*BSD News Article 75866


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Using pca device?
Date: 10 Aug 1996 15:04:53 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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daver@sirius.cs.pdx.edu (Dave Roethig) wrote:

> How do I use the pca (sound through speaker) device?

By putting the device configuration line into your kernel config file:

device pca0 at isa? port IO_TIMER1 tty

It operates on the normal PC speaker, but naturally, its sound is
rather terrible, and it puts a fair amount of load onto the machine by
drastically increasing the timer interrupt rate.

The device node /dev/pcaudio is supposed to be created by default.  If
you are adventurous, you can symlink it to /dev/audio, so other
programs will believe you've got a Sun /dev/audio compatible sound
device.

The implementation used to have several glitches.  Some of the most
serious have been fixed right in time before 2.1.5, quite some other
ones only later in 2.2-current (by July 20, 1996).  So if you try
playing XBoing over it, you will note several minor anomalities even
in FreeBSD 2.1.5.  In FreeBSD 2.1, don't be surprised if the system
hangs or crashes at all when you're doing this.  (Dumping single .au
files to /dev/pcaudio used to work, but XBoing opens/writes/closes the
sound device again for each new sound, so it puts much more load on
it.)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)