Well, don't forget that SB Live is also using an AC97 codec, it's just got a slightly smartet host controller than what's inside most southbridge chips. AFAIK it's got a DSP like the Delfina. I have not (as of yet) seen ANY good implementations of user space modification of the running code in the DSP in Linux, but I think there's some people working on it. Windows has had drivers with this capability for ages.
Here's what will work in AmigaOS:
SB Live (good card)
SB128 (bad card compared to the above)
Unknown:
Onboard AC'97 (excactly as good or bad as an SB128, I guarantee there's no big difference between them on the digital side. And the SB128 is NOT very impressive analog-wise either)
I've been studying this quite a bit to see if there's any point in making an AC'97 card for the A1G3-SE, but since the market is like 25 motherboards and Linux still doesn't configure the VIA for AC'97 properly, I gave it up for now...
