Envy24HT (VIA/ICE 1724) Audio Driver OS X PowerPC porting project

[ITzTravelInTime]

Hi PowerPC users, I am the guy who ported the kx audio driver to PowerPC macs, and i have decided to get into another project, porting the Envy24HT audio driver to PowerPC macs!

Why this? Mostly because i love putting all sorts of crazy pci cards in my macs and also because i already own some of the supported hardware and so i thought it will be cool to use some of them on PowerPC macs as upgrade paths.

I didn't have to start from scratch luckily since there were an abbandonware open source driver for hackintoshes, so all i had to do is basically port it to PowerPC macs.

A very early port has been actually been very straight forward and it just required minor code modifications to handle the big endian nature of the platform and to let the driver compile and load on old Xcode and OS X versions.

Then the project then moved (with the current version 2.0 development) to actually improve the driver by adding support for more sound cards and by improving the support for already supported ones, but also by still supporting both intel and powerpc and the latest versions of modern macOS too.

That said here you can find the github repo with the source code, and a very old driver release (which has been made obsolete by the new one i am working on) and were future releases will be published: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/Envy24HT

The release plan of the upcoming version 2 of the driver is to relase 2 builds of it: A PowerPC + intel 32bits and an intel 64 bits one (an universal build including PowerPC + intel 32bit + intel 64bit isn't possible since the latest macOS versions dropped support for pre-snow-leopard kernel api versions, so in order to keep the compatibility good i am splitting it in 2 builds).

For now the major additions have been a rework of memory management and a general improvement of 64 bit oses support and the adding of support for the ESI/Audiotrak Prodiy 7.1 HiFi sound card and the ESI MAYA44 PCI (the white one) (which is still in development at the moment of writing) and overall improvement of some areas of the driver implementation, like the way volume controls are implemented (still work in progress at the moment of writing).

Here are some supported sound cards as the moment of writing:

• Terratec Aureon 5.1 Sky (best support)
• Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space (best support)
• Terratec Phase22 (best support)
• Terratec Phase28 (best support)
• M-Audio Revolution 5.1
• M-Audio Revolution 7.1
• M-Audio Audiophile 192
• ESI Juli@
• ESI Prodigy Hi-Fi 7.1 (driver v2.0+ only)
• ESI MAYA44 PCI (driver v2.0+ only)
• Audiotrack Prodigy 7.1 (non HiFi variant) (best support)
• Audiotrack Prodigy HD2 (missing volume controls)

Some sound cards that can be maybe supported in the future:

• Hercules Fortissimo 4 and similars
• Onkyo SE 200/ SE 150

So while i am working on it i live you with this screenshot of the ESI/Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi i own running on my g4 mdd with leopard, which, seems to be working well for now.

 

[eastone]

If I remember correctly M-Audio cards have official drivers.

 

[ITzTravelInTime]

If I remember correctly M-Audio cards have official drivers.

That's not the point really, because lots of them does here, the point is really supporting the cards that never got drivers for ppc os x, while also keeping the driver unchanged from the intel version, which supports all of those cards, so i can release universal binaries and provvide alternatives in case official mac drivers are unfindable on the internet, like with some of the listed terratec cards, which supposedly had them but nobody managed to get a copy of them.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Man, you're great . As mentioned above, Revo5.1-7.1 already got official drivers, but I don't remember if they are universal (so hack-users need Intel drivers anyway) .

BTW, what about Envy24HT-S? I don;t know what's the difference between this chips, this name just jumped in my head .

 

[ITzTravelInTime]

Man, you're great . As mentioned above, Revo5.1-7.1 already got official drivers, but I don't remember if they are universal (so hack-users need Intel drivers anyway) .

BTW, what about Envy24HT-S? I don;t know what's the difference between this chips, this name just jumped in my head .

1) Actually some cards got universal drivers, but just for the 32 bit kernel mode, so only for tiger and leopard or snow leopard and lion running using the 32 bit kernel mode.

2) The various chips from the VIA/ICE Vinyl series such as the Envy24 or the Envy24HT do work slightly differently from each other, as much as breaking driver compatibility (as far as i can confirm), but the linux community managed to make a general purpose driver for a good chunk of the chips from that series, but since this mac driver has always been only for the Envy24HT, i will keep it this way, since really making a universal driver will mostly mess things up more than it needs, because also there is another driver for the plain Envy24 chip (that perhaps i will be forking off too one day), and also because i am not really an experienced developer when it comes to drivers, my C and C++ experience comes mostly from user land programming, ms-dos and arduino.

Edit: i found some evidence that the Envy24HT-S chip might work with this driver (see the comments to the linked forum thread), but of course this needs testing:

[New Envy24HT Driver] For Audio PCI Card Onkyo SE-200

I've built a kext driver based on Envy24HT kext to support Onkyo SE-200 PCI sound card. Just built it but i have not get that device yet. Now if anyone has that card, please check if my modified driver works with it or not. That is an expensive card and i don't want to buy it before I'm sure that...

www.insanelymac.com

 

[ITzTravelInTime]

Ok so, i have to massively correct myself, apparently the envy24HT-s is driver compatible with the envy24ht, because i just relised that basically i have it in one of my sound cards, so i will now try to get some more of them to experiment with, but specific sound cards will still need extra code in order to work or the driver will just kernel panic because the sound card you are trying to use is unkown. That said i'd love to get some onkyo, esi/audiotrack and m-audio stuff to try, also because those are mostly the most well documented in the linux drivers. There are even some chinese cards with an integrated pcie to pci bride that i could try getting.

 

[ITzTravelInTime]

Just found out about the existance of this very obscure japanise card, it' remarkably similar to the ESI Prodigy 7.1 HiFi that i own, to the point that it lets me think that it might actually use a licensed design from ESI/Audiotrack or that both cards might be based on some unknown third party reference design of some sort.

Anyway the card is the TOKYO STYLE S010（DCS-SEV24/PE）and as far as i know it's one of the very few PCI Express sound cards that might work with this driver. If you ever get/currently own one let me know immediately, i'd like to let you try it on OS X using the driver patches i have made for the ESI/Audiotrack Prodigy 7.1 HiFi (I will still need to know the complete set of pci and subsystem ids taken from the card, before making any driver build that would not kernel panic when attempting at using this card).

BTW there are also some chinese PCIe cards featuring the VT1723 chip, those might also be made compatible with the driver (IDK about VT1723 compatibility with the VT1724/VT1721), but i don't have any hardware for tests and eventual code adjustments, so for now it's all totally hypotetical.

To end the post here is a picture of it from the internet:

And here is a picture of the ESI/Audiotrack Prodigy 7.1 HiFi without the shroud for comparison:

They look remarkably similiar, and probably just feature the same chips (with the addition of a pcie bridge on the japanise one)

 

[ITzTravelInTime]

So i have been working again on the driver recently, and since i have got a maya44 rev g, i have improved support for it by adding proper volume controls for output. I have also been working on adding support for the other DMA channels to hope to get the second set of outputs working.

Also since they use the same codec i have been also working in parallel with the prodigy 7.1 hifi and i was able to get some noise to play back from the other channels, this is just a start, but we might see multiple channels working from the prodigy hifi at least.

Also this is me experimenting, i am keeping the source code on github updated if you want to try it, and i can't give any ETAs whatsoever on when i can release a driver.

That said this might actually become a pretty decent driver in the future now that we have some form of multiple dma support.

Before i end this post i am also looking into some other cards using the envy24ht family i could get for a test, like some Chinese ones using the vt1721 chip, it's the same used by the terratec producer phase 22 which is fully supported, and those are also available on pcie too.