Re: Warning! Sound Crash/Stuck/Hang with Wing Commander 1 and 2 with MT32 BLUE RIDGE Firmware!

Posted on 2019-11-22, 03:31

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Great detective work! The original MT-32 ROMs clear the patch memory on startup, the Blue Ridge ROM does not so you can keep your music patches in memory with a hardware battery backup when the device is turned off. It appears that Wing Commander expects the patch memory area to be clear and if it …

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Re: Loom MT-32 Patch: Where to find?

Posted on 2019-11-14, 00:38

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Look to the read.me file for instructions.

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Re: New sound card project: AWE64 Legacy

Posted on 2019-08-13, 14:36

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Awesome stuff. I wonder if it would be possible to add an option for a YMF289 (OPL3-L) plus YAC516? Following up from Hierophant, instead of the standard Yamaha OPL DAC could you not program a small PLD to convert from OPL output to a standard digital bitstream (I2S or SPDIF for instance) then mix …

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Re: New sound card project: AWE64 Legacy

Posted on 2019-08-12, 17:43

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This looks to be a very promising project, and I have no concerns about sacrificing a few of the non-Gold cards to further it along. Creative made them in vast numbers. I would have preferred an FPGA solution, but this will do. I would hope you add audio input headers for PC Speaker and CD-ROM. Will …

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Re: The "12-bit" Sound Blaster 16 Myth

Posted on 2019-06-07, 19:59

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The Sound Blaster was "good enough" for its time. Creative's sole moment of genius was to market a card that offered something to everyone at a reasonable price point. For many people, the Adlib compatibility and the Game Port were worth the price alone. Adding MIDI support, klunky though it was …

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vgaonly - 16-bit RGB?

Posted on 2019-06-02, 18:38

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by Great Hierophant

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

I found out yesterday that with all standard machine types in DOSBox, color is output and recorded in an 8-bit palettized format except for vgaonly, which is 16-bit RGB. 16-bit RGB per pixel only covers 1/4 of the colors standard VGA can display. Standard VGA allows the Red, Green and Blue levels of …

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Re: IBM EGA and Commander Keen 4-6, Keen Dreams

Posted on 2019-05-12, 15:43

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Two other observations I would note is that I do not recall ever seeing discolored pixels on "sprites". I also notice similar issues in Shadow Knights and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, which used earlier versions of the later Keen Engine. Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement showed no …

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Re: IBM EGA and Commander Keen 4-6, Keen Dreams

Posted on 2019-05-12, 13:45

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

keropi wrote: GH can you test with other dram ICs? It looks to me one is bad I can, but this card and its daughterboard has 32 64Kx1 chips, so replacing them all is a fair bit of work. 😅

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Re: Replicas of Covox Speech Thing, FTL Sound Adapter and SiliconSoft SoundJr

Posted on 2019-05-12, 13:41

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I believe that FTL renamed it to "future expansion port" for liability reasons. If someone fries their parallel port by plugging a joystick into a random "future expansion port", they cannot sue the company. My intention is to write some sort of TSR driver, as well. That driver could then e.g. …

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IBM EGA and Commander Keen 4-6, Keen Dreams

Posted on 2019-05-12, 02:39

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

My IBM EGA card, fully upgraded to 256KB, has an issue with Commander Keen's later graphics engine. The issue is randomly wrong-colored pixels appearing in the main game. These pixels can be "corrected" in many places by scrolling the so that they are no longer visible on the screen and then …

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Re: Replicas of Covox Speech Thing, FTL Sound Adapter and SiliconSoft SoundJr

Posted on 2019-04-15, 20:12

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have added an additional resistor pack to the FTL Sound Adapter replica for short circuit prevention. FTL_Sound_Adapter_replica_3d.png Without these additional resistors that are connected in series with the control lines, using the joystick port could potentially damage CMOS-based parallel ports …

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Re: Tandy 3 Voice Sound - SN76489 ISA Soundcard Project

Posted on 2019-04-13, 17:10

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If you use a SN76496 with the clone card, shouldn't its audio input pin be grounded to avoid picking up noise?

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Re: Tandy 3 Voice Sound - SN76489 ISA Soundcard Project

Posted on 2019-04-13, 16:30

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It seems to me that unless one of these testers was using a genuine NCR8496 chip, that you may get lucky with a chip marked TI SN76489 if you want the behavior that makes Maniac Mansion and some other games sound like they would sound on a later Tandy 1000. Either Texas Instruments changed the …

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Re: OPL3LPT : OPL3 FM Synthesis on parallel port

Posted on 2019-02-27, 20:13

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I just bought one, anxiously waiting for it to arrive. Do you know how much current does OPL3LPT draw/needs? The only way I can think of to draw 5V from my 486DX laptop is via the PS/2 port. A quick check online shows that the VCC connector supplies 5V with max 275mA. The other alternative solution …

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Re: Replicas of Covox Speech Thing, FTL Sound Adapter and SiliconSoft SoundJr

Posted on 2019-02-16, 00:23

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've often wondered if the FTL joystick adapter really worked and Dungeon Master's PC port actually supported it. The adapter is really simple, one of the parallel port grounds is connected to the common ground of an Atari-style joystick. Then each of the five "buttons" on that joystick is connected …

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Re: IBM PS/1 Audio Card.

Posted on 2019-02-15, 21:49

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by Great Hierophant

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

I have a PS/1 with PS/1 Audio Card now and test some Stuff. Is there anyway to access MIDI Devices from DOS ? i only get it working on Windows 3.x. Are you trying to play a SMF via the PSG on the PS/1 Audio Card or are you trying to access the MIDI ports to send SMF data to a MIDI module? The …

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Re: VCS - A capture utility for certain Datapath capture cards

Posted on 2019-02-12, 18:10

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by Great Hierophant

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I learned that alias mode requires a comma after each number, so 534,472,720,400 should work.

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Re: Trying to add Amstrad PC1512 special video mode.

Posted on 2019-02-12, 17:10

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by Great Hierophant

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

It is not impossible, but the Amstrad PC-1512 was like the Tandy 1000 of many European countries, the first IBM PC compatible that was close to 100% compatible and sold for consumer-affordable prices. Amstrad hit it big as a result. The PC-1512 has its quirks when it came to CGA graphics, so putting …

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Re: VCS - A capture utility for certain Datapath capture cards

Posted on 2019-02-02, 19:32

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by Great Hierophant

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I can't get the alias setting working with VCS 1.2.5. I have followed the readme's instructions. I created a text file with only the numbers 534 472 720 400 and the program refuses to load the file. The terminal states that "Expected a 4-parameter row in the alias file". Any ideas?

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Re: List of SBPro (CT-1330) stereo YM3812 supported games?

Posted on 2019-01-11, 13:58

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by Great Hierophant

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

ripsaw8080 beat me to it. I must have used Cloudschatze's Quest Studios post because I list the same games as he did. I did touch up the language on the list. I had no idea there was some kind of Wayback Machine archive of the Quest Studios' forum. So much was lost when that forum went down, so I'm …

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