Support for Turle Beach Montego II Under Linux

Tuesd@y asks: "I have been trying to find a way to get Linux to support my sound card, a Voyetra Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla, for quit some time. Is there any one out there who can offer some advice or even better a solution?" It's not listed in the Sound-HOWTO and appears to be a fairly new card. My guess is that support may be unavailable for this card at this time, and if this is true, are there any folks looking in to it?

No drivers at the moment.

[krausedw]

OSS (http://www.opensound.com) has a beta driver for the Turtle Beach Montego I that I am currently using. The driver seems to work very well, unfortunately it costs $30 dollars. There is also a limited evaluation version.

According to their website -
"THE "Vortex 2" (AU8820) CHIP IS NOT SUPPORTED YET. Unfortunately we can't give any
schedule for this chip yet. At this moment only the original Vortex (AU8820) chip
is supported."

Also on their website -
"Vortex 2 (AU8830): Driver development will start shortly. Estimated beta September 99. (Sorry for all the delays!). "

Re:No drivers at the moment.

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

One problem I've had with the Opensound drivers in general is that they are intended for non-hardcore users who don't want to configure their system just how they want. This is all well and good except that it means that you have to have your kernel compiled with a specific set of options (namely module versions enabled, which often breaks some of the less-maintained drivers as I've found) and have to use one of their supported kernel versions. Unfortunately, by having OSS "support" soundcards under Linux, that just leads the hardware manufacturers to think that they have no reason to support non-NDA drivers. Additionally, they make no concessions for people who want a bit more performance out of their system; I got in a bit of a flamewar with one of the 4Front guys over the commercial OSS drivers not working with my kernel compiled with a higher-frequency scheduler. He also didn't seem to know the difference between that and overclocking, but also tried to belittle me for being a "stupid overclocker" and saying all sorts of false claims, such as that it was "well known" that soundcards don't work on an overclocked motherboard (funny, I don't see how making my motherboard think a Celeron 300 is a P2-450 would stop the ISA bus from working - after all, soundcards work just fine on a normally-clocked P2-450, right?)

I'm fine with 4Front having a closed-source configuration tool. That I'd be willing to pay money for, in certain circumstances. However, by alienating the more technical users, who are the ones who tend to actually need the support for the more obscure/powerful soundcards, and only wanting to cater to newbies, who tend to have some generic WSS-compatible chip which came on their motherboard, they rather defeat the purpose of the whole thing, and also, sadly, end up keeping Linux's sound driver support quite far in the past.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Re:No drivers at the moment.

[jfunk]

I have that driver as well. I bought the Montego thinking, "Oh, don't worry, there'll be a Linux driver real soon." When I found out about the Vortex NDA crap, I was crushed. So I bought the 4front driver. It installs *really* nicely.

I'm kind of glad I payed for it because when I got it, some stuff was playing too fast (MP3s). I went to the support form on their page and got a human reply within 15 minutes. The whole thing was explained without any dumbing down (I write support queries in such a way that it's clear that they don't have to dumb it down). For support like that, US$30 is dirt cheap.

I just linked /dev/audio to /dev/audio1 and /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1 and it plays through the soft mixer, eliminating the speed problems. However, the sound quality leaves a little to be desired in the soft mixer. I just hope that it's fixed soon (It might be fixed now, I haven't checked in a while).

Civ:CTP sounds fine though..