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ALS-007/ALS-100/ALS-200 based sound cards

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Support for sound cards based around the Avance Logic

ALS-007/ALS-100/ALS-200 chip is included.  These chips are a single

chip PnP sound solution which is mostly hardware compatible with the

Sound Blaster 16 card, with most differences occurring in the use of

the mixer registers.  For this reason the ALS code is integrated

as part of the Sound Blaster 16 driver (adding only 800 bytes to the

SB16 driver).

To use an ALS sound card under Linux, enable the following options as

modules in the sound configuration section of the kernel config:

  - 100% Sound Blaster compatibles (SB16/32/64, ESS, Jazz16) support

  - FM synthesizer (YM3812/OPL-3) support

  - standalone MPU401 support may be required for some cards; for the

    ALS-007, when using isapnptools, it is required

Since the ALS-007/100/200 are PnP cards, ISAPnP support should probably be

compiled in.  If kernel level PnP support is not included, isapnptools will

be required to configure the card before the sound modules are loaded.

When using kernel level ISAPnP, the kernel should correctly identify and

configure all resources required by the card when the "sb" module is

inserted.  Note that the ALS-007 does not have a 16 bit DMA channel and that

the MPU401 interface on this card uses a different interrupt to the audio

section.  This should all be correctly configured by the kernel; if problems

with the MPU401 interface surface, try using the standalone MPU401 module,

passing "0" as the "sb" module's "mpu_io" module parameter to prevent the

soundblaster driver attempting to register the MPU401 itself.  The onboard

synth device can be accessed using the "opl3" module.

If isapnptools is used to wake up the sound card (as in 2.2.x), the settings

of the card's resources should be passed to the kernel modules ("sb", "opl3"

and "mpu401") using the module parameters.  When configuring an ALS-007, be

sure to specify different IRQs for the audio and MPU401 sections - this card

requires they be different.  For "sb", "io", "irq" and "dma" should be set

to the same values used to configure the audio section of the card with

isapnp.  "dma16" should be explicitly set to "-1" for an ALS-007 since this

card does not have a 16 bit dma channel; if not specified the kernel will

default to using channel 5 anyway which will cause audio not to work.

"mpu_io" should be set to 0.  The "io" parameter of the "opl3" module should

also agree with the setting used by isapnp.  To get the MPU401 interface

working on an ALS-007 card, the "mpu401" module will be required since this

card uses separate IRQs for the audio and MPU401 sections and there is no

parameter available to pass a different IRQ to the "sb" driver (whose

inbuilt MPU401 driver would otherwise be fine).  Insert the mpu401 module

passing appropriate values using the "io" and "irq" parameters.

The resulting sound driver will provide the following capabilities:

  - 8 and 16 bit audio playback

  - 8 and 16 bit audio recording

  - Software selection of record source (line in, CD, FM, mic, master)

  - Record and playback of midi data via the external MPU-401

  - Playback of midi data using inbuilt FM synthesizer

  - Control of the ALS-007 mixer via any OSS-compatible mixer programs.

    Controls available are Master (L&R), Line in (L&R), CD (L&R),

    DSP/PCM/audio out (L&R), FM (L&R) and Mic in (mono).

Jonathan Woithe

jwoithe@physics.adelaide.edu.au

30 March 1998

Modified 2000-02-26 by Dave Forrest, drf5n@virginia.edu to add ALS100/ALS200

Modified 2000-04-10 by Paul Laufer, pelaufer@csupomona.edu to add ISAPnP info.

Modified 2000-11-19 by Jonathan Woithe, jwoithe@physics.adelaide.edu.au

 - updated information for kernel 2.4.x.