The AMR, Audio/Modem Riser card WM9707

So I was doing some research into the Soundcard of the Xbox Alpha. Because I want to create a franken Alpha myself I need a soundcard. Well, it can work without one but thats kinda stupid and I want sound. According to some people on Assemblergames.com the Dash should work without one. Games will crash.

Me and a few other wanted to find or create such a sound card ourselves. But the resources to do so are very limited, in a way that you cant realy find documents or parts very easy. but it all changed yesterday, 14/10/2013. I contacted Intel, searched the archive and after a while Espes send me the Intel doc I was searching for http://www.ms-infobytes.info/pages/AudioModemRiser.pdf ,

Bad_Ad84 commented in the chat "

Bad_Ad84

why not download the reference design from wolfson for one of the amr cards

and here we are :D I found first one for the WM9705, but this morning I used the Archive again:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040517010459/http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/uploads/documents/WM9707AMR.pdf

On the whole wide web there is little to no information about the AMR slot used in many 2000 era computers, it was supposed to be kinda closed and such.

But here are the specs and some other intresting images :P original source also noted.

I hope this info and the files can help you If you stumbled on this, I try to make this sound card into something real in the next couple of month and maybe sell some boards if I have leftovers. Otherwise, make it yourself, order the main ic from somewhere like china and build it :D or source your own board. Original retail price, $99.

I spend $8 so far, and 6 hours searching.
I have made a backup of all the said files, so might one disappear, please contact me.

Image from borman, his Soundcard behind the Nvidea video card:

UEFI bootmanager and writing to nvram

I had some experience with installing Windows on my Lenovo Thinkpad E530 and later also Ubuntu as a multi-boot environment next to windows. It all works fine.And somehow I managed to install an uefi shell aswell, but after I got an SSD and installing windows and Ubuntu, I was unable to recreate a working uefi shell, the Uefi partition i created was stored on the SSD instead of the hdd.

I dont know if moving the files to a hdd partion has serios speed implications, but I want the freedom to replace the now "Data and personal files" disk anytime in the future without destroying the ssd boot options.

So, anyway. I think I fixed it by finding out how efibootmgr works, the man pages can be found here :http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr
And maybe using bcdedit you could do it from windows, but I had a hardtime getting acces to the uefi boot partition (linux is a lot easier if you happen to be Root)

So, basicly one can list all bootoptions stored inside the uefi nvram using just

efibootmgr

You get the following result for example:

BootCurrent: 0002
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0004,0000,0001,0002,0003
Boot0000* UEFI Shell
Boot0001  Boot Menu
Boot0002* Windows Boot manager
Boot0003  Lenovo Diagnostics

but thats not all (if you are not root, add sudo) efibootmgr requires that the kernel support access to EFI non-volatile variables (through /proc/efi/vars on 2.4 kernels, /sys/firmware/efi/vars on 2.6 kernels). modprobe efivars should do the trick.

and to get more info: type -v (verbose)

efibootmgr -v

Now the output will be slightly bigger:

BootCurrent: 0013
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0004,0000,0001,0002,0003
Boot0000* UEFI Shell    HD(2,96800,32000,24d8753a-ba2c-4cda-8ef9-8e115d00d4f4)File(\EFI\Shell.efi)
Boot0001  Boot Menu   
Boot0002  Windows Boot manager
Boot0003  Lenovo Diagnostics

You properbly notice that my shell shows up with more info. You can find more info at the man page. but ill show you one for my ubuntu aswell windweos

Boot0013* ubuntu    HD(2,96800,32000,2ff9953a-ba4c-4cda-8ef9-8e235d01d4e4)File(\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi)

so well, il explain what these entry mean, because maybe your say HD(1, ... something something

I exlained that My boot partition is stored on the SSD and I noticed in Linux that my SSD is a second drive device, the HDD is first, so no problem, sda and sdb under linux. sdb is my ssd.

But how was I supposed to add the second partition of my ssd? just /dev/sdb dint work and /dev/sdb2 also not.

-p | --part PART

Partition number containing the bootloader (defaults to 1)

so, I need to use P to specify the partition number if they are not 1 ;)

to add my Shell efi file that was stored in this partition, i used the following command:

sudo efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 2 -l '\EFI\Shell.efi' -L Shell

where -c means Create a new entry, -d means where the loaders is located (on wich disk) -p specifies wich partition, you could leave this away if its partition 1. -l (small L) means the location of the loader in the filesystem on the partition. and -L means label (using ' ' is also allowed)

To remove a entry

sudo efibootmgr -b 3 -B

-b | --bootnum XXXX

Modify BootXXXX (hex)

-B | --delete-bootnum

Delete bootnum (hex)

you get that HEX number from the list of boot entries.

 

Good luck and use google (leave a comment or mail me if you want help from me, but hey, Im no expert yet, this just worked :D )

 

Xbox project status

So recently some things arround my school made me have lotts of time.

Time to work on a Robot project, and ill make a post about that soon, but I also made some progress in researching the xbox.

At first a working modchip was modified with a kernel I modded... went wrong, I was at the hackerspace and had no way to reprogram the modchip to a working state there. So back home I used my spiderchip from my first xbox (on the right) to Hotswap chips to reprogram the Xecuter2.2 Pro.

And well, just a day after I got a PM, and there we have a long searched file: Barnabas-2084 .rar (it is in 8 parts.)

its the sourcecode for the Xbox kernel, bios. I might try researching this for Xbox live, an idea many people have ideas about, but no one so far as proven a workingserver. modified xbox or custom servers... its probebly gonna be a mess.

The files are here: http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=193&t=2212&start=490

[UPDATE] files are gone there, made an archive backup: http://archive.codeasm.com/#barnabas

Im not hosting these, because nope. but ill reup if its needed.

Cannot tell alott about what ive done so far, but I can confirm its the source, and compares to a few kernel dumps i have.

More on this and other projects soon, hope Facebook comments work ;P

Arch linux with Splash screen, Plymouth

Kinda destroyed my Linux install this last monday and decided to reinstall Arch linux. (I tweeted about it, I removed /var ... silly me)

All fine and well, ill post my Nvidia setting for my Lenovo E530 someday soon(url should point you in the right direction), but today I played with the idea of enableing a Splashscreen for Arch, a sort of bootscreen for linux instead of all awesome hacker friendly notes about wich modules are loaded, you get greetings from a nice load bar. example on youtube (shows what I have now, but his one is not booting further... like me, earlier today...)

Ill try to keep it short, maybe you ended up reading my article because you also got a "failed (Result: timeout)" for plymouth-quit-wait.service

Im using the plymouth "legacy" plymouth-legacy 0.8.8-2 (Actualy, now it works I might try the newer one...first ill tell you why this legacy one is working (choosed it because maybe newer one was broken/)

anyway, along the many commenst, recompiles and pakage install people did, some people actualy gave info I dint saw many times...

mareex (2014-06-27 13:16)
After setting "ShowDelay=0" in "/etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf" splash finally showed up.

gokul (2014-06-27 09:30)
word of caution: I'm new to arch (just a few days) and new to systemd as well.

editing gdm-plymouth.service to change as follows stops plymouth screen properly.

#Conflicts=getty@tty1.service plymouth-quit.service
Conflicts=getty@tty1.service

I think this is because "Conflicts" will stop services which is not the required action for plymouth-quit.service. It is already there in the "After" which is exactly what is needed.

Anyway, I believe the solutio Gokul gave us was the winner, I also set the delay to 0, just in case (tried 5 and later noting, but 0 seems to be fine)

Thanks Arch commenters, and now I can tweak the theme and see if I got rid of the %⎕⎕⎕ %⎕⎕⎕ %⎕⎕⎕ ....

(Should update to newer plymouth aswell.

I hope the comments work again (facebook and such.) else tweet me or find help arround the Archlinux bbs or comments

if you like to comment but do not see it appear, please mail:

support (at ) kernelpaniq (dot com