wnd's weblog

sidplay1 and ALSA (for Maemo)

16 Jul 2008 17:49:46 maemo, software

I’ve patched sidplay1 to use ALSA output, and compiled a version for Maemo Diablo/Chinook.

The original Unix port of sidplay is fast and it has audio driver support for OSS, HPUX, PC-SND, SGI, and SPARC. Not ALSA. sidplay2 has better emulation and (kind of) support for ALSA, but compared to sidplay1 it’s horribly slow. Guess which one suits Nokia Internet Tablets better? However if you prefer quality over playback time, see the entry about sidplay2.

I wrote an ALSA driver for good old sidplay. The patch merges with sources fetched from Your Favourite(tm) Debian repository. Patched copy can then be configured as usually, and if necessary headers and libraries are found, compiled with support for ALSA. This patch isn’t in any way Maemo/NIT specific, but it has been developed to be used on NIT.

Two versions of the patch exist, both are generated with sources from Debian repository. Once applied, configure and Makefile.in need to be recreated. It should be enough to issue automake-1.4 && autoconf. You can also download pre-compiled package for Maemo Chinook/Diablo.