On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 00:06 +0100, tommy wrote: > you may also look at http://www.alsa-project.org/~james/alsa-driver/ > and wait for lee revell. > > he seems to be an expert on this topic. Actually James is the expert on the ca0106. I don't know much about it, other than that James did a remarkable job reverse engineering it. I really don't know what Creative is thinking with this crap. The #1 killer app for the emu10k1/audigy was the hardware accelerated 3d audio aspect. Remember how mind blowing the original sblive was compared to the previous generation of sound cards? Compare the sound in Doom to an EAX game from a year or two later. Ever since they have been selling bazillions of them to gamers. The ca0106 looks like a winmodem or something, where they took the emu10k1 and gutted it and left the bare minimum of (cheap!) hardware so they can implement all the emu10k1/2 features in software. Considering how much can be done with the relatively feeble DSP in the original emu10k1, if Moore's Law applied to DSPs then we should all be able to buy $50 sound cards with multiple outboard DSP cores and run 100 reverbs and harmonizers and real time pitch correction at the same time. I still maintain there's a lot of money to be made by someone who designs a soundcard with the exact right balance of outboard DSP horsepower, decent quality codecs, price point and of course open architecture. Who knows, maybe if the open source video card project succeeds then someone will step up to fund the open sound card project... Lee
