Concerning the separate OpenAL32.dll thunk patch and OpenALwinmm driver patch

[Nick Burns]

>From: Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org>
>To: "Nick Burns" <adger44 at hotmail.com>
>CC: wine-devel at winehq.org
>Subject: Re: Concerning the separate OpenAL32.dll thunk patch and 
>OpenALwinmm driver patch
>Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:49:52 +0100
>
>"Nick Burns" <adger44 at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Again -- for the sound drivers -- Mac OSX has ONE sound driver ONE
> > I would like to have a choice.
>
>Why?  What does it do that you cannot do with the CoreAudio driver?

True the coreaudio driver can be made awesome -- but as it stands it has 
problems with many games on my machine (currently hard for me to test due to 
fullscreen detection changes in ogl)
Problems range from deadlocking -- to crackling sound
There are a few games that run flawlessly under coreaudio
My openal driver also has crackling sound in some games (but i have not yet 
seen deadlocking -- its possible it could)

Also the coreaudio driver is not testable and wont help linux ppl -- just 
Mac ppl

An openal driver would be multi-platform -- testable under 
windows/mac/linux, would add a 2nd built-in driver to Mac OSX.

> > Yes my wineopenal patch is not perfect (based on broken code does not
> > help) -- I know that -- but thats why i want to get it into wine -- so
> > other people who know more about audio can add to it and make it
> > better
>
>Judging from past experience, people for whom it doesn't work right
>will simply go out and implement yet another driver, with yet another
>set of bugs...

True -- it has its own set of bugs -- but I cannot iron them out myself -- I 
would need help from people to do so -- thats why I would like to give it as 
an option to you wine people (who can test it on linux)

(its possible i could try and start a side project in sf.net or something -- 
no clue what other options there are)

In a perfect world we could make an awesome cross-platform openal driver 
that does ... everything (winmm/dsound/dsound3d/...) everywhere 
(Linux/Windows/MacOSX)

----------
So, thats all the good stuff about it...
The bad stuff is that its
another driver in the tree
another option to confuse people
another point of failure
... (there is more badness here probably)

>--
>Alexandre Julliard
>julliard at winehq.org

- Nick