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Back to: Native Oberon Hardware Compatibility List

Sound support

Summary

Native Oberon supports SoundBlaster and compatible cards and equivalent on-board sound controllers. A true SB card can be detected automatically.

How to install a sound driver - Configure Oberon.Text

You have to edit the Sound.Audio group in Oberon.Text. To determine the correct settings required:

for an ISA card, consult the documentation which came with the card
for a PCI card, execute PCITools.Scan

The preset values are:

  Port = 220H 
  IRQ = 7          see IRQ
  LowDMA = 1       the DMA channel for byte transfers 
  HighDMA = 7      the DMA channel for word transfers (16-bit) 
  compatible = -1  -1: true SB (autodetect); and for 
                   compatibles: 0: SB1.5; 1: SB2.0; 2: SBpro; 3: SB16 
                   Other values are invalid.

Sound tools (Sound.Tool)

Wave.Panel GUI for playing / recording Wav files.
Au.Panel GUI for playing / recording Au files.
CDAudio.Panel GUI for playing audio CD-ROMs - currently not supported.

Modern sound cards include a mixer. Depending on the ancienty of the sound card, a different mixer type (DSP) or none is available for which Oberon offers a corresponding custom GUI:

  DspVersion  # of channels    Mixer GUI 
      4            15          MixerSB16.Panel 
      3            10          MixerSBPro.Panel 
      2.01          4          MixerSB.Panel 
   anterior        none        No mixer available

Release differences

The 2.3.6 release had separate IDE driver modules for hard disk and audio CD (a bad design for historical reasons). For the beta and alpha releases, the IDE driver was rewritten to support more modern IDE (ATA) drives, but the audio part of the CD driver has not been done yet. So the beta and alpha releases do not support the CDAudio panel.

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