At 8:17 PM -0600 6/12/00, Pat Plummer wrote:
>on 6/12/00 15:43, Constantine Karbaliotis at constantine.k@home.com wrote:
>
>>  unlike macLinux,
>>  there is sound support for BSD, but how far does that go?
>
>Having just gone through all of this myself, Constantine, Bob Nestor let me
>know that there is no sound support in the mac68k port of NetBSD.
>
>Here's what he related to me:
>
>"Audio isn't supported in the mac68k port.  The SND circuits aren't
>documented outside of Apple and the reverse engineering is slow going.
>Colin Wood (an Intel Engineer and long-time mac68k hacker) has been
>working on it."

Hi guys,
This is one thing that's always kinda confused me...I have an 840AV, 
and when it (and the PPCs) came out, there were literally tons of 
programs that would run on these machines without sound. The reason 
that was given in all the FAQs is that the programmers (mostly game 
developers) saved CPU cycles to make their games run faster...and how 
they saved cycles was that they wrote directly to the ASC instead of 
using Apple's Syscalls. So, the confusing part to me is, if it is so 
undocumented & must be reverse-engineered, then what did all the game 
developers in the '80's do to be able to get it to work?

Mind you, I have nowhere near the knowledge or abilities of Colin or 
most people here to doubt their word, but the coding to ASC was the 
big reason given for broken sound on the machines w/o the ASC.

Mike
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.