Well, I agree that something else needs to appear.
But to take you back to 2010, on a PC, you could have. And still can.
Using the parallel port (not a usb parallel adapter) to obtain cos /ptt , the sound unit is much less critical. For the software addresses for extracting those lines change with other adaptors and likely other things that are specific to that sound dongle.
My 1st private node back then actually did this with the built-in sound on a PC with a parallel port. But there is only one built-in sound and I had 3 private nodes then, so I just used the cm108’s and disabled the built-in as the motherboard was giving me issues with the shared IRQ supporting that built-in sound and I never looked back.
Of course this is no help with a Pi unless you separate the hardware interfacing with some other means. Every couple of years I load a Pi up and experiment with something on this.
The best results came from the I2C interface. And one can generate enough I/O to serve up 4 nodes+ and still have plenty of switches/inputs to play with.
Then I come to find out there was an attempt to do this already and has been buried in the code and not released since the passing of it’s author.
I did take some notes for others to follow.
But the framework is in there in the source to extract the code just for the i2c interfacing.
But I am looking in one other direction now and I am not sure when I will have time to sit with it again. I really don’t use the Pi for anything in Ham Radio/ASL, but I might.
I am using Pi’s with a i2c for other utility purposes.
So will anyone pick it up and run with it… I doubt it.
I may after retirement. No incentive at present.
This discussion comes around at least once a year for over the last decade.