Re: Deprecating ISA sound cards

> On 20. Mar 2022, at 15:45, David Chisnall <theraven@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On 19 Mar 2022, at 21:24, Chris <bsd-lists@BSDforge.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 2022-03-18 09:08, Ed Maste wrote:
>>> ISA sound cards have been obsolete for more than a decade, and it is
>>> (past) time to retire their drivers. This includes the following
>>> drivers/devices:
>>> snd_ad1816  Analog Devices AD1816 SoundPort
>>> snd_ess     Ensoniq ESS
>>> snd_gusc    Gravis UltraSound
>>> snd_mss     Microsoft Sound System
>>> snd_sbc     Creative Sound Blaster
>>> I have a review open to add deprecation notices:
>>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D34604
>>> I expect to commit this in the near future, then MFC to stable
>>> branches and remove these drivers from main. Please follow up if
>>> there's a reason we should postpone the removal of any of these
>>> drivers.
>> This only hurts from a nostalgic perspective. Those GUS cards were incredible!
>> I have a board running freebsd that has 2 GUS cards in it running
> 
> Exactly my reaction.  You can tell you’re old when drivers are removed from the tree for mainstream hardware that you never owned but wished that you could afford.
> 

I’ll never give away my GUS classic/GF1 with full 1MB onboard RAM(!). It was too much fun to program and tracker/demo support was superb. Plus, red PCBs felt really 1337 back then.

That said (and assuming it still works), it's unlikely I would use it with anything else but DOS these days.

Cheers
Michael