Intel Pentium 4 Sound Drivers For Windows 7 32 Bit

[Phoebe Sibilio]

Longago in a galaxy far far away, back in the early 90's, I worked for a crappy clone company as a phone technician. At the time, 386SX/25's were common for in-house technical support / customer service computers. Obviously our jobs did not require sound cards, or fancy hardware of any kind, but as technically savvy users, we spent a lot of time trying to sneak a good video card or more memory into our systems.

As I remember it, there was some sort of driver we used to install that would play audio on the PC speaker. It was tinny and scratchy, but I remember it most definitely worked. What I can't remember is what the driver was called, or if it was a DOS thing or a Windows 3.x thing. It certainly worked well enough that Windows sounds were easily distinguishable.

Does anyone have any details for the audio driver I am referring to? I suspect there may be more than one, as it isn't a unique idea. I would be interested to know the name, how it was installed, if it supported DOS and/or Windows, and any other history that might be available.

When sound was played, sound could get tremendous priority, causing an inability to move the mouse cursor while sound was played. Or, alternatively, moving the mouse cursor could significantly lower sound quality. (Not to say that sound quality was ever great, but there could be more and/or longer moments of silence as any sound was cut out repeatedly.) The level of unpleasantness seemed to vary very significantly between different computers, and may have been able to be influenced by other details (like maybe how much memory was available, which could be affected by what drivers were loaded).

There actually were two common PC speaker drivers for windows. One of them is the PC speaker driver by Microsoft, already mentioned in the other answers, while the other one, written by John Ridges has not yet been mentioned. The Microsoft driver is typically installed as SPEAKER.DRV, while the driver by John Ridges is installed as SPEAKR.DRV.

RealSound is a patented (US US5054086 A) technology for the PC created by Steve Witzel of Access Software during the late 1980s. RealSound enables 6-bit digitized PCM-audio playback on the PC speaker by means of PWM drive, allowing software control of the loud speaker's amplitude of displacement. The first video games to use it were World Class Leader Board and Echelon, both released in 1988. At the time of release, sound cards were very expensive and RealSound allowed players to hear life like sounds and speech with no additional sound hardware, just the standard PC speaker.

This lab presents the steps to setup an environment for using the EVAL-ADMP441Z evaluation board together with the BeMicro SDK USB stick and the Nios II Embedded Development Suite (EDS). Below is presented a picture of the EVAL-ADMP441Z Evaluation Board with the BeMicro SDK Platform.

The SDP-B controller board is part of Analog Devices System Demonstration Platform (SDP). It provides a high speed USB 2.0 connection from the PC to the component evaluation board. The PC runs the evaluation software. Each evaluation board, which is an SDP compatible daughter board, includes the necessary installation file required for performance testing.

The EVAL-ADMP441Z evaluation board is a member of a growing number of boards available for the SDP. It was designed to help customers evaluate performance or quickly prototype new ADMP441 circuits and reduce design time. When using this evaluation board with the SDP board or BeMicro SDK board, provide a 5 V to 6 V supply to J4.

The ADMP441 is a high performance, low power, digital output, omnidirectional MEMS microphone with a bottom port. The complete ADMP441 solution consists of a MEMS sensor, signal conditioning, an analog-to-digital converter, antialiasing filters, power management, and an industry standard 24-bit I2S inter-face. The I2S interface allows the ADMP441 to connect directly to digital processors, such as DSPs and microcontrollers, with-out the need for an audio codec in the system.

The ADMP441 has a high SNR and high sensitivity, making it an excellent choice for far field applications. The ADMP441 has a flat wideband frequency response, resulting in natural sound with high intelligibility.

After the Quartus II and Nios II software packages are installed, you can plug the BeMicro SDK board into your USB port. Your Windows PC will find the new hardware and try to install the driver.

Since Windows cannot locate the driver for the device the automatic installation will fail and the driver has to be installed manually. In the Device Manager right click on the USB-Blaster device and select Update Driver Software.

The next sections of this lab present all the steps needed to create a fully functional project that can be used for evaluating the operation of the ADI platform. It is possible to skip these steps and load into the FPGA an image that contains a fully functional system that can be used together with the uC-Probe interface for the ADI platform evalution.The first step of the quick evaluation process is to program the FPGA with the image provided in the lab files. Before the image can be loaded the Quartus II Web Edition tool or the Quartus II Programmer must be installed on your computer.To load the FPGA image run the program_fpga.bat batch file located in the ADIEvalBoardLab/FPGA folder.After the image was loaded the system must be reset. Now the FPGA contains a fully functional system and it is possible to skip directly to the DEMONSTRATION PROJECT USER INTERFACE section of this lab.

The lab is delivered together with a set of design files that are used to evaluate the ADI part. The FPGA image that must be loaded into the BeMicroSDK FPGA is included in the design files. This section presents the components included in the FPGA image and also the procedure to load the image into the FPGA.

This section presents the steps for developing a software application that will run on the BeMicroSDK system and will be used for controlling and monitoring the operation of the ADI evaluation board.

NOTE: Windows 7 users will need to right-click and select Run as administrator. Another method is to right-click and select Properties and click on the Compatibility tab and select the Run This Program As An Administrator checkbox, which will make this a permanent change.

Since you chose the blank project template, there are no source files in the application project directory at this time. The BSP contains a directory of software drivers as well as a system.h header file, system initialization source code and other software infrastructure.

In addition to the board support package settings configured using the BSP Editor, there are other compilation settings managed by the Eclipse environment such as compiler flags and optimization level.

In Windows Explorer locate the project directory which contains a directory called Software. In Windows Explorer select all the files and directories from the Software folder and drag and drop them into the Eclipse software project ADIEvalBoard.

These 2 steps will compile and build the associated board support package, then the actual application software project itself. The result of the compilation process will be an Executable and Linked Format (.elf) file for the application, the ADIEvalBoard.elf file.

The BeMicroSDK hardware is designed with a System ID peripheral. This peripheral is assigned a unique value based on when the hardware design was last modified in the SOPC Builder tool. SOPC Builder also places this information in the .sopcinfo hardware description file. The BSP is built based on the information in the .sopcinfo file.

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