From: stripes@pix.com (Josh Osborne)
Subject: Re: Sound Blaster Pro driver (re-post)
Organization: Pix Technologies -- The company with no adult supervision
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 17:47:12 GMT

In article <JTSILLA.92Oct12092004@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu> jtsilla@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (James Tsillas) writes:
>Hi Kurt,
>
>thanks for posting the Soundblaster driver to c.u.bsd. I am considering
>buying a Soundblaster board and have been unable to find any review of
>the boards. So far, browsing Computer Shopper I've come across four
>variations:
>
>        Soundblaster

11 FM voices, MIDI (but you need to buy a cable kit), 1 8-bit DAC
(for sampled sounds, mostly), and one 8-bit AtoD for sampling sounds.
The sample/playback rate is controlable from something really low to 
around 40Ksamples/sec.

>        Soundblaster Basic

AKA the "SoundBlaster Pro Basic", which is a SB Pro with no SCSI stuff.

>        Soundblaster Pro

Upwardly compatable with the SB.

11 FM "stereo" voices, some SB Pro's do this by providing 22 voices
(11 right, 11 left) with independent volume, some di it with a real panner.
(The older way is more flexable, both work fine)

There are now 2 DACs (or one that has 2 output chanels) for stereo samples.
It is rumored that it has stereo DtoA's, but the driver doesn't support it,
and the SB programming docs ($100 extra cost item... mostly worthless too)
don't say if it exists, or how to use it.

>        Soundblaster Pro (OEM)

Never heard of it.  I assume it is a SBPro creatave labs lets someone else
build.  I guess it would behave just like a SB Pro.

There are also other sound cards that are upwardly compatable with the
SB.  Media Vision makes the "Pro Audio" line of cards, the onlt one I know
about is the one I bought (so future relases of the SB driver will support
it...).  The Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (PAS-16), same as the SB Pro, except
it can do 16 bit playback and sampling, and the sound is much cleaner (likely
because the card has more shilding then most PC video cards!), also the SCSI
port is a standard 50-pin pin-out and it uses a standard SCSI chip (I will
try to make a new SCSI module for it - when I get the time).

The only other card of note on the market is the Gravus UltraSound.  It is
"compatable" with the SBPro via a software driver supplyed with the card
(a DOS driver of corse), and is VERY diffrent from all other cards on the
market.  Our driver will not support it, however it is a cool card and if 
you feel like writing a driver, this is the card to buy.  It has 32 chanels,
all are 16bit sample chanels with a primitave DSP to "waveform" the data
(i.e. each chanel can be sampled sound, FM sound, or a mixture), the card has
512K (I think) expandable to 1M (I think) of DRAM to store samples and code,
it has a 68010 on-bord to drive the whole thing.   They give programming
docs away (but you need to order them).
-- 
           stripes@pix.com              "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Multitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
We all agree on the necessity of compromise.  We just can't agree on
when it's necessary to compromise.       - Larry Wall