Sound card compatibility

[guferr]

Hi, i'm building an simple OS that must play songs in wave format, and i was wondering if the soundblaster pro is compatible to most of the sound cards of today days.
thanks.

[Combuster]

Supporting the soundblaster series will only cover old equipment. Depending on what you have as spare computers this may be a majority for you, but it will not work on modern computers. Several VMs and emulators support a soundblaster though.

There's much less of a standard nowadays, but common chipsets include Intel HDA and clones on currently sold computers, and various AC97-labeled devices on computers of the previous generation.

[guferr]

The question is that i need to run this OS in most of the modern computers, and i want to find the easier manner to play the wave sounds, with a reasonable quality, and i don't have much time to develop various drivers, so i was wondering wich one would be compatible with most of the sound cards, just like happens in video cards, where all of them today supports the resolution of 320*200 with 256 colors (mode 13h).

[Combuster]

The VGA is rather epic in regards of backwards compatibility, mostly because it is used by everything including the latest windows and linux to various extents. Soundblaster compatibility on the other hand was only an issue for DOS, where each program had to come with their own drivers, and SB compatibility meant supporting DOS games.

Therefore, SB has been promoted to be part of history proper, whereas VGA isn't. That means that unless you have motherboards with comparable chipsets you are quite likely to need multiple drivers. I estimate that for each driver (of good choice) you will reduce the amount of unsupported machines you'll encounter by 50%.

I briefly went through the current mobos on sale and basically noticed two commonly recurring chipsets. One's the Intel HDA I already mentioned, the others have a VIA VT17xx. Of course your target group mileage may vary and you probably should start building a driver for the chipset in your primary test computer.

[guferr]

There's an easy manner to use already existing drivers to play wave files?
I mean, there's any sound driver that explains how to be used in assembly language?

[Combuster]

Nope. Welcome to OS Development!

[guferr]

i don't mean a driver that plays wav files, but compatible to the waveform sound, and that i can adapt in my OS.
When i said that i thought in the menuet OS drivers, because its have been made in assembly language, and i would get some explanation of how to load it and call it.
Obs.: this OS is just an little game, and i am developing another OS, to this other OS i'll take more time to develop, and i'll create all drivers for it, but now i don't have time to do it.

[guferr]

I didn't ask anyone to do it, and if i was searching someone to do it, i would have posted it on the "Announcements, Test Requests, & Job openings" page, not here on "OS Development" page.
What i asked is if there's an already existent driver that i can adapt to use in my OS, such the menuetOS's intel HDA driver.

[Brynet-Inc]

I didn't ask anyone to do it, and if i was searching someone to do it, i would have posted it on the "Announcements, Test Requests, & Job openings" page, not here on "OS Development" page.
What i asked is if there's an already existent driver that i can adapt to use in my OS, such the menuetOS's intel HDA driver.

Did you just answer your own question accidentally?

There is plenty of documentation and source code out there, it is your job to adapt them to your needs, or don't.. couldn't care less.