Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-21, 08:09:

I also remember seeing a Media Vision Jazz 16 sound card being supported in some games.

Not sure if that has 16-bit audio though, maybe someone more familiar with it can clarify.

Looks like 16-bit, but only compatible with SB Pro - added to the "neither" list.

The FIFOs are only 16 samples deep, and there to prevent buffer underruns when DMA doesn't react fast enough for whatever reason in the normal use case.

As far as NV1 goes, the chip there is probably used just as a convenient codec+mixer, fed by whatever data stream the PCI side can generate for it, not unlike SB compatibility on things like Aztech and OPTi cards.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-06-21, 10:40:

Note that there are programs that can use a WSS codec located at non-standard addresses (other than 530h, 604h, E80h, F40h), but there are also other problems related to PCI...

The big elephant in the room is third-party DMA. ISA sound cards get their sound data deliviered by the DMA controller. The sound card does not know what address the data is from. The sound application is not going to tell the sound card any address. It just tells the sound card: Play the data you receive from the DMA controller, and generate an interrupt after you received n samples. All sound cards from the 90s (or newer) have some means to provide gapless playback, so there is some way to have the interrupt generated without also stopping playback at the same time. The ISA DMA controller has no way to send data to a PCI sound card.

Getting digital sound on PCI sound cards to work with software written for ISA sound cards entails one of

1. Virtualizing the DMA controller in software, and translating the DMA controller programming into equivalent instructions to the PCI busmaster controller on the PCI sound card
2. Having a way to interface to ISA DMA from a PCI card. IIRC this is what PC/PCI aka SBLink is doing
3. Having a protocol in which the mainboard and the PCI sound card cooperate to "hand over" some DMA channels to a hardware DMA controller emulation on the PCI sound card. This is what DDMA is doing.

Unless there is the required software (for the first method) or hardware (for the other methods) support, you can't get ISA compatible WSS (or SB) playback on a PCI card. Hardware support for the later two method is required on both the mainboard and the sound card.

Yes, and certain PCI cards do support SB-Link and/or DDMA to provide compatibility with some SB - sometimes even SB16.
But is there any card to do that for WSS compatibility? I've never seen any trace of such a thing, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...

Can anybody clarify on where to place the Rockwell RWA010 ?

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/media/rockwell/DSA-446553.pdf
Obviously no SB16, but they do mention WSS, however:

"8-bit and 16-bit PCM sample record and playback from 4 kHz to 44.1 kHz"

If it can't do 48 kHz, it can't be WSS compatible...

Grzyb wrote on 2024-08-01, 13:33:

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/media/rockwell/DSA-446553.pdf Obviously no SB16, but they do mention WSS, however: […]
Show full quote

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/media/rockwell/DSA-446553.pdf
Obviously no SB16, but they do mention WSS, however:

"8-bit and 16-bit PCM sample record and playback from 4 kHz to 44.1 kHz"

If it can't do 48 kHz, it can't be WSS compatible...

Probably another hardware solution that is not compatible to the AD1848 port interface (oftentimes called WSS), but still provides drivers compatible with Windows (some vendors like to call the OS-side API used by those drivers WSS, too). One clue that this is the case (except for the glaring obvious 44.1kHz limit):

RAW010 datasheet wrote:

Windows Sound System (WSS) compatible recording and playback of 16-bit and 8-bit PCM audio is supported in Rockwell-provided host driver software which controls the WaveArtist using the WaveArtist command/status registers.

I interpret this sentence as "the software is WSS compatible" (whatever that means, most likely that the card can be accessed by the MMSystem API in Windows), whereas the driver that implements the API uses a proprietary WaveArtist interface to communicate with the card.

Looking at the Linux and Windows drivers - no trace of 530, 534, or any other WSS addresses...
seems safe to assume that RWA010 isn't compatible with the WSS hardware.