Re: neomagic
Hi,
concerning a NeoMagic cards, I would like to share my own
observations. I own a Siemens Scenic Mobile 510 AGP
notebook, that is equipped with video+sound combo called
NeoMagic 256 AV. This card is not very well supported by the
Linux as of time because the manufacturer does not release
any specs. Anyway, I found out, that the video card runs
nicely under SVGALib as a VESA card. Even the tweaked modes
like 400x300 work! I do not have any experiences with X as
I do not use it. Now to the sound: there is a driver for a
NeoMagic sound card in a Linux Kernel, but it works only
for the 'genuine' cards with ACL97 chipset. But my card was
not compatible with this driver. The commercial OSS drivers
seem to support the card in a right manner, but I haven't
tried. There are also some compatibility modes (8bit SB,
MSS) which didn't work too. The only message I've got using
any of these was: Interrupt test on IRQ5 failed - Probable
IRQ conflict. Accidentaly, loading one module after another
the card started working! I tried that several more times
until it turned out, that the right sequence is to load a
soundblaster module, that will fail. And then immediatelly
a module for OPL3-SAx, that will initialize correctly! This
way you get 44kHz, 16bit sound instead of a crappy 8bit.
I do not understand why it is so, but it works. Below is my
sound.sh. The values may not be the same for your machine,
try to look into the Windows driver settings or in a Bios.
---------------------snip---------------------
#!/bin/bash
#
# sound This shell script starts the NeoMagic 256AV
# sound modules.
#
# I do not know why, but the soundcard works only with
# this sequence:
#
echo "Initializing sound modules."
/sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5
/sbin/rmmod -r sb
/sbin/modprobe opl3sa2 io=0x370 mss_io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=1
---------------------snip---------------------
I hope this will help,
Radim
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