Re: [PATCH 1/7] dsound: Remove support for IKsPropertySet for now

[Robert Reif]

The current wine direct sound implementation can do multiple opens of 
the same device and hardware mixing and hardware 3d acceleration without 
any modifications if the low level driver supports it.  No wine audio 
driver implements all that because the linux audio APIs don't support 
it.  An openal driver can be developed which can eventaully replace the 
alsa and oss drivers and supports everything you would expect on a real 
windows system.  A total rewrite of the entire audio system from scratch 
might be better in the long run but just adding an openal driver doesn't 
require changing any of the existing wine code, it only adds a new 
driver.  Writing an openal driver is probably a half a man year effort 
to get working well enough to make it the default driver.  Doing a total 
rewrite of all wine audio APIs to move them from the Windows 95 driver 
model to the current WDM driver model is probably a 5 man year effort to 
get working right.  Your approach may make some direct sound games work 
better but it is going to introduce a lot of unfixable regressions.

The current wine audio implementation does a pretty good job of 
implementing the windows 95 audio model.  It's not the direct sound or 
winmm dlls that make audio suck in wine, it's the alsa and oss drivers 
that suck and that's because the alsa and oss APIs and their low level 
drivers suck (and pulseaudio would suck even worse).  An openal driver 
would allow wine to support all the features that the current direct 
sound implementation already supports but can't use because of current 
alsa and oss driver limitations.