[Wizard] Wizard audio - reprise

[Cameron Patrick]

(I'm CC'ing Trevor 'cos he was asking on the PLUG list about using a
Wizard for sound-related purposes not long ago.)

G'day all,

After all my whinging about the Wizard's onboard audio being of lousy
quality, I've finally managed to get it to something tolerable.  As
someone else suggested, it was driver-related: however it seems that it
wasn't sound drivers, but instead /graphics/ drivers[1].  Running XFree86
4.3 with the 'nsc' driver (as Craig suggested) instead of the
unaccelerated VESA driver seems to have resulted in a significant
reduction in noise.  There's still a faint 50Hz hum and if you listen
carefully you can hear network traffic, but this is inaudible over even
quiet music, so I'm at peace with the wizard now ;-)

One thing: in order to use the nsc driver, I needed to push the video
RAM selection in the BIOS up to 4mb - otherwise it hung immediately
after displaying the xdm login screen.  (Craig mentioned this to me at
some point but it doesn't seem to have been in his post to this list, so
I thought I'd note it here.)  With the nsc driver, I have half-way
reasonable 2D graphics, and a refresh rate somewhat higher than 60Hz
(and substantially easier on the eyes!).  Still can't go above 1024x768
though :-/

Cheers,

Cameron.

[1] I'm assuming that this is what fixed it - the sound is okay now but
wasn't last time I tried it with the vesa driver.  It also fits with
my earlier comment about XMMS causing more background noise than sox.