The ESS 1938S Solo-1 Soundcard and FreeBSD

This is taken from the newsgroup comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc. It is written by Steve O´Hara-Smith and Joost Baerveldt .

To get a ESS Solo-1 1938S PCI AudioDrive working on FreeBSD

The Solo1 is not supported, there is a patch by Takanori Watanabe (mail one of the two above if you want a copy) that gets the mixer going but fails to do PCM (seems to be related to PCI DMA).
Several people have bounced off the problem of trying to get the thing into SBPro mode, the closest is to add these lines to pcisupport.c (in the big switch say around line 1250). If you uncomment the last pci_write_config then your machine will probably crash on boot (it should make it work AFAICT).

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/* ESS Technology Inc -- vendor 0x125d */
case 0x1969125d:
pci_write_config (dev, 0x41, 0x10, 1); /* Enable IRQ 5 */
pci_write_config (dev, 0x51, 0x21, 1); /* TDMA */
/* pci_write_config (dev, 0x52, 0x01, 1); Enable ISA IRQ */
return ("ESS Technology Solo1 Audio controller");

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Add to your kernel:

device pcm
device sbc0 at isa? port 0x220 irq 5 drq 1flags 0x15

type:

cd /dev
sh MAKEDEV snd0
And enjoy!