hmm dunno never looked at that, would be fairly easy i think. Have to see how vlad does it in vdmsound i think. Although that might not be a disney sound source he emulates there.

DSS emulation ion VDMSound sucks, mainly because all DSS games need SPEEDSET and you end up with all these timing anomalies (like you get all samples within 10us, then there is a 1ms pause, then another ton of samples, etc.), so there is a lot of timing voodoo in VDMSound that is irrelevant in DosBox. Simple: when a byte is output to the parallel-port then put it in the sound buffer at the right position in time, and you're done.

V.

Harekiet wrote:

hmm dunno never looked at that, would be fairly easy i think. Have to see how vlad does it in vdmsound i think. Although that might not be a disney sound source he emulates there.

vladr wrote:

DSS emulation ion VDMSound sucks, mainly because all DSS games need SPEEDSET

It was my hope that since, by default, DosBox is already running titles at a slower rate, that it would allow sound source emulation to run properly as well.

There is at least a couple of older Disney titles that break completely on Pentium machines and I can't find any way of patching them. They run fine in DosBox at it's default settings with (ugh) PC speaker sound.

Jeeze. They break on a Pentium? Incredible.

Hmm screwing around with disney sound source a bit, but it's euhm kinda strange. Got it detected now by wolfensteind 3d, but i can't see how the hell wolf3d would do it's timing to send the data through the parallel port at the correct time since it doesn't change any timers.

Originally posted by Snover They break on a Pentium?

The moment you said that I remembered that I had run it on a Pentium laptop numerous times (it was a P60, so slow I forgot it was a Pentium).

Having realized that, I decided to try and find at what point the edu-game would break. So I plopped it onto my (recently cobbled together from various pieces) Celeron-566 PC. To my surprise, it ran fine. Well, I knew it wouldn't run on an AMD-Duron950, so I figured it would break when I overclocked the 566 to 850 MHz.

Surprise again. It still worked. Pulled out the "Disney Sound Source" to test it on the 566 and found that it broke with this error:
run-time error R6003
- integer divide by 0

So I removed the DSS, to double-check and found that it was broken again! Tried repeatedly at 566 and 850MHz, not working.

Bewildered, I went back to the (P4) Celeron at 1.7 GHz and, out-of-frustration clicked MICKEY.EXE and... you guessed it. It worked.

After repeatedly going back and forth I've found that it will work on a 1.7GHz Celeron but, apparently, the startup program is sometimes speed-sensitive. Once it's started, it seems fine. It's just that I might have to try starting it 30 times before it will actually run without the "run-time" error.

The speed however, appears to prevent it from recognizing or using the "Sound Source" (although "Rise of the Triad" worked fine with it).

Hrmm...did someone activate the probability drive near my home or something?

bleh finally found it, always wondered why the disney sound source was supported more than other similar parallel devices.

But the disney sound source has a 16 byte fifo queue running on a 7 khz clock emptying it. Lemme do some more programming crap 😀

hmm got it working correctly now, well with wolf3d at least. Sierra games still need some more work i think.
Shouldn't be that hard to get this running in vdmsound i think, since the games don't need to set an ultrahigh timer to get the correct sound. Wolf3d needs a 700 hz one that normally runs fine with win2k too.

Well that's good news. Of course, my primary concern are those titles where the DSS is the only way to play back digital audio.

Admittedly, those are a rare few.

Hmm, 16-byte FIFO @ 7kHz you say? Ok, but then why does "Another world"'s setup program let you choose between DSS @ 5kHz and DSS @ 10kHz? Is the 5/10kHz thing just for animation, mod synthesis, or what? I'll try setting up a fixed 7kHz rate in VDMSound's PPDAC and see what that gives. 😁 Where did you find the tidbit about the FIFO & timer, BTW?

V.

Just from looking at the debug output of the size of the queue i found it strange that it sent out big blurps of output now and then so i figured it must have a fifo, since stretching out the data gave horrible slow ass results.

Then groups.google.com is quite a useful source for information:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie= … G=Google+Search

As far as i know sound source only supports 7 khz so if you go above that it probably sounds crappier than it should, with the extra bytes just being skipped since the fifo is full. My guess is the another world programmers didn't even know about how the sound source work, and thought it was just another parallel a/d convertor 😀

Harekiet wrote:

Already working on changing the mame version a bit, seems to be the right thing. Can't find any information on the actual author of this specific chip emulator, but mame seems to be GPL now so should be okay to use.

Author is Manuel Abadia. See here:
http://www.mame.net/wip0007.html

email address is manu@mame.net

MAME is NOT GPL YET!
We are just considering it. See?
http://www.mame.net/whatsnew.html

MAME is still under the "MAME License" for now, until a decision is made: http://www.mame.net/readme.html

The main problem is with source code reuse - using MAME code in a GPL project automagically GPL's the code. If the author does not want it to be GPL'd, well, many people ignore that.

IMO, if there's changes that could be made to the SAA1099 driver, email Manuel... especially if they are derived from hard research, and not hacks to find what "sounds best". I've still found no absolute PROOF the SAA1099==CMS. Just a few posts on USENET.

Personally, I'd ask permission to use it anyhow, but that's just me...

You may also wish to talk to the guys involved in MESS.
http://cvs.mess.org:6502/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ … sound/saa1099.c
http://cvs.mess.org:6502/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ … sound/saa1099.h
Looks like Nate Woods, Peter Trauner, and someone called "HJB" (who I don't know. Email addresses here: http://www.mess.org/contacts.html

GUS Emulation would be nice in dosbox too though, should look into that a bit too sometime 😀

I'd be happy to dig up any info you might need. Also, talk with the GUSEmu guy (Vlad said once he thought you already did talk to him?)

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

Well that's good news. Of course, my primary concern are those titles where the DSS is the only way to play back digital audio.

Admittedly, those are a rare few.

I've often wondered if Disney's COASTER sounded better with a Sound Source than a Sound Blaster, since it is a Disney program (I'm sure they didn't engineer the Sound Source, I wonder who did?). Can't wait to try it. 😀

Stiletto wrote:

I've often wondered if Disney's COASTER sounded better with a Sound Source than a Sound Blaster, ...

I was surprised to find that "Martian Memorandum" (Tex Murphy) sounded better with "RealSound" than with SoundBlaster on DosBox. IIRC, it even had some audio samples that didn't play when using SoundBlaster. I'm guessing that SoundBlaster was "new" to Access (at the time), while they had plenty of experience with RealSound at that point.

Stiletto wrote:

Author is Manuel Abadia. See here:
http://www.mame.net/wip0007.html
email address is manu@mame.net

Hmm have to give him a mail sometime then, to see if he likes me changing his sources a bit to make them work with dosbox. Should hopefully not be that much of a problem.

Stiletto wrote:

IMO, if there's changes that could be made to the SAA1099 driver, email Manuel... especially if they are derived from hard research, and not hacks to find what "sounds best". I've still found no absolute PROOF the SAA1099==CMS. Just a few posts on USENET.

I do think they are the same, did some more searching but the only thing i never found in any CMS docs are the sound envelope registers. So might just be that the SAA1099 is more advanced, but don't think that would make any difference to how it sounds. Don't have a real CMS, so have no idea how it should sound originally.

And digging up GUS information isn't really needed got all i need, seems like a nice thing to work on to get emulated. Although might save some time and talk to the GUSEmu guy a bit again. Last time i talked he might want to do it through a loadable module, but i kinda removed module support. So dunno if he feels about releasing source code that would be easier.

Alrighty, thanks Harekiet.

Note to Vlad/Harekiet - One card on my list here is the Innovation - it's extremely rare - but collectors lust after it. Know why? It's two SID chips on a ISA card. And it was commercially produced and had limited support.

The SID's been emulated for years now... If you can figure out how to emulate the card without any docs, that would truly be amazing. All I have is an ASCII card diagram and a fuzzy photo. No software/drivers, either. 😀

Looking forward to the improved DAC emulation coming to DOSBox AND VDMSound. 😉

are there actually any games/apps that use this card?

Harekiet wrote:

are there actually any games/apps that use this card?

Just a handful - MobyGames reports these:
Airball (1987, MicroDeal )
Asterix: Operation Getafix (1989, Coktel Vision)
Bad Blood (1990, Origin)
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge (1989, Infocom)
Castles: The Northern Campaign (1991, Interplay)
Lexi-Cross (1991, Interplay)
Red Storm Rising (1989, MicroProse)
Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990, Origin)

Of course, if it used a sample ROM or anything, we'd be screwed.
And all those games support other cards, too. But it would be... interesting...

Even more interesting:
Ensoniq Soundscape
http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attributeId,77/
Motorola 68E000 on card running at 8Mhz
Ensoniq OTTO ES5506 chipset
2M WaveForm ROM
Up to 32 channel of wavetable synth
Onboard Panasonic/Misumi/Sony IDE interface
Sound Blaster, FM synth & MT-32 mode via software emulation
software emulation of Yamaha OPL-2
The ES5506 is emulated in MAME. As is the Motorola 68E000.

I should know - I finagled the Ensoniq docs from an ex-Ensoniq employee. (don't worry, it's legal) 😀

This one should be easier to reverse, then, IMHO. hey, Vlad? 😀