Topic: Dual PCI Laserboy Dacs in one computer

[LaserCo]

Hello James and all,
way back around window95 time I was able to take an isa printer card and strip away a trace to one of the slot pins on the card and solder some wirewrap wire from it to an address decoder IC. This gave me two extra printer ports at different locations than normal.

Do you think this could be done with PCI soundcards?
or rather, do you have all of the info on how the pci cards would need to be addressed and which pins do what on one,

or even taking this a step back and do this on an isa pc?

Is there a decent manual on how to use your program yet?

can you show me on here where i find the information to install your program under linux?

Thanks for help in advance,
Mitch

[James]

Hi Mitch. Welcome to The LaserBoy Forum!

My first success with the modified sound card idea was with PCI cards.

I never tried two cards at once, but I don't know why that wouldn't work.

I wrote a Linux Frame Buffer API that knows how to manage up to 32 different display cards. At one point I had 1 AGP and 4 PCI video cards all working together at the same time.

I haven't worked with Linux and sound cards for a while, but I think it enumerates them and makes file nodes in the /dev/ directory, like dsp1, dsp2, etc. You can play waves from the command prompt with an argument of which dsp to use.

The nice thing about using PCI cards is that you have both -12V and +12V from the PCI slot to power the op-amps in the correction amp. You don't need a DC/DC converter.

If you get the distribution zip of LaserBoy, it comes with all the source code. You should be able to just navigate to the LaserBoy/src/ directory and issue a make command. You will need to have Boost C++ and libSDL on your system for it to compile.

Once you have the executable LaserBoy, it will be in the parent directory, you can run it from the console, if you have a kernel built for Linux Frame Buffer support. If not, you can run it in Xfree86 (even if you do have fb support).

You run it with the arguments of the width and height of your display or the window that it will open in X.

There are tons of posts here on LBF on how to use LB.

http://laserboy.org/forum/index.php?topic=551.0

I'm pleased to see you are running Linux! I wish more people did.

I always test every new update to LaserBoy to make sure it compiles in both Windows and Linux.

James.