Tmbinc about: 24C3 Presentation, 360 Linux Sound Driver Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Tmbinc about: 24C3 Presentation, 360 Linux Sound Driver Posted by XanTium | January 2 01:19 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From tmbinc's blog: [QUOTE] The 24c3 is over now, and we really had a lot of fun. We brought 6 of our Xboxes, which allowed us to grab attention from quite a lot of people in the hackcenter :). Axel, who already wrote the free60 X11 driver using a revolutionary (ok, let's say: "interesting") remote development method, started, together with Tom, hacking on a Xbox360 linux sound driver. The bad thing was that they had nothing more than a really short braindump of what I so far found out on the sound hardware (and that was really not much more than a list of registers associated with the sound). But some hours later, they had a first result: No sound, as we didn't brought speakers with us, but we just hooked up a multimeter to the sound port, and whenever they would "trigger" the sound driver, the multimeter showed some activity! Luckily it was (almost) daytime, so we just bought speakers (and more DVDs for Ben), and voilà: sound! It was something uncontrollable, but some time later we had some code which we estimated to output a plain sine wave. But somehow we screwed it up, and the output was an interesting piece of music, just not a simple sine wave. Ilinuxp. On the other hand, it's a mystery for me how they could bring the hardware to output anything at all! Thanks a lot, you two! I will soon provide Axel a skype link so you can continue developing remotely ;) [/QUOTE] Full Story: tmbinc's blog

[the_nerdy]

At least they got a song out of this.


Now if they can get the sound to work correctly.

I think working on the 3D graphics right now is a higher standard, so screw the sound.

[Dark Seraph]

screw the sound..are you serious its one your senses...i NEED sound ...but im still working on a problem i have right now with linux overscanning all my tv's >.<

cant wait for a fully working soudn driver.

[Bandit5317]

The sound's not that big a deal right now, since you can use usb speakers and get it, anyway. But from the sound of it, this happened when they were pretty much just messing with it. Heck, I'll take any good news on how linux360 is progressing.

[HotKnife420]

Excellent. This is a great step towards people writing applications which take advantage of these types of things. We may see some homebrew yet in '08!

[eduardor2k]

Hi to everyone, i think Sound is more important than 3D hardware acceleration because 'i think' it's the only thing that lacks drivers on free60 (correct me if i'm wrong).

But hey, sound is here (ok, some sort of sound)

Now, bring me 3D hardware acceleration baby!!!

[bucko]

Nice, they will take one step at a time, I'm sure 3D will come but it may never (look at Xbox 1 Linux). I'd rather have a complete driver system for the 360 than missing bits like sound.

[tmbinc]

If you look at http://x226.org/?p=38 - we have 3d acceleration since some months now. It's just that nobody cares

[eduardor2k]

If you look at http://x226.org/?p=38 - we have 3d acceleration since some months now. It's just that nobody cares

Ok, some further words: I didn’t implemented any standard API yet, right now, the functions are on a very low level, directly above the hardware...

[tmbinc]

...which means that unless somebody works out a 100% perfect solution, nobody is going to use it?

Honestly, I like the provided interface more than OpenGL. It's comparable with DirectX, of course a bit simpler, not device-independent (which eases up things a lot), and of course misses some functions (but there should be no showstoppers - most things are done in the shaders anyway).

[the_nerdy]

The 3D access is barely working. We only have maybe 5% of the access to it.

Once everything for the XBox1 can be put onto the X360, then we will talk.

Esp XBMC.

Just not enough 3D access right now to run any of that.

[openxdkman]

Don't worry tmbinc, I have a several years project that will use your amazing findings about Xenos (low level programming is my prefered way too...)

Since it allows easy interpreted (beside low level compiled) programming that should bring a few coders that will use it (without knowing it).

btw, would you mind posting the sound registers? Thanks.

(To everyone: stop ignoring pbkit existence or I'll get angry too! He he he)

Prepare for some legal Netrek 3D playable between xbox360 and xbox1 (no eta, my current job is eating me alive but 2008 should be calmer -all emergencies treated before end of fiscal year 2007-)

(I really want to hear the "resistance is futile" from the Borgs on 360, so...
Don't let them put your morale down, tmbinc! Resistance is not futile!)

This post has been edited by openxdkman: Jan 2 2008, 08:21 PM

[ILLusions0fGrander]

any progress is good progress. nice work

[tmbinc]

The 3D access is barely working. We only have maybe 5% of the access to it.

Once everything for the XBox1 can be put onto the X360, then we will talk.

Esp XBMC.

Just not enough 3D access right now to run any of that.

Right, as you would know what you are talking about.

What is your 5% figure based on? Name some features which are missing for you. I bet you don't know any. And you *do* know that even with the original XDK you cannot port xbox1 stuff 1:1, as the fixed-function pipeline is gone? (Let me bet, you don't even know what a fixed-function pipeline is, right?)

The performance right now is far better than Xbox1, thanks to the low-level API probably even much better than it could be archived with a "layer" (like GL) with a lot of optimization.

And NO, XBMC wouldn't compile against the official XDK for a dozen of reasons - let it be the 3d stuff which changed, the non-x86-architecture, the endianness, or the multi-core. So in your words, the original 360 XDK is crap, yes, and is like 5% done? Just because it doesn't fix the world for you?

[yaazz]

A multimeter hooked up to the sound output..... AWESOME
These guys are my heroes