Tecra 8000 - opl3sa2 chip - No Sound

Problems and successes with specific brands/models of computer audio hardware
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Dgertis
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun 23 Nov 2008, 17:17

Tecra 8000 - opl3sa2 chip - No Sound

#1 Post by Dgertis »

First, let me say that I think Puppy Linux is absolutely amazing!!!

Second... Help!!! I can't get the sound to work.

We have an old Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop that was gathering dust on the shelf, and were about to toss out. Instead, however, I decided to see if I could make it a "green" project and reclaim it's usefulness by installing a Linux system.

After trying SUSE, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, I finally found Puppy! I was able to install and run the whole operating system in one try, and was even able to configure a wireless card using the wizard. Pretty amazing considering this is a pentium II machine with 128k ram and a 10gb hard drive!

Unfortunately, history repeats itself, yet again. Configuring the sound is "W2K" - way too komplicated. I cannot get sound to work using the ALSA wizard, or even trying place the config values in module.conf or modprobe.conf. All of the posts I could find on this were (as expected) 3-10 years old and correctly identified and corrected the problem in a particular operating system, but I could not duplicae the fix here in Puppy.

Here are the default BIOS Settings for the sound card:

Chipset: Yamaha opl3sa2

WSS I/O Address = 530H
SBPro I/O Address = 220H
Synthesizer I/O Address = 388H

IRQ = 5

WSS (Play) DMA = 1
WSS (Rec) & SBPro DMA = 0
Control I/O Address = 538H
MPU401 (MIDI I/F) = 330H
--------------------------------------------------------

Any advice as to how to se this up in one of he configuration files to activate sound in Puppy would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance for your thoughts on this.. and again, my deep thanks to all of you who make and support Puppy -- it is really great!

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gjuhasz
Posts: 422
Joined: Mon 29 Sep 2008, 14:28

Tecra 8000 - opl3sa2 chip - Must work

#2 Post by gjuhasz »

Hi Dave,

I have the same Tecra8000 except the 256M of memory.
The 4.1.2 version of Puppy Linux contains the driver you need. It recognizes the sound card - go ahead with alsaconfig.
Version 4.0 fails for the first round but succeeds if you answer Yes when Puppy asks whether to seek the the legacy drivers.
If you want to install Skype, use the pet package.
I did not try older Puppies.
I think upgrading to 256M does worth. However, you can live with 128M. G_Pup 1.1 can be a good base for you in this case.

tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

#3 Post by tempestuous »

Dgertis wrote:I cannot get sound to work using the ALSA wizard
For older hardware such as yours, particularly with devices on the ISA bus, there's a really important BIOS setting which will let your hardware play nice with Linux. By default the BIOS wants to allow the operating system to alter the computer's hardware resource values, but this will typically only works with Windows, not Linux, so you must force the BIOS to use its own hardware values. Normally this setting is called "PnP OS = Yes/No"
but instead I believe that old Tecras will have something like
"Device Config. - Configure Devices by OS"
and I think you need to change this setting to -
"Device Config. - Configure All"
Save this new BIOS setting, and exit BIOS.

Now boot to Puppy, and go to -
Menu > Setup > ALSA Sound Wizard
at the prompt, select "legacy"
the correct driver in your case will be "opl3sa2"

Now use Geany to open /etc/modprobe.conf
and at the very bottom you will see that the ALSA Sound Wizard has added these lines -

Code: Select all

alias snd-card-0 snd-opl3sa2
alias sound-slot-0 snd-opl3sa2
options snd-opl3sa2 fm_port=-1 midi_port=-1 port=0x370 wss_port=0x530 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5
Those hardware resource values are the default values for your soundcard, and they need to match the values listed in your BIOS.
You can actually delete the references to "fm_port" "midi_port" and "wss_port" but all other values are critical.
sindi wrote:dma1=00 dma2=01 irq=5 Addresses 0x220 0x530 x388 0x330 0x370
I don't know where you got those values from but they are NOT the default values for a Tecra 8000. dma1=1 dma2=0.

tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

#4 Post by tempestuous »

Dgertis, just one more thing, you posted a request for help back in 2010, and didn't respond -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=60478
That's improper forum etiquette.

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