Older blog entries for zx80user (starting at number 14)

Well, the driver now plays something a bit more sophisticated than crackles - it even sounds slightly like my daughter telling me I've got an email when I use my test sound.

But I still have lots of problems. it only plays on the left hand side for instance (a consequence of me not working out how to handle stereo in this model) and it get stuck in an endless loop. Previously - in the white noise era - it didn't, so it's been two steps forward and one step back in that regard.

The main breakthrough today has been on the ARM7 side - I dug up some arm7-elf generating tools (couldn't be bothered to build them all myself so got RPMs and installed them on a Fedora box I have here - my main dev box is Ubuntu these days). Wrote some new code to raise an interrupt - needed, I think, for the driver's overall health - and not only did this code work (the SH4 portion treats it as firmware), it played better sound - I think the only firmware may have been broken or corrupted over time.

The driver now plays screeches and crackles - so it is giving me sound output. Lying in bed last night I realised there were several more simple changes to make to get me closer, but at heart I fear the DMA mechanism I have chosen is wrong and might need to be looked at again.

Just got the DMA to start working on the driver and I am therefore filled with glee. I still have lots to do, but I am beginning to feel that a three year quest is approaching the end!

Well, have finally made some progress on the ALSA driver - though now have to get stuck into the meat of the DMA API and face the fact that the existing Linux g2 DMA is 99% certain to be broken.

But it's still a thrill to see a piece of code go from completely broken to behaving as expected after just a few tweaks. That is what hacking is all about!

<aside>Anybody else think the Advogato UI is less than optimal?</aside>
Anyway, made a little progress on the driver - though spent a lot of the last week's spare time building a PC from scratch (for the first time) as the old one relied on a not very stable wireless driver and accordingly locked up every 48 hours or so - but the box was far, far too noisy to move to the living room and plug into the ethernet.
Anyway, driver still does nothing real but now (at least partially) properly handles the kobject model in the 2.6 kernels...

Just a brief one - as i won't be about for a few days. Wondered why my driver didn't show up in /proc and then realised that was because I wasn't registering the device. So fixed that - so proc now acknowledges my existence.
Reading the diary entries below, from the first iteration of this effort worried me a bit last night - because it suggested that I was going wrong... hmmm. Well, the last time round went nowhere so I hope that was the wrong one :)

Ok, it's almost two years since I last was here and the funny thing is nothing much has changed ... still looking to write an ALSA module for the Dreamcast.
In the last two years my Linux knowledge has come on leaps and bounds - after 4 years of the OS I no longer feel like a newbie all the time and can even answer other people's questions on my LUG email group with a little authority (well, some of them anyway).
C coding has taken a back seat though I've hacked quite a lot of perl in the last two years.
Now I've helped inject a little bit of life into the Dreamcast port of SH (general work was powering ahead, but the DC side of it was pretty dead) by posting up a working kernel on my website (here) and have at least written a few lines of code to get the ALSA port started again (on my subversion repository if you're interested).
Progress will be slow - despite a little effort at trying to get myself a job as a hacker based on the perl stuff, I am still working in communications, so this is strictly part time :)

So, it is finally September. To be honest it has mentally been September for me since I came back from Ireland just over a week ago. Depression seeps over me at the thought of the dark winter ahead.

On the coding front have managed to make some progress - and boy is ALSA complex in comparison to the throw it all together and add a few ioctls approach of OSS/Free.

Discovered that I needed (at least) alsa-lib and alsa-utils to build my driver and went through a few days of difficulty to get them cross (and static) built. Some of the bits and pieces still aren't built statically (there seems to be a problem with the way the alsa-lib configure script handles static builds - it built the main libs as static, but not the rest).

The people on the alsa-dev mailing list and the #alsa channel on freenode have been helpful at all times though.

OK, now have the tools to test my driver (to see if I am headed in the right direction), when I discover the need to built in some mixer code (another change from OSS - I could build a very simple driver without any mixer ioctls though obviously it would be all but useless, here it just won't work without proper mixer code).

Despite the moaning, I can see the power alsa brings - the OSS driver and the recently completed BSD driver - use only two out of 64 channels - if I can get the ARM7 code right then alsa will allow me to use all 64 :)

Started to make some progress on the ALSA sound driver at last. But it's been 18 months since I wrote the OSS one and the technical language of pulse code modulation is slow to return to the active bits of my brain.

Still trying to get 2.6.0-test4 to compile for SH. Have been let down by SF anon CVS and then have struggled with a poor internet connection this afternoon :(. Going to pub now, so that's the end of that :).