MindWalker
Well-known member
Inspired by @Phipli's thread about PPC BeOS software, I got my PowerComputing Powercenter 132 back on the desk and finally tried some more BeOS on it 
Using a pre-made BeOS image I was very quickly up and running, and mostly everything seemed to work fine out of the box.
The only custom part my machine has is a Matrox Millenium II PCI card, which I had flashed to Mac ROM earlier (it works with MacOS and BeOS). Other than that it's a plain Powercenter with 133Mhz PowerPC 604, 96MB of RAM, and I believe 2MB of VRAM.
However soon I found a problem. While I did get the startup sound on boot (everytime), I wasn't able to play any sound within BeOS. All players would just do nothing (CL-Amp, Sound settings panel), or tell me that no audio hardware was found (MediaPlayer) and at shutdown I would see that audio_server and/or media_addon_server would hang and need killing manually.
I thought that perhaps this was an issue with the pre-made BeOS disk image, so I went and did a fresh install. With the proper BIN+CUE files installation was a breeze (with ZuluSCSI) but unfortunately the issue held.
However; once I remove the Matrox GPU, the sound starts working again. In my usage having the extra GPU is not necessary, I can get Okish resolution and color with just the built-in graphics, but I was just wondering why this happens and are there any tweaks that I could try to get the sound working with the graphics card?
Also: BeOS doesn't seem to mute the internal speaker when I connect external speakers to the line in at the rear (MacOS does this and even the startup chime plays only to the external speakers when connected). There doesn't seem to be Devices control panel (unlike BeOS's x86 version) so I guess there are no audio controls (even a volume slider at the BeOS menu) available at all?
Using a pre-made BeOS image I was very quickly up and running, and mostly everything seemed to work fine out of the box.
The only custom part my machine has is a Matrox Millenium II PCI card, which I had flashed to Mac ROM earlier (it works with MacOS and BeOS). Other than that it's a plain Powercenter with 133Mhz PowerPC 604, 96MB of RAM, and I believe 2MB of VRAM.
However soon I found a problem. While I did get the startup sound on boot (everytime), I wasn't able to play any sound within BeOS. All players would just do nothing (CL-Amp, Sound settings panel), or tell me that no audio hardware was found (MediaPlayer) and at shutdown I would see that audio_server and/or media_addon_server would hang and need killing manually.
I thought that perhaps this was an issue with the pre-made BeOS disk image, so I went and did a fresh install. With the proper BIN+CUE files installation was a breeze (with ZuluSCSI) but unfortunately the issue held.
However; once I remove the Matrox GPU, the sound starts working again. In my usage having the extra GPU is not necessary, I can get Okish resolution and color with just the built-in graphics, but I was just wondering why this happens and are there any tweaks that I could try to get the sound working with the graphics card?
Also: BeOS doesn't seem to mute the internal speaker when I connect external speakers to the line in at the rear (MacOS does this and even the startup chime plays only to the external speakers when connected). There doesn't seem to be Devices control panel (unlike BeOS's x86 version) so I guess there are no audio controls (even a volume slider at the BeOS menu) available at all?
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