Aureal Vortex 1 Sound Card Not Recognized

[Tim Sheets]

Hello,

I am having a problem getting my sound card to be recognized in FC1.

The system is an older Asus PII board, and the soundcard is an Aureal 
Vortex 1 as shown from 'lspci -v' below.

00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Aureal Semiconductor Vortex 1 (rev 02)
         Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
         Memory at e2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
         I/O ports at b800 [size=8]
         I/O ports at b400 [size=8]
         Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1

If I look at the relevant messages from dmesg, it is basically telling 
me that it can't config the card I think.

[root@chode etc]# modprobe cs4232
<misc unlreted items cut>
ad1848/cs4248 codec driver Copyright (C) by Hannu Savolainen 1993-1996
ad1848: No ISAPnP cards found, trying standard ones...
cs4232: set synthio and synthirq to use the wavefront facilities.
cs4232: Must set io, irq and dma.

So, I tried

'modprobe cs4232 irq=11 io=0xb400 dma=<0-7>' (I didn't know which DMA it 
was or may be using, and I got the same error messages when I tried 
without specifying dma).  The resulting messages from dmesg are below:

ad1848/cs4248 codec driver Copyright (C) by Hannu Savolainen 1993-1996
ad1848: No ISAPnP cards found, trying standard ones...
cs4232: set synthio and synthirq to use the wavefront facilities.

I don't even recall where I saw a reference to this particular module 
for this card, but somewhere searching around today.  The other module I 
saw referenced 8820 (or something to that effect) I don't have on my system.

Does anyone have any idea where to turn with this?

Thanks,

Tim

[Bill Nottingham]

Tim Sheets ([e-mail]) said:
> Hello,
>
> I am having a problem getting my sound card to be recognized in FC1.
>
> The system is an older Asus PII board, and the soundcard is an Aureal 
> Vortex 1 as shown from 'lspci -v' below.
>
> 00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Aureal Semiconductor Vortex 1 (rev 02)
>         Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
>         Memory at e2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
>         I/O ports at b800 [size=8]
>         I/O ports at b400 [size=8]
>         Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1
>
> If I look at the relevant messages from dmesg, it is basically telling 
> me that it can't config the card I think.
>
> [root@chode etc]# modprobe cs4232

That's very much the wrong module.

The Aureal Vortex stuff is from an old company that has since
died, as I recall, and they never released specs. There was
a binary-only driver for it at one point; not sure if someone
has gone about hacking up something else.

Bill

[Tim Sheets]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Tim Sheets ([e-mail]) said:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am having a problem getting my sound card to be recognized in FC1.
> >
> > The system is an older Asus PII board, and the soundcard is an Aureal 
> > Vortex 1 as shown from 'lspci -v' below.
> >
> > 00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Aureal Semiconductor Vortex 1 (rev 02)
> >        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
> >        Memory at e2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
> >        I/O ports at b800 [size=8]
> >        I/O ports at b400 [size=8]
> >        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1
> >
> > If I look at the relevant messages from dmesg, it is basically telling 
> > me that it can't config the card I think.
> >
> > [root@chode etc]# modprobe cs4232
>
> That's very much the wrong module.
>
> The Aureal Vortex stuff is from an old company that has since
> died, as I recall, and they never released specs. There was
> a binary-only driver for it at one point; not sure if someone
> has gone about hacking up something else.

I was wondering about that....like I said, I don't recall where I saw 
that reference.  Anyway, I also tried installing the drivers on 
sourceforge, but they won't compile.  From what I read, Creative Labs 
bought Aureal and won't release the specs.

Thanks for your help, at least I won't beat my head against the wall 
with the wrong driver. :-)

Tim

[James Ralston]

On 2003-11-23 at 21:57:38-0600 Tim Sheets  wrote:
> I am having a problem getting my sound card to be recognized in FC1.
> the soundcard is an Aureal Vortex 1

You're screwed; throw it away and buy a different sound card.

Aureal was killed several years ago by Creative Labs' inferior
products and superior lawyers.  There was a petition to get the
company to release hardware specs, but some entity bought the IP
rights to the remnants of the company, and then promptly disappeared.

I bought one of the Aureal Vortex 2 cards years ago, when the only
other alternative was Creative Labs and their "Soundblaster Live!"
defective pieces of crap.  Despite the lack of hardware specs, some
intrepid developers had partially reverse-engineered a driver, but the
driver was quite buggy; running xmms for any significant period of
time would eventually completely wedge your system.

Anyway, when Aureal folded, that pretty much killed interest in the
reverse-engineered driver effort.  I went and bought a Turtle Beach
Santa Cruz card, and I've been happy ever since.

(Even under Windows, Aureal cards are essentially paperweights, as the
drivers haven't been updated in years.)