[TRLog] SBDVP

[Kevin Schmidt]

K4BEV wrote:
>Is there still support for the SBDVP program?
>I just can't get it to work.
>          K4BEV

First let me make sure that everyone knows that Tree has nothing
whatsoever to do with SBDVP, and any problems with it are my fault
not his.

My support for sbdvp now is the same as it always has been, meaning I
fix bugs if I can find them.

SBDVP was and is a quick hack to make a sound card work with TR. I
believe it is relatively bug free, and it has not changed for several
years. It should work with sound cards that look, at the hardware
register level, like Sound Blaster or Analog Devices chips. Cheap clone
Sound Cards typically work fine once they are properly set up to look
like Sound Blasters or Windows Sound System under DOS. SBDVP talks
directly to the hardware, so recording and play back are done by using
extended memory and programming the registers of the sound card and DMA
chips. Since DOS isn't really an operating system, it lets programs do
this. Grown up operating systems are protected against user programs
directly programming hardware.

I use DOS 6.2 to run TR, and unix or linux for everything else; I
know next to nothing about Windows. In the long run, I assume that Tree
will port TR to Windows and/or linux, and at that point it will be
trivial for him to add sound card support directly into TR (i.e.
calling the operating system sound card routines is as easy or easier
than what Tree has to do now to support the K1EA DVP and various DVK
setups.) We can then all happily throw away things like SBDVP.

73 Kevin w9cf
=-------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Schmidt, w9cf@ptolemy.la.asu.edu, http://fermi.la.asu.edu/w9cf
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1504
(480) 965-8240 Fax: (480) 965-7954

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