Solaris on Tecra 550CDT: Audio

To be precise, you can, by adding PnP device identifier YMH0021 to ID section of the entry for Sound Blaster in /platform/i86pc/boot/solaris/devicedb/master file, make Solaris recognize Tecra's audio and even use it, but you'd be limited to low quality 8MHz mono sound which for me was absolutely unacceptable.

So I went with purchasing another commecrial product - OSS driver from 4Front Technologies, Inc. It's only $30, but it uses capabilities of the laptop's audio system in full, and the sound I now have, when playing audio files (e.g. .wav or .au formats) or when running software synthesizer (for MIDI instrumentations) or playing audio CDs, isn't different from what I heard when was trying the audio system under Windows95.

When installing OSS driver, make sure you're using at least version 3.9.1e for Solaris/x86 2.6 or 3.9.1i for Solaris 7: any earlier version may not (and most probably is not going to) work properly! Configuration of OSS sound driver for Tecra 550CDT audio system is a little bit not obvious; here's what you should end up with after running soundconf utility:

Card: Generic Yamaha OPL3-SAx (YMF715/YMF719) non-PnP
      Device: OPL3-SA Windows Sound System port (enabled)
         I/O port = 530
         IRQ      = 5
         DMA (A)  = 0
         DMA (B)  = 1
      Device: OPL3-SA MIDI port (enabled)
         I/O port = 330
         IRQ      = -1
      Device: Yamaha OPL2/OPL3 FM synthesizer chip (enabled)
         I/O port = 388

Please note the following important moments:

• Don't try to force soundconf to perform automatic detection of audio hardware - it won't work for Tecra 550CDT!

• Although Tecra's audio stuff is fully PnP compatible and the OSS driver's configurator - soundconf - offers OPL3-SA3 PnP card (which is actually what you have in the laptop) as one of the options, do not use it: for this particular case with Tecra 550CDT you must select Generic Yamaha OPL3-SAx non-PnP card!

• For some reason, soundconf expects you to provide it with two different IRQs, one for Windows Sound System (WSS) and another for MPU401 (MIDI interface), while Toshiba BIOS setup utility shows only one IRQ for the entire sound configuration (see this page for details on correct sound setup in Tecra's BIOS). What you should do is specify the correct IRQ (5 in my configuration) for WSS and do not specify any IRQ for MIDI (MPU401) by selecting Disable the IRQ option when asked for OPL3-SA MIDI IRQ value. You'll face then multiple attempts of soundconf to make you "fix the error" and enter "missing" IRQ; you should ignore them and end up with a setup similar to shown above.

If the sound driver is installed correctly, you should see this output from cat /dev/sndstat command:

OSS/Solaris 3.9.1i (C) 4Front Technologies 1996-1998

License serial number: XNNNNNNNN
Options: 
This copy of OSS is licensed to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Card config: 
Yamaha OPL3-SAx at 0x530 irq 5 drq 0,1
OPL3-SA MIDI at 0x330
OPL-2/OPL-3 FM at 0x388
SoftOSS Virtual Wave Table  <--only if SoftOSS is installed

Audio devices:
0: MS Sound System (CS4231) (DUPLEX)
1: Shadow of audio device #0 (DUPLEX)

Synth devices:
0: Yamaha OPL-3
1: SoftOSS v1.2             <--only if SoftOSS is installed

Midi devices:

Timers:
0: System clock
1: MS Sound System (CS4231)

Mixers:
0: MS Sound System (CS4231)

Just in case, here's how dmesg and prtconf report the working OSS driver:

dmesg:

ISA-device: oss0
oss0 is /isa/oss@ffffffff,9

oss, instance #0
    System properties:
        name <intr> length <8>
            value <0x0900000005000000>.
        name <instance> length <4>
            value <0x0a000000>.
        name <minor> length <4>
            value <0x00000000>.
        name <dma-channels> length <32>
            value <0x000000000100000002000000...>.
        name <reg> length <24>
            value <0xffffffff0900000000000000...>.
    Driver properties:
        name <chosen-interrupt> length <8>
            value <0x0900000005000000>.
    Register Specifications:
        Bus Type=0xffffffff, Address=0x9, Size=0
        Bus Type=0x1, Address=0x220, Size=14
    Interrupt Specifications:
        Interrupt Priority=0x9 (ipl 9), vector=0x5 (5)

There's a negative side of using OSS driver, too: it replaces completely Sun's native audio system, so programs like audiotool or sdtaudio don't work any more. However, there's a lot of free utilities (available from 4Front Technologies' Web site or elsewhere on the Net) that fully compensate this deficiency and do everything I want (with one exception - see below). Here's some of OSS compatible tools that I personally use:

• xmmix by Ti Kan - to control the sound driver settings; it's available from this SunSite. Note that OSS driver comes with its own mixer utility - ossmix, and the two are pretty much interchangeable.

• xmcd also by Ti Kan - to play audio CDs; available from the same site as xmmix.

• play that comes with OSS driver - to play Sun audio (.au) and .wav format files.

• timidity by Tuukka Toivonen - to play MIDI files. See another my page that discusses timidity and MIDI music in general for more details.

Java audio support in Sun JDK 1.2 beta 4 also works with OSS drivers without any additional configuration (I don't even understand why), but honestly I didn't go too far in that direction, so I can't tell if this support is good or complete enough.

The only really bad thing about the OSS driver is that it's not supported by RealNetworks, and therefore sound in their RealPlayer up to version 5.0 beta 3 doesn't work properly. It's sad, but alas, there's no choice... Rumors are that RealNetworks are going to start supporting OSS sound model in the nearest future, but nothing definitive so far.