HI all,
Well, I can now report that after a couple of weeks of trying, I still haven't been able to get either OSS or ALSA (0.2 or 0.3) to run reliably with my "opl3sa3" sound hardware. I'm going to try one more thing (using ALSA's native mode) today, but I don't really expect it will change much.
To answer some of Guenter's specific questions:
OSS (at least as it's delivered in RedHat 5.2) doesn't work in full duplex with my opl3sa3 card.
My high noise floor problem in OSS didn't go away when I tried switching DMA channels. Guenter's remarks that both channels are 8 bit conflicts with comments in the INSTALL documentation for the ALSA distribution, but anyway switching the channels didn't help.
In ALSA 0.2 I got a 25 dB noise floor, roughly the same as in NT, and in 0.3 I got 40 dB in the left channel, 25 in the right.
I confirmed Guenter's finding that ALSA's OSS emulation doesn't provide full duplex.
I think the next step should be for me to change teh audio hardware, but I can't do this before mid April. So I now plan to put out another "test release" in case any of the rest of you are curious to see how is works on other cards...
cheers Miller