I recently built a new PC, mainly to play my favourite games from yesteryear,  from some moderately oldish parts lying around, and unfortunately found out that the used mother board I got from e-bay had a problem with its sound, as one of the channels didn’t seem to work. Not to fret, I thought and went straight to the next PC-World to get some cheapo 5.1 soundcard. I think I spent 15 pound on this no-name, white box model based on the  C-Media 8738 / 8768 chipset and quickly found out that the accompanying Windows driver was terrible shite and buggy as hell.

Well, you get what you pay for.

Then I found a open, free (new BSD license) actively supported driver by a mysterious bilingual gentleman calling himself  ”dogber1” that works absolutely terrific and has resuscitated this machine. Good documentation, easy install and a goof community site make this an excellent choice for your old soundcard.

Another example how open source can deliver excellent quality to the masses.