Linux Aureal Drivers

The Story

Aureal makes these sound card chipsets called vortex. They released a mixed binary, source driver for linux. They had some problems, so some hackers worked on making them more stable and support the latest kernel. These were submitted back to aureal with the intent to make them back into the official drivers. Aureal went through some business problems, and has now gone bankrupt. Their assests were purchased by Creative Labs. Unfortunatly, Creative refuses to release the specs for these cards.

Status

The current drivers (1.1.2) are in usable state. However, it is recommended that the cvs be used instead. The cvs version has a variety of useful fixes, and a rewritten makefile that should make them eaiser to install.

We are currently in the progress of reverse engineering the binary part of the drivers with the hope of finding out how to talk directly with the card. When this is complete the drivers will likely be completely rewritten from scratch.

The current reverse engineering work can be checked out of the cvs using the "aureal_re" module

Links