what you wanted to know about drivers, but didn't dare to...

A place to talk about whatever Scope music/gear related stuff you want.

Moderators: valis, garyb

Post Reply
User avatar
astroman
Posts: 8455
Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Germany

what you wanted to know about drivers, but didn't dare to...

Post by astroman »

admittedly, 'driver' in the so called information technology sense is a subject that makes me about to vomit as soon as I read the word :roll:
anyway, let's ask wiki about it
purpose...A device driver simplifies programming by acting as a translator between a device and the applications or operating systems that use it...

developement... Writing a device driver requires an in-depth understanding of how the hardware and the software of a given platform function.
as you can see, if someone wants to protect a technological advantage, there's an implicit contradiction in releasing (too much) details about the device.
like it or leave it - noone stops you to build your own hardware (prototype) and write your own code to 'drive' it. ;)

just don't tell others how to handle their stuff, pretending there'd be an advantage for everyone - there isn't

as there's always this Scope Driver thingy adressed all over the place in a myriad of contexts:

there is no such thing as 'a' or 'the' Scope driver

in fact there's about 2 dozen different libraries dealing with anything from control signals to GUI elements
and due to the complex nature of the Scope environment those libraries are heavily interconnected and refer to each other.

as it has been mentioned countless times:
this is one piece of software, structured in a modular way, but that doesn't mean you can pick out arbitrary parts of it and (say) build a virtual recorder by just using scope_asio.dll

if you can't resist, open you Scope folder and add the amount of data for everything that ends with a .dll or .vxd .
Let's assume you end with some 10MBytes or so (no idea how close that is to the true figure, but it does't matter in this context)

What does matter is that it's equivalent to at least a million lines of sourcecode, not something you will just mod on a sunday afternoon... ;)
Porting it to whatever is a serious task, and if there is a fee for it, then for sure not to squeeze a few extra bucks from the audience. There are more effective ways to make money...

cheers, Tom
User avatar
next to nothing
Posts: 2521
Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Bergen, Norway

Post by next to nothing »

well, i downloaded scope 3.01 to have a look at what would differ between the win9x and win2k "drivers", and as far as i can see, the files helping our OSes communicate with our hardware is sub-200000 kilobytes, not 10 meg.

These are the only files that makes the difference, and defines how communication goes, The ASIO modules etc are the same. Also the Scope.inf only calls functions like HKR,Drivers\midi\scope.drv,Description,0,ScopeBoard, and never refers to ASIO.DLL etc.

With this in mind i would say that Scope.drv is THE driver for win98, and scope.sys is the driver for 2k/xp(/vista). the other .dll/.vxd would be read from within the SFP application when it is launched an the OS is allready communicating with the card (hence being more like "plugins" if you get my drift.
User avatar
astroman
Posts: 8455
Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Germany

Post by astroman »

right Piddi, as mentioned it's a modular system...
that folder content is only for communicating with the multimedia layer of the OS and if it's all you install, then it will not even squeeze a beep from the card.

it cannot do without all the other stuff mentioned and there's a ton of X86 code in this system.

that's why I wrote the constant reference to a 'Scope driver' is nonsense
the true driver functionality is spread over several cross-referencing libraries and modules

not to be misunderstood: I don't think that you have to rewrite the whole package if you want to make it run in Vista (for example), but you may well have to deal with stuff beyond the software layer of the driver's folder content.

cheers, Tom
Post Reply