OpenAL back-end: repost for reconsideration

[Chris Robinson]

On Monday 19 January 2009 9:33:26 am Stefan Dösinger wrote:
> The problem with the openal32.dll -> libopenal.so wrapper was that it broke
> some games, and we never debugged why. If anyone wants to continue this
> development I think this wrapper library is something that would be highly
> welcome.

In Linux, I'd imagine it's because the old Linux lib wasn't coded very well. 
However, newer versions of OpenAL on Linux are based off the same code the 
Windows version is derived from (the original Windows version was LGPL, then 
was closed up; the recent Linux versions were ported and enhanced from the 
LGPL code).

I don't really know how well the OSX version of OpenAL works for this purpose, 
though.

> As for the winmm driver, Roderick pretty much said it. We don't need
> another half baked sound backend, the effort should instead be put into
> making sure we have one properly working one for each platform(Alsa for
> Linux, coreaudio on the mac, not sure about *BSD and Solaris)

Yeah, a WinMM driver pretty much won't work well. A better idea would be 
wrapping DirectSound around OpenAL, and I have code that does that; but it's 
not perfect yet, and it would have to be ported to C from C++ for any hope of 
inclusion in Wine (it's currently a real native DLL, cross-compiled with 
MinGW, depending on the aforementioned OpenAL DLL thunk).


IIRC, most of the problems surrounding the DLL thunk were two things:

1) The original patches used a lot of macros to do the function thunks. 
Alexandre didn't like that and wanted it expanded. This part I've done, though 
the thunks are missing TRACEs.

2) The functions returned by al[c]GetProcAddress also need to be wrapped. 
Although the Linux and Windows version use the same calling convention 
(cdecl), AJ says this can break on OSX. To do this, we'll likely need some 
kind of script like opengl32 uses (luckilly not too many extensions provide 
functions, so the needed wrappers will be minimal compared to opengl; but I've 
been lazy in setting that up).

There's probably some other things that need to be done, but those two are the 
big ones I remember. I've attached a patch with the latest version I have.. 
it's a little broken on OSX currently because it's not checking for the OpenAL 
framework, and I'm not sure how to do that properly.
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