“A year or two ago, Aureal Inc, a sound card chipset designer,
made two chipset called Vortex and Vortex 2. These chipsets are
incorporated into many sound cards made by companies other than
Aureal Inc, such as VideoLogic and Diamond. As the designers of
these two chipsets, it was Aureal’s job to write drivers for them,
and Aureal’s code was incorporated into the manufacturer’s
drivers.”
“Unfortunately, a little while ago, Aureal Inc filed chapter 7
in the US and is no longer writing drivers for these chipsets. At
the time that Aureal went bust, they had only written complete and
stable drivers for Windows 95/98/ME. The Windows 2000/XP and Linux
drivers were still in beta form.”
“A group of people at Sourceforge were in possession of the
source code for Aureal’s beta Linux driver for the chipsets before
Aureal disappeared, and have been working on the drivers since.
These drivers are stable and complete and work on most Intel
systems. However, a problem with the drivers and VIA chipsets
(which are found on old Pentium systems and all AMD systems) means
that system lockups occur when the drivers are used on these VIA
chipset-based systems. This is a problem that was acknowledged by
Aureal when it was still trading, and the problem was fixed in the
Windows 95/98/ME drivers. If the problem is to be fixed in the
Linux drivers, the people maintaining the Linux drivers need access
to the source code for the stable Windows 95/98/ME drivers. The
driver source is now owned by Creative Inc, which bought the assets
of Aureal after it filed chapter 7.”