Re: [Alsa-user] Marian Marc 2 - drivers needed

[James M. <ja...@ma...>]

Hello Fryziu,

Your post intrigued me and I thought I would investigate it.
This card seems to be from a very low volume manufacturer and not 
produced for some years, potentially 20 years or more.
The chipsets you mention are not audio chipsets. The Xilinx is an FPGA 
and the PLX is a PCI bridge. The card appears to be entirely proprietary 
and unique.
Unfortunately this means drivers for this card would need to upload some 
binary blob or otherwise program the FPGA for it to work.
This makes writing a driver much more difficult if not impossible, 
combined with the obscurity of this card it explains why there is no driver.

I don't think you have any change of getting it working with ALSA on 
Linux directly.

However, there is another possible solution.
The manufacturers website no longer offers any downloads for this card, 
but the web archive has an older version of the site which does: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20070315160445/http://www.marian.de:80/en/downloads
These drivers are of course only for windows. My idea (which is only 
theoretical) is that you could pass-through the PCI card to a VM running 
Windows XP.
On the VM you then run the Cygwin version of pulseaudio: 
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/FAQ/#index33h3
You can then forward audio steams from Linux to the VM which is able to 
play it on the sound card using the Windows drivers.
I couldn't much about using pulseaudio on Windows and nothing about 
using the method I have outlined above. It might work (I haven't tried 
it) and you would need modern hardware to support the pass-through.

I hope this is of some help to you.

James

On 08/09/2019 08:15, Fryziu DeMol wrote:
> Audio card Marian Marc 2 24/96
> (earlier sold as SekD Prodif Plus)
> https://i.imgur.com/fWVE3mk.jpg
> distinguishable chipsets are:
> VCS10XL by XILINX SPARTAN
> PCI9052 by PLX TECHNOLOGY
>
> Is there any chance to get it working?
> Does anyone have some unfinished drivers,
> some clue what to do to run this card on ALSA?
>
> Fryziu
>
>
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