Sound drivers on macOS?

[mmitch]

Our automated builds using GitHub Actions ensure that gbsplay compiles on macOS: https://github.com/mmitch/gbsplay/actions?query=workflow%3A%22macOS+Build%22

configure currently only detects these plugouts on macOS that don't actually play any sound:

• iodumper
• midi
• altmidi
• stdout

While gbsplay compiles, not having a useful sound output won't make it very useful.

We need somebody with knowledge of macOS and sound drivers that can tell us what to do:

• Are things like ALSA or PulseAudio available on macOS (natively or via brew etc.)? Would it be reasonable to expect the user to have one of our supported sound libraries installed?
• Do we need a new sound driver for macOS like the dsound driver for Windows? It would be nice if anybody could write the driver, but we'd need at least somebody with access to macOS hardware to test it if we were to write blindly implement such a driver.

[mmitch]

I have looked very shortly at other Gameboy emulators on macOS: Both Gearboy and SameBoy run on macOS and both use SDL. As SDL also runs on Linux and Windows, this should be a viable target for a new sound driver, we could like test 90% of it on our normal development platforms.

Also Gearboy mentioned Gb_Snd_Emu, a Game Boy PAPU sound chip emulator, which might be worth a look for us. But on the other hand: If we just use an existing sound engine, where is the fun in that ;-)

[mmitch]

Pull request https://github.com/mmitch/gbsplay/pull/38 contains an SDL sound driver. According to the build pipeline it compiles on macOS (using brew install sdl2). It is not really tested because nobody has a Mac around here, but with that pull request we at least provide one (untested) real sound output under macOS. Mission accomplished.

[mmitch]

The SDL driver has been merged to master, so I'm closing this issue.