ESS(4) | Device Drivers Manual | ESS(4)

# NAME

`ess` —
ESS Technology AudioDrive family audio device driver

# SYNOPSIS

`ess* at isapnp?`
`ess* at pnpbios? index ?`
`ess* at ofisa?`
`audio* at audiobus?`
`opl* at ess?`

# DESCRIPTION

The `ess` driver provides support for the ESS 1788, 1888, 1887, and 888 AudioDrive audio devices.

The AudioDrive 1788 is a half-duplex device, while the 1888, 1887, and 888 are full-duplex. All are capable of 8- and 16-bit audio sample recording and playback at rates up to 44.1kHz.

The AudioDrive takes 16 I/O ports. The I/O port range, IRQ, and DRQ channels are set by the driver to the values specified in the configuration file (or for isapnp, pnpbios, or ofisa, the values assigned from the firmware). The I/O port base must be one of 0x220, 0x230, 0x240, 0x250. The IRQ must be one of 5, 7, 9, 10 (or 15 on the 1887 only). The first DRQ channel must be selected from 0, 1, 3. The second DRQ channel (used for playback by the full-duplex 1888/1887, ignored by the 1788) can additionally be set to 5. If both DRQ channels are used they must be different.

The joystick interface (if enabled) is handled by the joy(4) driver.

# SEE ALSO

audio(4), isapnp(4), joy(4), ofisa(4), opl(4), i386/pnpbios(4)

# HISTORY

The `ess` device driver appeared in NetBSD 1.4.

# BUGS

The AudioDrive devices have a SoundBlaster compatibility mode, and may be detected by the SoundBlaster driver (see sb(4)) rather than the AudioDrive driver. The workaround is to remove the SoundBlaster driver from the kernel configuration.

August 25, 2020 | NetBSD 10.1