Repulse and OS4 Classic

Is there anyone out there who might be able to patch or make some working drivers for the Repulse sound card on OS4 Classic? It is really annoying to have no sound on OS4 except Paula (even Linux/BSD supports the Repulse) and I guess I am not the only one who has this card.

@DJBase

nope ... your not the only one! :-/

@DJBase

Perhaps if you provided links to the source code for the driver and any other dependencies it might inspire someone to browse through it

just a thought

good luck however

@Slayer

Well, theres at least a developer archive with includes but I am not sure if this would be enough.

http://repulse.amigaworld.de/

@DJBase

I started work on an OS4 native driver using the linux driver as a reference. I gave up, though.

@xeron

What were your problems?

@DJBase

Quote:

I was going to ask this too but didn't want to hijack the thread for my own reasons

I wanted to see what problems coders can come up against (especially new coders in C and also AmigaOS parculiarities) because I intend to follow this very path myself in the weeks to come...

thanks for asking that question and thanks to xeron for answering

@DJBase

Does the driver show up at all in AHI prefs?

@DaveAE

Yes, everything seems to be fine but when I try to playback something nothing happens. Every player refuses to play until I change the AHI unit again.

@DJBase

Ok. Then it wasn't just a matter of installing the repulse.l.main file!
I think I got the source code at some point, but I'm probably not allowed to distribute it.

I gave up because it was too much of a stab into the unknown. I have no experience writing AHI drivers, or sound card drivers.

DaveAE gave me an AC'97 based OS4 driver to use as a base, and I was going to put the logic from the Linux driver in where possible.

It just drove me nuts and i gave up, basically.

I still have the code if someone wants to look, but its probably best to just start again.


@DaveAE
The official repulse drivers just plain don't work on OS4. AFAIK, anything that tries to play sound just gets 'stuck'.

@xeron

Quote:No idea about the Repulse, but most sound cards use DMA. m68k DMA drivers can't work on PPC because of the different cache line size, on m68k it was 16 bytes and 16 bytes alignment was enough for the data, but on PPC the cache line size is 32 bytes and only using 16 bytes alignment for DMA can't work because the caches may get flushed and/or invalidated for data outside of the DMA buffers.

@joerg

But you would still hear something, be it garbage or the actual sound.

@DaveAE

and btw ... it works under MOS. (with some timing issue but it works)

@DaveAE

You have the original source of the repulse lib?

@DJBase

Yes, it's partly 68k asm, partly C.

@DaveAE

Have you tried to check the source if you can find something that prevents the repulse from working on OS4?

@DJBase

Well, it's been years ago and I can't read 68k asm. If the card uses DMA then it will go wrong because virtual is not equal to physical memory.