're interested in learning programming and stuff, this might be just
> > the project to get you started :-)
> 
> It seems to me as if I'd need to spring for various books in the "Inside
> Macintosh" series - right? 

not at all, or at least, not much...you'd probably learn a lot more from
reading the nubus attachment code of various drivers in the netbsd kernel.

> And I've never needed to do a lot with
> MacsBug, so I'm mostly a novice there, but at least that's free  :-) 
> Hmmm...  I think that I might have the Inside Macintosh series on a CD-ROM
> in DocViewer format from the summer of '93...
> 
> Let's assume that I'm willing to take a poke at it.  What would I need to
> do to get prepared?

well, given that the card appears to more or less be a soundblaster clone,
you'd need to familiarize yourself with the pas driver, the soundblaster
driver (sbdsp.c) and the MI audio driver.  you'd also need to learn the
mac68k nubus driver.  once you've got all that straight, you basically
have to figure out where the card keeps its registers in nubus space, map
them in, and then operate on them in ways similar to how the sb driver
does.  of course, the ISA version is DMA-based, and i don't know exactly
how the nubus version would handle this...

so, you can probably begin to see the size of the task if you want to pick
something like this up...

later.

colin