Greg Crain is back at developing the ESS Maestro3/Allegro sound driver, after a 4 month hiatus. I got in touch with Greg and asked him whether his driver works with BeOS R5 as well as with Zeta R1, and he replied that yes indeed it should work as intended.

The Maestro3/Allegro driver was actually written by Mario Moschetti long ago, but it never gained much traction and failed to work properly. Greg looked into it, found a few problems, fixed a number of issues, and the result is what you see today, if you download the Maestro3_driver.zip file.

Greg is contemplating re-writting the driver using a BSD style license, but this is yet to be determined. As it stands now, the driver uses a GPL license, so all source changes will be made available. You'll have to contact Greg for futher info on that.

The driver is currently fairly limited, with no support for recording yet in place, but Greg expects to work on this as he gets deeper into development. The driver is labeled as a DEBUG release, so you have been warned. Greg's test platform is his wife's Dell Inspiron 800 that has an included Maestro chipset, so testing has been limited to that environment. Further testing would require another computer with other soundcards using the chipset. Any and all hardware donations would be welcome, and require contacting Greg via his email address.

It's nice to see this particular driver receive attention again. Let's hope Greg can make some real headway and we wish him the best with his development. If you want to help his efforts, get in touch with him via the email address noted.