Hi,

I have now had a chance to read some of the specs of the X-Fi cards. aka. emu20k1. It turns out that some of the X-Fi cards have a compatibility mode. By default, they boot up in compatibility mode. The interesting point is that this "compatibility mode" is in fact the intel-HD standard so could use the intel-hda driver. For one X-Fi card with IDs: Device 1102:0009 Subsystem: 1102:0010 works a bit with the ALSA hda-intel driver. So far, the off the shelf hda-intel driver, with simple PCIs adjustment, works for the above card, but only sound capture works so far, so probably some quirk would be needed. This compatibility mode works with the Windows Vista UAA drivers.

Not all X-Fi cards support with compatibility mode. For example, any card with (after a cold boot into Linux) Device 1102:0005 Subsystem: xxxx:xxxx will be X-Fi only.

With regard to actual full X-Fi support, I am still in the progress of creating a GPL emu20k1.h file, that is the first step towards an snd-emu20k1 native ALSA driver.

James

Hello,

That first ID is an X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe (CA0110-IBG) is it not? Not a real EMU20K1 based X-Fi, fully software driven, and from what I read its just a PCIe variation of the old CA0106. This thing will probably work with snd-ca0106 if creative kept to their old tactics regarding their low end X-Fi products.

As for supporting the real X-Fi's, this is great news, its been a very longtime coming. One just has to question Creative's motives behind finally releasing the datasheets out of the blue like that after more than 2 years of trying to get them. Are these sheets under an NDA? Full support of an X-Fi will probably also need a firmware loader.

If the PCIe CA0110-IBG doesn't share any common traits with a full blown EMU20K1, then I think the real X-Fi's should be focused on first as many more people are going to have these real X-Fi's that are useless to them at the moment, (about 3 years remember).

I'll be around to help test code and can try anything you will require to help out supporting a real X-Fi card.

02:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB X-Fi [1102:0005] Subsystem: Unknown device 415a:0034 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10 I/O ports at a400 [size=32] Memory at efc00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M] Memory at e8000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M]

Bren