I haven't fixed it yet but I discovered that on the Debian 7 system, a recompile of the working version of the code now produces a non-working version with the same problem as that of Debian 8. Everything seems to compile as before but the new target produces no output on /dev/dsp.
Basically, my question to the list is meaningless so I will work until I figure it out and post what I found. I presently have a usb-based sound card on the Debian 7 system which uses the same code and was working perfectly yesterday so I don't know what is wrong well enough now to describe it. Martin McCormick