Prodif24

 

This with my first kernel driver for a digital sound interface card. The ISA-bus card developed by MARIAN was equipped with 24-bit resolution converters and analog/optical SPDIF interfaces for audio input and output. No down-sampling, no filtering, just pure digital audio input/output. Nice card, but completely outdated due to the ISA interface.

 

This version will run under BeOS R4.5:

 

ISOMultisession

 

This is a modified iso9660 filesystem add-on and a little server application to read multisession CDs under BeOS R4.5. My first BeOS project ever!

 

This version will run under BeOS R4.5:

MemoryStick(tm)

 

I started developing a USB Mass-Storage Driver in order to use my new Sony Clie 710 under BeOS. The folks from Sony had added a few nice features that made the old and rusty PalmOS look a bit nicer. Not only was the 710 able to display nice color graphics, it had a built-in MP3 player. BeOS was ‘back then’ not able to handle USB Mass-Storage Devices, something I decided to change. It didn’t take too long to figure out that Sony was not following the corresponding specifications too closely. They actually inverted the status response of the device, maybe to add some lame copy-protection mechanism? Once that was fixed, the driver was working without problems. Except for the little hiccup that existed in the BeOS USB-Stack that would stall the flow of information because of some handshake running out of sync whenever the the user removed the device from the bus.

While I was using the driver for quite some time on my system, I never really made it available to the community. It never was meant to become a full featured Mass-Storage device driver anyway.

LANC Control-L Interface

 

There was a time when I fell for the MiniDisc back in 1994. Recording audio with my little portable MiniDisc recorder was just so much fun. Needless to say that I had a few(!) MiniDisc recorders hooked up to my PC back then. These devices were equipped with a little interface, called the Control-L bus. A lot of Sony’s products were able to be controlled via this bus, my Hi-8 camera, the Hi-8 VCR, Super Beta VCR, MiniDisc decks, ... Sony even offered a PC interface, a little grey box that would be connected to your PC’s serial port on one side and to the LANC interface of the device to be controlled on the other side. It came with a SW that would let you control a MiniDisc deck from within Windows. The biggest advantage of this SW was to automatically rename tracks of your recordings. No having to use the little wheel on the recorder’s front plate in order to enter the track titles was a huge advantage, believe me.

So, I had a look at the protocol and wrote a nice little BeOS application that would work with the interface. Not only was I able to control my MiniDisc decks from within BeOS, track titling was done in a breeze.

I doubt that many people ever bought this interface to control Sony devices, so this application was never made public.