Porting Device Drivers to Winehq

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:19:24AM -0400, John Shillinglaw wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Can anyone point me to documentation/help or tools for disassembling
> Windows 95 drv and vxd files and/or porting them to wine??
This is a rather totally wrong kind of query, since Wine won't be able
to help you at all, since it doesn't support any binary VxDs.

You really want to try ALSA instead, and especially look at
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=vendor-Roland_Edirol#matrix
which unfortunately doesn't list any SCP-xxx card.

> I have a Roland SCP-55 Soundcanvas card (pcmcia ) which is not
> recognized by linux, and Windows XP ( which I don't like using anyway )
> will not recognize the drivers when it prompts for a driver file.
This is an all too common situation...

> Ideally I'd like to decode the windows drivers to help with developing a
> pure linux driver.
Very nice! That's the only really useful solution anyway...
Oh, and I'd like to especially encourage you to *not* throw that card
away and buy a new one, since Linux *does* need more sound drivers in order
to be able to finally support *all* cards on the market.

I've written an ALSA driver for the entirely undocumented Aztech PCI168 card
(a low-end, crap card), by spending some weeks reverse-engineering
Windows drivers using IDA (Interactive DisAssembler).

(you might want to search the wine-devel archive for recent discussions of IDA,
since someone asked about a nice selection of good disassemblers)

> However, while I've found plenty in the wine docs about running /porting
> windows _programs_, almost nothing about what to do with the win 95
> *.inf *.drv *.vxd and *.ini that come in the driver package for the
> pcmcia card.
...since we don't (~= cannot) support that at all.
It should be done entirely via Linux kernel driver anyway.

Another idea would be to try and see whether virtual machines such as VMWare
can give an insight what the hardware interface looks like.

But, most importantly, you should ask Roland whether they will give you
(parts of) the card specs required to be able to write a driver
(without laborous reverse-engineering, that is).

And of course you should read all relevant ALSA pages about supporting an
undocumented sound card.

And maybe the SCP-55 card is similar to another Roland card supported
by ALSA? That could be a start...

Feel free to ask me about further ALSA driver specifics, I may be able to
help.

Andreas