I don't think he ever told us what board he is using this in. I'm rather curious to know.
😀

What? The Motherboards they're plugged into?

1 is in an MSI K9VGM-V with an Athlon X2 dual core 4200+ and 2GB system ram. Runs Windows XP pro.
The other is in a Gigabyte 6VTXE with a PIII-s Tualatin 1.4GHz (512k version) with 1GB ram running Windows 98.

swaaye wrote:

The MPU port works fine in my experience, much better than the buggy Creative ISA card MPU ports. But since it's a PCI card, you need the card's ISA emulation driver running as with any other PCI card. The MPU port does work on port 330 in plain DOS and Windows with the driver loaded. .

I just had a play with my MX300 system, which has a DB50XG attached. If I select MPU 401 in the DOS MIDI section, then exit to DOS, then games like Heretic and Warcraft 1 clearly access the daughterboard at 330.

But in a Windows DOSbox the same games produce no music.

Is there a way to get the daughterboard running for DOS games in a Windows box?

Computer spec: Athlon XP2000, A7M266, 512mb ram, Voodoo 5, MX300 [did have SB128PCI in there but took that out, made no difference].

There is a multimedia device without a driver that I have disabled, but that's just a motherboard device. Reason I mention it is that I recall seeing a "multifunction adapter" device when I had a Vortex 2 before, though that was under Windows 2000.

Moogle,

The XP drivers suck. I have been having pops and clicks in XP with my 440BX + Vortex 2. How bad they are seems to depend on what video card you are using.

If you want to run XP, get a Sound Blaster Live! or newer. The Live! drivers for XP are fully functional, come with a nice control panel and work perfectly.

ratfink wrote:

I just had a play with my MX300 system, which has a DB50XG attached. If I select MPU 401 in the DOS MIDI section, then exit to […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

The MPU port works fine in my experience, much better than the buggy Creative ISA card MPU ports. But since it's a PCI card, you need the card's ISA emulation driver running as with any other PCI card. The MPU port does work on port 330 in plain DOS and Windows with the driver loaded. .

I just had a play with my MX300 system, which has a DB50XG attached. If I select MPU 401 in the DOS MIDI section, then exit to DOS, then games like Heretic and Warcraft 1 clearly access the daughterboard at 330.

But in a Windows DOSbox the same games produce no music.

Is there a way to get the daughterboard running for DOS games in a Windows box?

Computer spec: Athlon XP2000, A7M266, 512mb ram, Voodoo 5, MX300 [did have SB128PCI in there but took that out, made no difference].

There is a multimedia device without a driver that I have disabled, but that's just a motherboard device. Reason I mention it is that I recall seeing a "multifunction adapter" device when I had a Vortex 2 before, though that was under Windows 2000.

Assuming you are running Win9x, you need to go into the Aureal control panel and select Aureal MPU-401 for DOS box MIDI. That should do it.

If it's not 9x, you could be out of luck.

Looks something like this:

If he is in a Windows XP Dosbox.. doesn't he need VDMsound?

Aw this is embarassing. There is an external wavetable slider in the volume control panel; it was on mute.

Thanks for the advice anyhow, it confirmed I was using the right settings and helped me track down the problem. Didn't realise the wavetable had a control of its own.

Like I said, I got the issues figured out, and it sounds quite good now in XP. I don't generally use it for anythign but music listening. I just wanted somethign with a better DAC, and this was in the pricerange I had to work with.

Odd as it may seem, it's been my 9x experiance I've not been impressed with.

Supposedly Killer sound quality mod:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2918169

I'm intrigued.

I know right? I stumbled across this when is was looking for driver and info, I thought the guy had a separate thread about it but I wasn't able to dig it up. If I could change any one single thing about this card; it would be a S/PDIF input. I thought it would be neat to run the digital out from my AWE64, inside the case and everything. C'est la vie.

I've seen people stick mega huge caps on cards before. A fellow that sounded versed in electronics said that big caps were a bad call because they react too slowly.

Whenever I see stuff like this I start to think "crazy uneducated bigger-must-be-better audiophile". Maybe I'm wrong though.

prophase_j wrote:

If I could change any one single thing about this card; it would be a S/PDIF input. I thought it would be neat to run the digital out from my AWE64, inside the case and everything. C'est la vie.

My vortex II card is a Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio, it comes with a breakout box with S/PDIF in and out. I connected it to my yamaha YMF-724 card, and it works well in windows. Only thing is I don't know how to get S/PDIF going in real DOS. So then it's back to line-in.

The Vortex card is a really good and clean 'mixer' both in windows and Dos. In Dos I setup the card with au30dos.com, run vortmix to set the volumes, then optionally unload au30dos.com and load the yamaha. In the latter case the vortex just routes the yamaha sound. Before that I did something similar with a SB-Live. IIRC I modified some liveCD mixer program to set volumes for other inputs then just the CD-in.

The Monster Sound Vortex variant seemingly has a better location for the waveblaster header, as to change a daughterboard without removing the whole card.

It makes wish that someone with lots of skill would reverse engineer the whole thing. Then we could have better drivers, and all those undocumented features. 😀

Someone kind of did this was the Yamaha PCI cards. Unfortunantly, the one I have it a cheap one with a cheap DAC.

But, the Legacy audio worked in XP, minus the FM synth, of course.