OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware

Two Sound Cards on OS/2-eCS

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Martin Iturbide:
Hi.

I was wondering, How does OS/2-eCS manage two sound cards on the same system?

How do you know which one has to sound?
If both are installed with a working driver, does the two make the same sound? or is it a way to configure which sound output to use?

I ask this because today almost every new mainboard comes with two sound cards (or what it looks like two sound cards).  One of the regular sound card (with ports in the front and other in the back) and other that is the HDMI sound out port.

Just for example Windows has a way to manage the output/input sound ports, which is not very practical, but has something.



Regards.

Marc:
I don't have 2 sound cards but do have an on board chip set and a sound card.  The on board chip set plays system sounds but not anything in  Firefox using Flash..    Put in an old Blaster card in and it plays both.  Only thing is I'm using the audio driver from ECS 1.0.  It's the only driver that I could get to work.

Ian Manners:
In the late 90's I had two sounds cards installed, think one was an AWE with the MIDI daughter card and the other was a SB16 or maybe a Vibra16 but I do know that I had to set IRQ's, addr's and IO ports differently on each card so there were no conflicts, then load drivers for both cards, each driver specifying the IRQ's, ports etc.

I cant remember what I did software wise, possibly set up what went where in the System Multimedia setup panel ?
I might have had to edit mmpm2.ini, so long ago, another world, a different life.


--- Quote ---I ask this because today almost every new mainboard comes with two sound cards (or what it looks like two sound cards).  One of the regular sound card (with ports in the front and other in the back) and other that is the HDMI sound out port.
--- End quote ---

Just went back and reread your post :)
The above bit is 'normally' simply mixing, not two different sound cards. ie, you select were you want the outputs to go to depending on program or inputs.
I guess it comes down to the motherboard though, a manufacturer might have made an upmarket MB for a vertical market maybe.

Some audio chipsets have completely separate input paths and completely separate output paths but its all done with high speed digital multiplexing and pathways before it hits the DAC's, so you can do some fancy stuff but it all comes down to the actual mixing. I have seen some where a sound card with 4 completely separate dual channels(read chipsets) on it, that I would classify as 4 sounds cards but it uses the one driver (not OS/2 unfortunately). Other stuff, its simply easier to use an external USB connected mixer.

[edited again, my speeling is bad when I get tired]

Dave Yeo:
I also at  one time had 2 sound cards, actually a Pro Audio Spectrum which included an original Sound Blaster clone. Like Ian, I had to be careful to set different IRQs and DMA for both cards, luckily set on the driver line in config.sys and the Dos utility for testing IRQs worked.
I don't remember ever doing anything for OS/2 to use the Pro Audio part, it just worked, or in case of a faulty 486 MB, crashed when using 16 bit DMA.
What I could do is set Winos2 to use the sound blaster part so OS/2 and Winos2 could both play sounds without conflict and under DOS most games could choose one or the other or in the case of Simcity 2000 one card playing midi and the other card doing all the other sounds.

Martin Iturbide:
Thanks for the replies.

Sorry, I didn't actually mean two "cards" , I actually mean two "chipsets", I just noticed I was not clear. But I understand more about it now. But I think we are missing some tool to administrate the sound cards a Windows has.... but I think we need first to have more audio drivers :)

I also want to test the test USBAudio drivers, that's why I try to figure it out how to mnage two chipsets on OS/2-eCS. But I still can not make the USB audio devices that I have to work yet.

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