alsa and no sound

[Mike]

Hi

I am probably gonna sound stupid here, but here goes

I have compiled alsa in a freshly minted test2 kernel with oss emulation
for my cs4237B based soundcard.

after modprobing snd-cs4236 everything appears to work but no sound

to whit

sound mixer starts up fine (everything on max)
xmms appears to play
no errors in dmesg or /var/log/messages
my /proc/asound/oss/sndstat is
Sound Driver:3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v0.9.4 emulation code)
Kernel: Linux localhost 2.6.0-test2_scheda #1 Fri Aug 1 02:44:31 BST
2003 i586
Config options: 0
 
Installed drivers:
Type 10: ALSA emulation
 
Card config:
CS4237B at 0x534, irq 9, dma 1&3
 
Audio devices:
0: CS4237B (DUPLEX)
 
Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG
 
Midi devices:
0: MPU-401 (UART) 0-0
 
Timers:
7: system timer
 
Mixers:
0: CS4237B

my /proc/asound/alsa/oss/devices is
  2: [0- 2]: raw midi
 10: [0-10]: hardware dependent
  0: [0- 0]: mixer
  3: [0- 3]: digital audio

/etc/modprobe.conf contains
include /etc/modprobe.conf.dist
alias eth0 8139too
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias char-major-14 sound
alias char-major-14-6 sndstat
alias char-major-10-1 mousedev
 
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

any help appreciated