Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-21, 23:21

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It took some debugging and a good bit of staring at both a hex editor and the output from the FFF parser, but I think I've finally found the source of the problem I was having with the ROMMAKER. I should have time within the next few hours to produce another new test ROM. If I can avoid including …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-10, 03:01

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Great news 640K!enough ... you're really earning your name on the frontside of the PCB here :) Pretty excited for what you come up with. The first thing I looked at was the patch parameters in the official FFF files. I didn't really take a detailed look at the 4 MiB set beyond that, but it was …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-09, 15:12

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Although it may not be useful to anyone else, I have spent my free time the last few days working on an FFF parser to see if it can offer a few hints about what is going on. The results turned out to be quite interesting, even though the software isn't complete yet. I should have a new test ROM that …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-06, 04:55

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I mean I don't mind reworking the SOP44 chips anymore since yesterday, but once you desoldered them cleaning up the pins to re-use them with my programmer is a major pain (it's a ZIF socket which needs the pins almost perfectly clean of solder - basically looks like this http://www.icunlock- …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-03, 03:24

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I do highly suspect a timing problem, after changing the ST 29F800-90 to an AMD 29F800-55 things work reliably. I guess anything below 80ns might go, as that's the recommendation for RAMs on the GUSPnP I was told. I read the 80 ns requirement for the RAM too. It was mentioned in the Gravis PDF …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-02, 20:18

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

EDIT4: ROM reliably checks out good ... I'll upload new recordings soon. While SBOS sounds a bit more complete now, Windows MIDIs sound pretty much the same to my judgement. What did you find? I was suspicious of a timing problem somewhere in the memory sub-system, just because of the …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 16:56

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It took quite a bit of fiddling with the instrument list just to get a few instruments and (most of) the standard drum kit to fit. I added a few MIDI files, too. With the exception of some of the drums, all of the instruments needed should be available.

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 15:36

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If the FFF bank I uploaded a few days ago produces decent MIDI quality, then it may have something to do with the ROMMaker's down-sampling feature. What do you think of producing a ROM file with just enough instruments to play a few MIDI files, without converting to 8-bit , and giving that a try …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 15:25

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

That's bad! I knew before I suggested it that the "bow glass" is not in the ROM, but was hoping the piano might at least be sane. There also seems to be (too much) of some sort of echo (or bad reverb) effect. If you load the 16-bit, 2 MiB FFF version of the bank into RAM, is MIDI at least half sane? …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 14:49

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Bad news: Sounds quite broken ... this is canyon.mid played back under windows https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9WAZV_Pqo7gcnMzNFBUZzg0MjA ... General MIDI via SBOS/MegaEM sounds similarly wrong. That's sounds so bad it's almost comical, except that we have to figure out how to fix it. I can …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 04:43

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

There is a certain amount of old cruft in the code, and some other general sloppiness. The global variable rom_size is set to 2 initially, then it even looks like the size can be set using a command-line argument. The only problem is that it is never used; the line that used to refer to it in WPATCH …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-31, 20:56

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This is somewhat peculiar. All of the important files were included in the archive I uploaded. IWSBOS.INI is the ROM configuration file I used, and rom_size is set to 1048576. There were no splits; just a single ROM file generated. If you have a hex editor handy, can you post just the first 172 …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-31, 20:03

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

At least that tells us that we can produce usable ROMs. Now that we're sure of that, we can put some effort into tweaking the results. I'm not quite sure where the 2 came from, but I intentionally used obvious values in the ROM configuration file to see how they were treated. If you wanted to see …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-30, 21:32

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Just for some context, have a look at the typical footprint of a more modern flash chip. It's not impossible to solder by hand, but it's not the easiest thing to do for beginners, either. Flash Chip.jpg Personally, I would prefer the option to have two or even three such footprints on the board, to …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-30, 04:05

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If anyone has the time or inclination to test, I have attached a ROM file, along with the ROMMaker ROM configuration file and source FFF/DAT banks. The banks are exactly the 2 MiB files generated from the Pro Patches Lite (PPLT) 1.61 set (using the old Gravis GIPC tool). The ROM file contains the 8- …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-29, 20:01

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

As far as I understood, there is hardware possibility to put a 4Mb ROM chip instead of the 1Mb one without any major modifications into the design. By far more problematic is the driver itself as it has to be somewhat modified in order to take the 4Mb ROM image. Yes, according to the Programmer's …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-26, 19:49

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I got a little bit more work done with the software. The first thing I did was write a simple tool that can produce a valid sboslyrs.ini file given a ROM configuration file (as used by ROMMaker). It is important to notice that I said "valid"; the results won't necessarily sound good on the first try …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-23, 20:25

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

To my knowledge the drivers in the SDK are outdated. Since the target for the card is to remain compatible with the formerly distributed GUSPnP drivers there's no need for a custom built driver from the SDK ... having someone figure out how exactly the ROMMaker tool works would be awesome tho. I …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-11, 18:16

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This is quite an interesting project shock__ has started! I haven't read the entire thread yet, but I'm getting through it. I have taken quite an interest in the SDK package linked earlier, and have been working to get everything to build more consistently. So far, I have reproduced enough of the …

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