[rescue] Sick Dreamcast hacker

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 11:04:03AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
>   Argh. :-(

With some fiddling, that I haven't had time for, I should be able to
restore it to a previous state.  But the short of it is that driver
development on the part of Creative Labs seems to have stopped (and
they aren't bug free either), and the drivers were never rolled into
the kernel.  So the kernel drivers do wave output, but that is all I
can get them to do.  I can't even get them to do mixing.

I'm severely disappoint because I bought this card with the idea that
it would be better supported than anything else.

>   I don't understand why there seems to be such a hole in the audio
> I/O market.  It seems like it just hasn't advanced along with
> everything else, except for the really expensive cards.

I don't get it either.  Nice Crystal Semiconductor AD and DA chips are
pretty cheap.  If someone had the skill and wanted to take the time, I
bet they could build a 4 chanel card and sell it in small quantities
for under $100 (but then, I don't know what additional expense being
PCI incurs over being an ISA card or USB device) and they would make a
profit.  Better yet, make it four chanel in, and 6 chanel out.  Then
you could also sell it to the PC for home theatre crowd.  

Things would probably be cheaper to manufactor still if it was a
digital IO only card, but I could be wrong.  The RME cards are digital
only, and look how expensive they are (although, part of the big deal
is that they are a lot cheaper than the competition).

> > >   So here I am trying to come up with a circuit to reduce the duty cycle
> > > of a 460KHz square wave down to about 12-15% using a small number of
> > > inexpensive components.  I like hacking electronics, but this part is
> > > *not* fun.
> > 
> > I'll assume that what you said is really hard since I don't know what
> > duty cycles for square waves are.  Do you mean reduce the frequency
> > 12-15% or what?
> 
>   Well right now it's a plain old 50% duty cycle square wave, and I need
> to reduce the "on" time from 50% to (not by) 12-15%.  I'm using a
> 74HC123 retriggerable one-shot now (running about 28%) but I seem to
> be at the chip's pulse width limit. :-(

Ahh, so you are trying to reduce the width of peaks of the wave
without changing the frequency.  I get it.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd