CT5880-E 4-speaker output

[Mathew Kanner]

On Jan 10, soralx at cydem.org wrote:
> 
> > > Is anyone interested in patching 'es137x.c' to enable 4-speaker output
> > > on a CS5880-E based audio card (built into mainboard; Line-In can be
> > > reconfigured as another Line-Out)? I've recieved some souce code of
> > > DOS drivers (written in C) for the 137x-based cards from Creative,
> > > but I don't have enough experience to port the functionality to the
> > > FreeBSD dirver. Also, after I managed to completely halt my machine
> > > while experimenting with the driver, which almost killed the /usr
> > > slice (softupdates...), I'd prefer to spend the spare time I have
> > > on doing backups :)
> >
> > 	Hey, don't give up!
> 
> I don't, but I figured that it would be _much_ faster [and safer :)]
> for somebody more experienced in sound coding (and C coding in general)
> than I to do that. All I need for now is to make the driver flip some bits
> in the card's register to conver Line-In to Line-Out and enable copying
> primary stereo stream to this other output.

	I think this is a reasonable starting point to get into the
sound code.  I suggest you try to hook-up a sysctl to make this
configurable behaviour.  Look at /sys/dev/sound/pci/via8233.c line
709-752 for ideas.

> When I get some time (and experience), I plan to extend the driver
> functionality a bit more by adding (bass/treble,3D enh,gain,mic boost)
> controls and real double DAC 4-speaker (surround) output mode. It seems
> like most (all?) of this is already done in ALSA, so I'd need just to
> figure out how it all works and port the necessary bits.

	I look forward to it, and I hope this will be the beginning
getting easy and fancy features out of alsa.

> 
> Or probably I'll buy some PCI card with higher sound quality (not that
> it is bad now, but it still could be better) and [5|6|7].1 mode. Does
> anyone have any reccomendations on such good (but not too expensive)
> card? Is there any sound card that can work in FreeBSD in 4 (and more)
> speakers config mode?

	I'm not an authority on sound, I don't think we able to
produce analog except in mono and stereo other than copying whole
channels to different outputs (like your goal #1).  I've heard Cameron
suggest that the emu10k1 has good features that we should aspire to
tapping into.

	--Mat

> 
> > Bring the system to single user mode
> > (kill -TERM 1) and force the the disks the re-mount read-only (mount
> > -u -o ro /).  Then load your hacked module.  This is typically how I
> > test/debug kernel modules.
> 
> OK, this sounds sane; I probably should have done that right when I started %)
> 
> Timestamp: 1073721041
> [SorAlx]  http://cydem.org.ua/

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