
     forte - an OSS/Lite driver for FortéMedia FM801 sound chips
     ===========================================================

This is a driver for cards using the FortéMedia FM801 audio
controller.  The Genius Sound Maker Live card and the onboard audio in
HP Workstation zx2000 has been tested.

Both IA-32 and IA-64 architectures are supported, but the driver
should work on any platform.

The FM801 controller supports a variety of AC'97 codecs.  This driver
lets the OSS core code figure the codec out, and should thus support
any codec with support in the Linux kernel.

The driver supports /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp for generic OSS audio
support.  In general it adheres to the OSS spec to the extent it can
be done with the way the hardware works.  The FM801 controller doesn't
support scatter-gather, so if the application sets fragment size too
low, it puts strict requirements on interrupt processing speed.  The
driver tries to compensate by enforcing bigger buffers than requested
by the application if the fragment size is low.

The forte driver includes both standard read()/write() and the
unsupported mmap() interface used by Quake.  mmap() is only supported
in playback mode.

U8 and S16 audio formats are supported, mono/stereo, as well as most
all sample rates implemented by the chip.  Default is 48 KHz, 16-bit,
mono.

MIDI, FM audio, and the gameport controller are not currently
supported.


The latest version of this driver can be found at:

    http://mkp.net/forte/


Martin K. Petersen, July 2002
