Sound - handmade how?

[Hartwig Atrops <Hartwig.Atrops@arcor.de>]

Hi all.

I want to write a program that generates sounds - sinus waves, random sound 
and so on. What is the format I can send to the sound card? Which device to 
use? The program should work on different architectures (i386, sparc ...)

Thanks in advance,

   Hartwig