[Openal-devel] Hardware accel and Linux.

[Chris Purnell]

Just over a year ago I said I wanted to do a hardware accelerated OpenAL
for Linux and that I thought that ALSA might provide the driver support
that I needed.  However, back then I couldn't get ALSA to work to my
satisfaction.  A few weeks ago I made the switch to Linux 2.6 and
because it came with the ALSA drivers I gave them another try.  This
time I got everything to work without a problem.  And so I got to work
on a fresh version of OpenAL.

And now I've got it working sufficiently well for me to make my first
release.  It requires ALSA and a sound card that is supported by the
ALSA EMU10K1 driver.  It's not thread safe, is lacking the ALUT WAV loader
functions and has no extensions implemented.  Also, it calls ALSA functions
from the ALSA async callback, which is apparently not safe.  But apart
from that it seems to work perfectly.

This release it just for anyone who is interested.  The next release
(which I hope to get out in the next week or two) will fix it's known
shortcomings.  Then I'll be looking for people to test it properly.

You can download my new OpenAL from: http://www.lost.org.uk/openal.html

I would also like to appologise to all the contibuters to the existing
OpenAL implementations whose code fragments I may have copied without
giving credit.  This version I wrote practically from scratch but I was
looking at both the exiting Linux and Windows versions from CVS the whole
time, as well as the spec, to see how it should be done.  So inevitably
much code was copied.

-- 
Christopher John Purnell  | I thought I'd found a reason to live
http://www.lost.org.uk/   | Just like before when I was a child
--------------------------| Only to find that dreams made of sand
What gods do you pray to? | Would just fall apart and slip through my hands