Subject: Re: Gravis Ultra P&P...
To: Gary D. Duzan <gary@wheel.tiac.net>
From: John Utz <jutz@atvideo.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 09/12/1996 08:07:50
Hi gang;

On Wed, 11 Sep 1996, Gary D. Duzan wrote:

> In Message <9609112222.AA14382@cthulhu.spd.analog.com> ,
>    Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com> wrote:
> 
> =>
> =>>Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 17:26:31 -0400
> =>>From: "Andrew K. Adams" <akadams@wraith.psc.edu>
> =>
> =>>I have a P166 w/Tyan motherboard (4 PCI, 5EISA slots) and am running
> =>>1.2_BETA as of mid-august.  I received a Gravis Ultra Sound Plug &
> =>>Play card and installed an additional 8Mb of RAM (yes, it's sick),

	Hah! i have 6 meg *total* on my 2 386 seats and 8 meg on the
server ( also a 386 ), i dont think your sick, i just know i am poor! 8
meg on a soundcard would be realy cool!

> =>>however I am not able to get NetBSD to probe the card.  I installed
> =>>the Gravis software and configured the card in DOS to be at I/O port
> =>>220, IRQ 15, DMA channel 7 and record at 5.  There is also a roland
> =>>emulation which I set to be at I/O port 330 and IRQ 9.  The DOS setup
> =>>utility was able to succesfully test the 8Mb of memory...for whatever
> =>>that is worth.  I have configured my kernel with the following line:
> =>
> =>>gus0    at isa0 port 0x220 irq 15 drq 7 flags 5 # Gravis Ultra Sound \
> =>>(flags is record drq for full-duplex)

	Both of you show your configurations to be pointed at 220 for your
primary position. This is a BadIdea(tm) IMHO.

	What is probably biting you in the butt is the fact that in the
world of soundcards, the one thing that everybody can rely on ( sort of a
default standard, or is it standard by default? ;-) ) is that the cursed
SoundBasterd ( the original, 8 bit one ) has *always* pointed at :

		port 220 Irq 5 as the default

	can u start to see what is happening here? Usually ( like on my
pas16 ) when manufacturers have claimed SB and OPL ( yamaha )
compatibility, they have obtained it by actually *including* the chip on
their product. So my pas 16 has a wild assortment of soundcard vendor
names on the board. I have not looked at one, but it sounds like gravis
is sufficiently clever enuf to dispense with having to purchase stuff from
other folks, and are using their own stuff exclusively. 

	This crashes really hard into the fundamental assumptions that
voxware uses about life. Voxware has port 220 hardcoded irq 5 hardcoded in
in a couple of different places as the SB card. period. U have to change
*all* of them to get it changed over to something else. *CHANGING THE
KERNEL CONFIG FILE IS **NOT** SUFFICIENT!*

	Soundcards are hell, really. I think that mediavision went out of
business simply because trying to make user/software configurable,
hardware that pretended to be 4 different things *and* a scsi card led to
what was basically an untestable, thus unsupportable, system. My pas went
back *twice*, i was lucky i got it back the second time.

	hope this helps.

		john