Well, I just bought myself an AWE64, and guess what. That AMPLIFIED OUTPUT is making NOISE in BeOS, but not in Win95 (not because MS is better, they just don’t know how to 🙂 ). So I decided to fix it.
The reason for the noise is that the Be guys love it loud and therefore they crank up the output gain to 4x. Now with the amplified output (at least my amplified output) it makes A LOT of noise which I don’t enjoy. Since there is no ’normal‘ way of getting it down to 1x I decided to tell you how to fix it. It’s not perfect, but hey don’t blame me I didn’t cause it. In fact don’t blame me if you don’t know what you’re doing and something goes wrong. I take no responsability for this ‚hack‘ and what happens to your system.
What this ‚hack‘ does:
What it does is simply write to the soundcards mixer register and turn it down to 1x. It’s only four basic operations so I decided to write a script since this code should have been in the driver anyway. Here it is.
Solution:
This assumes that your awe64 is installed (and working!!!) at 0x220. (You can check this with the Devices preferences panel). If it’s installed in another way you take the two first numbers (in this case 22) and replace the 22’s later in this example.

1. In your ‚UserBootscript‘-file located in ‚/boot/home/config/boot‘ add the following line first:
poke </boot/home/CorrectSound >/dev/null

2. Use an texteditor (StyledEdit maybe) and write the following:
outb 0x224 0x41 outb 0x225 0x0 outb 0x224 0x42 outb 0x225 0x0 quit

3. Save the texteditor file to /boot/home/CorrectSound

4. Open a Terminal and type: poke </boot/home/CorrectSound

It’s done. And once you restart you will have about 2 seconds of noise at start-up (I told you it wasn’t perfect). Now, start sending me money :).