From Tom’s Hardware: “Creative Labs is bringing out a new range of sound cards based on a new DSP by E-Mu assisted by 24-bit converters. Linked with a new games library, the Advanced HD, the Audigy card is aimed at both game players and musicians who will benefit from the ASIO drivers. And as a bonus, Creative provides a FireWire port. Here is the low-down on a multimedia card that approaches professional standards. The article is great, and apart from the good price for the OEM basic model ($80 street price) it also comes with the notion to kill the ancient protocol of the Joystick port (the Joystick port on the Audigy only comes as an add-on card). Firstly because the USB Joysticks are the future, second because the actual joystick-port protocol is an extremely old, legacy problem and third because use of a joystick with most of the new PCI sound cards kill the overall OS latency. And this is exactly why the newer linux kernels do not turn on by default the joystick on the SBLive driver module and also why the BeOS (an extremely low latency/multimedia OS) never managed to properly support joysticks on the SBLive! driver.
The SBLive! Successor: The Creative’s Audigy Sound Card
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I bet it’ll be windows-only
the PCI gameport driver allows me to use the gameport on my sblive under beos without a problem. Though, windows flakes out constantly, telling me there is nothing plugged into the port.
>the PCI gameport driver allows me to use the gameport on my sblive under beos without a problem.
Do you think I was an idiot when I did the above statement on the news post?
Do you know the PRICE you pay everytime you have the gameport and its driver enabled on the SBLive under BeOS? The latency of the OS falls down worse than the Windows latency levels. And BeOS is called “The Multimedia OS” mostly because of its low latency that this driver kills in order to work.
Me, Jbq and the driver writter of the SBLive gameport driver had extensive emails exchanged when the driver came out (I was a beta tester for Alex). Alex stopped developing the driver after these emails. He probably understood that by releasing the driver he makes more bad than good to the OS itself (I haven’t emailed Alex since then though, so I don’t know if he even uses BeOS anymore).
The problem is not with the driver quality or the OSes (because all the OSes will get the latency problem when the SBLive or Audigy joystick port is enabled). The problem is with the joystick protocol itself, being extremely old and able to work as planned only on XTs and 286s, not on modern hardware. Creative knows that. This is why they try to kill it. There is always USB or Firewire anyway.
In another, not-related note, here is http://www.eugenia.co.uk/wedding.jpg“>a on our wedding day, last week.
Wasn’t the so called joystick port originally a MIDI port? I thought it just ended up being conveniently used for the joystick. As far as I know it is still used as a MIDI port. Wouldn’t this be a drawback for real musicians who still buy brand new MIDI devices? Just a thought, maybe I’m totally confused.
An added benefit of many sound card joystick ports is that they can use some pins for MIDI purposes. However, this wasn’t the original intention. MS’s first force-feedback joystick used the extra pins to transmit the FF data rather than use a serial port like most other FF joysticks from that time. That’s why you needed a joystick/MIDI port on your sound to be able to use that joystick. “Real” MIDI musicians have dedicated hardware for MIDI in/out. Those connectors look a little like an AT keyboard’s.
Somebody posted “I bet it will be Windows only.” Probably not true, given that Creative is very supportive of Linux. They have *good* open source drivers for their Live! card and also are one of the premier companies developing OpenAL.
Congrats on the wedding Eugenia
Linux drivers don’t help unless Creative dual or MIT licensed their code.
From what I know, Joystick and MIDI on soundcards have nothing in common except that they share the same connector. Their signals run on different pins and they are accessed in different registers. For example, an ESS-1688 chipset is not supported in stock BeOS at all (no sound, no MIDI), but you still can use a joystick on it.
And yes, the joystick protocol sucks soooo much.
There will be linux drivers for the Audigy. There are linux drivers for the Live! and at last check they’re under a very liberal license…
Eugenia, congratulations on the wedding
Any chance the Audigy will see BeOS drivers developed for it? Are the drivers for the SBLive for BeOS open source or closed? I assume Audigy is 100% non-compatible with SBLive since it uses a new chip for synth, but then the SBLive synth was never usable with the BeOS drivers anyway. I would love to see all the synth and SoundFont stuff made available to BeOS… I know – dream on.
I waited a long time to have sound on my BeOS after I bought a Live card… there’s no way I’m upgrading to another not-pro consumer sound card from Creative unless there will be support under my main OS.
On Creative’s web site, the specifications clearly indicate that while the Audigy can play back audio at 96000, 24-bit, it cannot record in this format and maxes out at 48000/16-bit. Do not be mislead by the review; I read through the artical looking for this information and it seems to be missing. I think the author does not know about this. The author indicates not being able to find the desired settings in the software used to test the card and that is likely because the card does not seem to offer that feature.
I do not believe that they will ever be Audigy drivers for BeOS. Sorry. It is pretty complex to develop this driver, even if the specs may be freely available.
To answer your first question, the SBLive driver was closed source, written by Be, btw.
To be extremely precise, the Live! driver for BeOS actually contains copyrighted material. Be Inc. would not even have had the option to open-source it “back then”.
–jbq
Workin’ linux driver exist from OSS and creative opensource site. Actually it’s a modified live! driver under the same lic. as Live! I don’t think you should assume too much.