Guillemot Maxisound ISIS ALSA driver / News: Recent posts

I uploaded a new version of the modified bochs enviroment to isisalsa.sourceforge.net/bochs/
Should you want to participate, read the readme file for some chalenges

I added lots of stuff to the website. check it out.

After evaluation several options, I found this program 'bochs', which is actually an open-source VMWare. It completely simulates the X86 (pentium) processor and a lot of periphials often found on motherboards. The nice part is that it also supports PCI and IO handlers. This means that you can write your own handlers for PCI requests at specific addresses, and for IO operations (assembler: in, out, insw, outsw, ...) on specific addresses. You might see the opportunity here.
This is a quasi perfect tool for the driver monitoring, as it enables me to run a Win9x session on top of a Linux distro. I'm now going to write handlers to handle (duh) the PCI and IO calls to the ISIS board. After looking into the source code of bochs I'm convinced that this shouldn't be too hard. The nice part of the story is that I can actually pass those PCI and IO requests to the physical hardware. This means that the card will work on the simulated windows box, and I'm able to monitor all trafic from/to the card. Just what I need.... read more

As you might have noticed, the project was very silent for almost a year. With no help from Guillemot, and lot's of other things on my mind, I didn't get much further. BUT... the last days I have been very productive. The guys at Guillemot don't want to help, so I have decided to completely reverse engineer the card, and to make all info available... I'm not ready yet, but I have already discovered a lot about it. See the hardware page for more details (http://isisalsa.sourceforge.net/hardware.htm)... read more

I am contacting guillemot in order to obtain the nescessary information on writing the driver. I don't know how they will respond, but I'll try to keep insisting until I got what I need.
Maybe if I'm a little more persistent than I used to be, they give me the info. Otherwise I'll have to terminate the project, it's almost impossible to reverse engineer this bastard.

The way the ISIS card works is crazy...at least from the reverse engineers point of view.
It seems that it uses the general purpose bits of the maestro chip to pass data on to the sam9707.
all data transfers seem to be 8bit...
I don't know how they manage to get 4out/8in channels simultaniously over this connection.

I don't know if I'll be capable of cracking this nut without help from Guillemot... and they are not too helpfull.

A very basic homepage is added. It contains some developement documents and links.

See the 'Homepage' link, or use http://isisalsa.sourceforge.net