DIrectSound on top of openAL ?

[Chris Robinson]

On Friday 31 October 2008 10:11:12 am you wrote:
> I think that your dsound->openAL wrapper could be used verbatim in wine,
> if wine provides an openal32.dll <-> native openal wrapper (as with
> opengl32).

I have one of those, too, but it's not yet suitable for inclusion into Wine. 
In particular, I need to make wrapper functions for even all extension 
functions, which I haven't done yet (and unlike GL, there's no simple file I 
can parse to auto-generate such wrapper functions; but also unlike GL, 
there's not so many).

> By the way, did you try your dll with vista, which dropped dsound
> hardware acceleration ?

I haven't, as I don't have Vista. I also don't think I have any cards that 
have a native OpenAL hardware driver. A problem with this is that a default 
OpenAL install will have an OpenAL->DSound wrapper as a fallback.. so if you 
have a DSound->OpenAL wrapper and a OpenAL->DSound wrapper at the same time, 
you obviously get some problems. ALchemy got around this by loading 
ct_oal.dll directly, bypassing the wrapper (at least in the free beta they 
had).

So it can work in Wine, with an OpenAL32 DLL thunk and a bit more work on both 
sides, but it working in Windows without locking down to specific drivers 
will be a bit more difficult.