README SoundBlaster 16 Driver for BeOS Intel R3.x
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Welcome! This is a SoundBlaster 16 driver for BeOS Intel R3.x. It may be used by all owners of SB16 or compatible cards. This driver is considered an experimental driver. Use it at your own risk. Anyway no severe bugs are known and the driver runs fairly stable and shouldn't do any harm to your system.

Currently the driver just supports playback and mixer use, but no capturing. There are some minor problems left. See also the "Known Bugs" section for further information.

This driver is freeware. Feel free to give it to anyone who might use it, but be sure to tell all windows users to upgrade to BeOS before they try to install this driver ;-) All updates and the original archive can be found on http://www.be.com/berare/drivers/sb16drv.tgz.

In case you want to applaude for this incredible ;-) driver or just want to flame me for a bug feel free to email me at th.schaaps@bigfoot.de. Please use [SB16-Bug] as message subject.

USE THIS DRIVER AT YOUR OWN RISK! NO WARRANTIES FOR NOTHING! NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY LOSSES WHICH MIGHT OCCUR BY USING THIS DRIVER: NO MONEY BACK IF YOUR CAT DOESN'T LIKE THE SOUNDS YOU PLAY.

Installation
As all BeOS software this driver is really easy to install. Since you are reading this README you already figured how to unzip the archive. Now you only need to copy the SB16 file to /boot/home/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers directory and you are done. If you use an older non-pnp revision of the SB16 you might also want to edit and copy the SB16_settings file to /boot/home/config/settings. A more detailed explonation of the SB16_settings file can be found in the file itself. You might also use the included utility showisapnp which dumps some information on the currently installed PnP devices.. Be sure to run showisapnp from a terninal window. HINT: If anything goes wrong with the driver, boot with your original BeOS installation CD and press ALT-SHIFT-CONTROL-T to open a terminal window mount your /boot filesystem and remove the driver.

Know Bugs:
As far as I know there are no severe bugs left in the current release of this driver. But there is a known problem with Becasso. Currently it seems to be that Becasso interferes with the Media Kit - even though I have no idea why - which produces weird results on the DAC stream (shutting it down and other nasty effects). This seems to be a Media Kit problem though, but it is evaluated and as soon as there is a fix you will find a new driver on BeWare.

Another problem which might occur is strange behaviour of some legacy hardware when you use the autoprobe facility of the SB16Config tool. A primary candidate for this are some older NE2000 compatible networks adapter cards as well as some ISA based Adaptec SCSI controller cards (these aren't supported by BeOS anyway, so you might get rid of this card :). If you run into trouble with autoprobing a reboot should help (for the geeks who want to know everything: autoprobing can put some cards in an unusable state).

Still missing:
Currently only digital audio playback is supported. No capturing, no MIDI. MIDI won't be available before R4, but be sure to check on BeWare for an update which supports capturing as well, which will be released as soon as it is done. But I can't make any promises on that, since I'm doing this driver in my spare-time.

Thorsten Schaaps

Copyright (C) 1998 Thorsten Schaaps