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Hardware

SoundBlaster Live! under Linux? 42

Posted by Cliff from the drivers-drivers-anywhere? dept.
Shrub writes in with this query: "I know Creative is planning on writing Linux drivers, but in the meantime.. has anyone managed to get a SoundBlaster Live! card working in Linux? "
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SoundBlaster Live! under Linux? More

SoundBlaster Live! under Linux?

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  • Posted by Vympe:

    Hi all,

    I'm just about to put together a new computer. I've been considering which sound card to buy and I'm still somewhat clueless. I hear of problems with the Soundblaster PCI64 and PCI128, as well as the Live! Should I just stick with the old proved SB16?

    Which sound card offers the best 'Linux value'? In other words, which modern sound cards are fully supported in Linux?

    Thanks for the help!

  • MX300 (Score:1)

    by volkris ( 694 )
    The Diamond Monster MX300 is supposedly very close to the SB Live... I think it's the same chipset.

    I believe I once heard that drivers for one would be extremely easy to make work for the other, so does anyone know of any advances toward a driver for the MX300?

    I think the chipset is called the Vortex 3D but someone correct me here.

    ~Chris Carlin

  • MX300 (Score:1)

    by volkris ( 694 )
    Oh yeah, see I heard about these guys developing the SB Live and MX300 cards at the same time and must have misunderstood it. Oh well.

    So anyone know of a group working on drivers that will be free? (for us poor college students...)


    ~Chris Carlin

  • MX300 (Score:1)

    by volkris ( 694 )
    Really?

    I keep hearing about how Diamond can release drastic updates to the hardware adding completely new features through the programmable chipset/chip....

  • AWE 64 (Score:1)

    by BigEd ( 6405 )
    DON'T go for a Yamaha. The support (at least for mine) is flaky at best.

    I have to boot into DOS, load the setupsa.exe drivers to initialize it, and then use loadlin to boot into Linux. Even then the mixer doesn't work, so everything is really, really quiet.

    I think Alan Cox mentioned buying an OPL3SAx in his diary the other day, so the support could improve soon, but for now I'd go SB16/SB64 Value all the way.

  • I'm not sure what it does yet. Have to get my box at home here up and running with Linux again.

    Check out:
    http://developer.soundblaster.com/linux/

    For this file:
    ftp://ftp.soundblaster.com/pub/creative/beta/sbl ive-0.1b.tar.gz
  • ok...what about the thing in windoze where it says "sb16 compatibility"? Is that just an interface for old dos games, or is it actually a hardware feature?

    Right now, i just want a way to play my mp3s in linux so that i can limit my windows usage to just playing Tribes.

    Off-topic: It seems like whenever i play Tribes, some loser tries to use netbus on my firewall (ie they try to access port 12345). It's happened about 4 times, and always from a different dial-up modem connection, and from various different parts of the US. Anyone else notice weird shit like this?

  • Since we are on a SB topic.

    I have a SB AWE 64, sound card and am trying to get it to work with the 2.2.5 kernel. It recognizes half of the devices but not the AWE. I have /dev/dsp reecognized, but when it boots up it it says AWE not found. It used to work under 2.0.36, but now I am using 2.2 and there are new sound drivers. I have configured the kernel the way it explains in the kernel sources Documentation/sound dir, enabling the options it describes to. I have a conf.modules. It loads the sb correctly (soundcode, soundlow, sound, sb). It does not load the opl3 at all but I can manually load it or load it.

    The main problem is when it tries to load the awe_wave, the module gets loaded but the AWE device is not found. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, and email can be sent to joeja@mindspring.com [mailto]

    Anyone have an "up-to-date" howto with the new kernel 2.2's?????????????

  • Well I just got my AWE64 to work. there is support for it in the 2.2 kernels. So if you are using 2.2 I'd recommend going with the AWE64 before a SB16. the AWE64 is full duplex. You'll need to set up pnp, but that is not that difficult. once you have set upi a pnpconf file, you can load the modules,, soundcore, soundlow, sound, uart401, sb, awe_wave, opl3. When loading the sb you'll need to pass a few parameters to it, you will alsohave to pass parameters to the opl3, as well...

    it works pretty good ... I do not know about support for the other SB cards, I have heard that som eof the PCI cards will work ....

  • Geez, guys, all we want is some programming info,
    not planning on making our own boards.

    Sigh.



  • A nice gesture, but this is _not_ true Linux support IMO. Where's the source?

    The fact that they're not trying to support SMP indicates that the driver will quite possibly be buggy on non-SMP machines too. (Under NT at least, drivers that bomb on SMP also are quite buggy in non-SMP mode too. It's just the bugs come to the surface much faster under SMP. Case in point: the SB Live drivers :)

  • MX300 (Score:1)

    by tjrw ( 22407 )
    Nope, not even close I'm afraid.
    The MX300 is hard-wired silicon. The SB-Live uses the EMU-10K chip which is a DSP making it quite a lot more flexible i.e. Creative can change (improve) the functionality by changing the programming of the DSP. You'd need programming specs to support the MX-300.

    Tim
  • The MX300 uses the Aureal Semiconductor Vortex2 chip. There is a driver under development by a third party. Check out www.opensound.com .

    cameron@fuzzydice.com
  • I bought an SB Live!, but I still had my old SB AWE64 isa card laying around. For a while I just toughed it out, figuring that eventually a linux driver would appear. Checking opensound.org, it looked like it was going to be a LONG wait. So I threw my AWE64 back in and use it for Linux & Live! for Win98 Quake 2 sessions (yes, I do run Q2 in Linux sometimes but it sucks compared to how fast it is in 98). The only hard part is switching my speakers from one card to another during OS switch time.

    Monty

  • According to 4Front's status page [opensound.com]:
    SB Live!: Driver development started but still months away from beta due to no documentation. We are investigating some other mechanisms of developing the driver by means of reverse engineering and/or using PCI bus logic analyzers. Managed to get the AC97 mixers and the MIDI port working. So you can only hear AudioCDs and use the MPU401 MIDI port. No beta release dates available yet.
    The sound support in the kernel always lags behind that of OSS, so i'd watch this page for further developments.

    -jab

  • I received the following response from Creative Labs:
    From: Developer Support (
    devsup@creativelabs.com)

    At this time Creative is not in a position to release the materials that it has received under NDA from our chipset suppliers or the DVD consortium.

    Creative is actively working on Linux drivers for our audio and graphics products, and will do what we can within our legal rights to provide drivers to the Linux community.

    This is an unfortunate position that quite a few hardware vendors seem to be getting stuck in. Hopefully companies will start to see the value in releasing specifications without NDAs, as the availability of high-quality drivers and other software supporting their hardware can only improve their product sales.
  • Hey,

    I just rooted our my OLD SB pro 8 bit,
    and stuck it in on the same irq / dma / etc
    as the SB Live SB16 emulation.

    It works fine unders linux, and windows doesn't see it, and uses the SB16 emulation instead for all my old dos games.


    Cool huh, best of both world, except for when I try and play a 16bit sound under linux )C:
  • I got really sick of the Linux (coming soon) line on Creative lab's developers website, so I wrote in asking about it. The reply is below. This was from last Wednesday. So, it sounds like I will be able to use my SB Live! Value soon!


    Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 10:31:55 -0800
    From: Jacob Hawley
    To: bbarrett@nd.edu
    Cc: Phillip Williams
    Subject: Re: Developer: Website Feedback

    Yes. We will have the driver in the next two weeks. We are still working out
    the versions for the SB-Live driver. Currently we are looking at 2.0.36 as
    well
    as 2.2.x. Both versions would included versioning and non-versioning builds of
    the kernel and will not support SMP.

    Jake
  • The oss group has been working on something for it, but they have yet to release anything also, citing that it will be late 4th quarter before they have anything done. *sigh*
  • How do you see these attacks under Windows (which you are apparently using for this game)?
  • Just being able to play audio CD's while I'm at work would be great!!! I'd say, release what you have and add the bells and whistles later...
  • Just a little titbit. The latest OSS version has BETA support for CD Audio and MIDI ports on the SB Live! Not the most exciting thing in the world but still... Open Sound Status Page [opensound.com]
  • There's a Linux section in developpement at http://developer.soundblaster.com/ [soundblaster.com] for drivers and patches... I don't know if it's there for 6 months...

    I hope that they'll release spec of source for the SBLive! full, if not, I think that the driver will always be buggy and I don't think that I'll buy one... I want to buy one, but only when it will be fully supported by Linux...
  • I tried loading a sb module with the same settings as the Windows driver reported. No luck.

    As for Tribes, I hadn't noticed. I go through IP Masq, so they're not gonna get to my Win box. But try sitting on EFNet once in a while, then you'll see telnets, ftps, etc coming in.
  • According to a quick search on the Linux Kernel mail list, no. Creative hasn't released the specs on the card, so we're all out of luck. Sad as that may be...

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