Descent - OPL3 works but no sound effects.

Malik: I have just mirrored your ASL-4000 driver stuff as Maliks ALS-4000stuff

here

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MCM5AGIF

and here

http://www.multiupload.com/T9PWJOF6IB

thanks mate! Just saw this.

Herculean effort there Malik!

Couple of things I'm wondering:

1. Does it send Midi signals through the game port?
2. Have you tried the card on an even newer board?

Modern boards allow you to switch of cores, reduce the FSB and lower the CPU multiplier. On an Asrock socket 1156 board I had an i5 running at 50 or 100 MHz that way 😁

It ran Duke Nukem 3D and Doom just fine. But without sound of course...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Herculean effort there Malik! […]
Show full quote

Herculean effort there Malik!

Couple of things I'm wondering:

1. Does it send Midi signals through the game port?
2. Have you tried the card on an even newer board?

Modern boards allow you to switch of cores, reduce the FSB and lower the CPU multiplier. On an Asrock socket 1156 board I had an i5 running at 50 or 100 MHz that way 😁

It ran Duke Nukem 3D and Doom just fine. But without sound of course...

there is no need, doom and duke have their timing mechanism and won't go out of speed control.
and even using the -timedemo benchmark, i have never been able to go much faster than 200fps in doom, on multiple computers. the fastest result i got was on an athlon64+nforce3+geforce2ultra, with the tnt2/gf256/gf2mx/gf3 just a few fpses behind. the geforce4 cards are much slower, no matter whatever platform its on.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Herculean effort there Malik! […]
Show full quote

Herculean effort there Malik!

Couple of things I'm wondering:

1. Does it send Midi signals through the game port?
2. Have you tried the card on an even newer board?

Modern boards allow you to switch of cores, reduce the FSB and lower the CPU multiplier. On an Asrock socket 1156 board I had an i5 running at 50 or 100 MHz that way 😁

It ran Duke Nukem 3D and Doom just fine. But without sound of course...

Mauf,

1. I haven't tested this part yet. WIll try it.

2. I intend to try it on my SandyBridge based S1155 mainboard which runs the i2500K processor.

noshutdown wrote:

there is no need, doom and duke have their timing mechanism and won't go out of speed control.
and even using the -timedemo benchmark, i have never been able to go much faster than 200fps in doom, on multiple computers. the fastest result i got was on an athlon64+nforce3+geforce2ultra, with the tnt2/gf256/gf2mx/gf3 just a few fpses behind. the geforce4 cards are much slower, no matter whatever platform its on.

Doom and Duke Nukem 3D sound quite good on Ensoniq Audio PCI or Creative sister. I have put up some recordings using this card:

Ensoniq / Creative AudioPCI

I'm very fond of this little pocket-rocket card. They are cheap as chips but aren't perfect.

Forget FM, but for Sound Blaster and General Midi they work really well as long as the game runs with EMS memory installed.

That SB-Link cable isn't hard to build. I'm sure you could construct one yourself...

Yes, those games that require FM synth to play music or those that only play using FM synth are old enough to be played comfortably in Dosbox in a fast machine that only has PCI slots.

Mau1wurf, I'll create a new thread focusing only on PCI sound cards with drivers for use in DOS - doesn't matter how good or how bad, and I think I'll need your help there later with your experience in that Ensoniq card in Dos emulation mode. 😉

And for that SB-Link DIY cable, I think you can take a pair of simple Audio CD connector cables (the larger 4-pin black " simple flat" connectors) and use them to connect to the pins on both the soundcard as well as the motherboard. Just have to make sure that the each wire connects to the corresponding pin on either side. The flat headers can also be easily split longitudinally along the black plastic so that you wont have to deal with re-arranging headaches on the pins.)

No worries 😀

The exemplary pack of "bad" games for PCI cards to check compatibility: Commander Keen 6, Descent 1 & 2, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Dune, Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle, Larry I VGA, Laura Bow: Dagger of Amon Ra, Mega Man X, Police Quest 3, Prince of Persia, Quarantine, Sam & Max - Hit The Road, Space Quest I VGA, Wing Commander 2
+ any important games like Dune 2 just to be sure they work well.

Music recorded from card's FM would interesting to hear too. The example is there: The Grand OPL3 Comparison Run!. At least, for Dune which sounds lame on CQM.

Malik wrote:

2. I intend to try it on my SandyBridge based S1155 mainboard which runs the i2500K processor.

Did you try it yet?

Hello,
I have a ALS4000 PCI Sound Card on a PC with Windows 98SE. Installed the drivers from VOGONS, and I only get sound effects and no music in Wolfenstein 3D. Is this normal? thank you!

EDIT: mainboard is an ASUS P4PE-XTE

Scandy wrote:

Hello,
I have a ALS4000 PCI Sound Card on a PC with Windows 98SE. Installed the drivers from VOGONS, and I only get sound effects and no music in Wolfenstein 3D. Is this normal? thank you!

EDIT: mainboard is an ASUS P4PE-XTE

How are you running the game? Launched from within Windows or did you boot into DOS? I can confirm that through Windows 98 you will only get sound effects but if you play it in real DOS mode the music also works.

I just recently set up a thin client rig with this card (the thin client has a PCI slot) and it works great, once properly configured.

One tip for anybody else reading this - I used the als4kdos set of drivers, and in the .cfg file, I had to change the card's DSP type from the default of 402 to 302 in order to get Duke Nuke'm 3d to work.

Hello and sorry for my late answer.
I switched to a Sound Blaster PCI 512 (CT4790) and I finally hear MIDI music and sounds both in WIN98SE and DOS (of course using the DOS drivers).

I really can't understand why music didn't work with ALS4K (system is the same), I suppose for some kind of IRQ issue even if BIOS config is the same.
Anyhow, worth keep trying with the ALS4K? (e.g. is better than the SB?)

Thank you!

Has anyone ever investigated what is so special on the i815/i815 chipsets?
Why are they so problematic with lot's of PCI-Soundcards on legacy dos?

edit: found it
Intel i810 or later do not support Distributed DMA for legacy DMA support for PCI.

The chipsets on my mb (ASUS P4PE-XTE) are:

Intel 82845PE MCH
Intel 82801DB ICH4

Mau1wurf1977 wrote on 2011-10-14, 07:32:

Herculean effort there Malik! […]
Show full quote

Herculean effort there Malik!

Couple of things I'm wondering:

1. Does it send Midi signals through the game port?
2. Have you tried the card on an even newer board?

Modern boards allow you to switch of cores, reduce the FSB and lower the CPU multiplier. On an Asrock socket 1156 board I had an i5 running at 50 or 100 MHz that way 😁

It ran Duke Nukem 3D and Doom just fine. But without sound of course...

Wow, it's been more than 8 years since I last posted this.

After a long gap, I resurrected this project, and now trying with another Pentium 4 based motherboard - Gigabyte 8IPE775 Pro. This time I have added SB Live! SB0060 card in it.

I have tested the ALS4000 card again and now can answer (obviously belated) these 2 questions:

1. Yes, it can send MIDI signals in pure DOS after initializing it with the ALS4KDOS utility (which is not a TSR, just an initializer and doesn't take any memory space or need any memory manager). It's a shame SB Live! couldn't send out MIDI OUT in pure DOS. And Line -IN doesn't work in DOS for the Live!.

Tried with another game, Heretic - sound effects not working but MIDI to my SC-55 MKII works.

Tried with Descent - I tried using both SB Live! for sound effects and the MIDI from ALS4000. This works.

Many games hang when both these cards are initialized. Something to do with this motherboard, I guess.

2. Haven't tried on anything newer but only with this another i865 chipset motherboard.

Apologies if this is a wrong thing to bring up this old topic instead of raising a new one - I am experimenting with a Labway ALS-4000 card at the moment, but from a different angle; I would like to get it work in DOS programs running in Windows 98 SE.

So far I was able to get Windows app working (sound, external MIDI, wavetable and OPL3), DOS apps - with my motherboard I only expected OPL3 and external MIDI to work and they actually did work. In fact special games, like Electroman/Electrobody actually seem to work with digitized samples as well; from what I understand they do not rely on IRQ/DMA to work with the SB card, but this is still nice to confirm the card is in principle operational as an SB.

Sadly in DOS apps running in Windows I only get OPL music and external MIDI; digital sound only produces strange meander noise... Has anyone had experience with this type of setup?

I am using the drivers from Vogons library, but only the vxd-type driver from the newer "WDM" package works for me.

EDIT: Playing with drivers from the web and archive.org never got me anywhere sadly; still getting the strange meander sound 🙁
I have however done a bit more testing of the SB emulation by going into pure DOS and trying FastDoom with Sound Blaster Direct for sound and Sound Blaster for music, and predictably that worked without issues.

Probably the combination of motherboard and soundcard is to blame, so will pursue other configurations for it, e.g. SBEMU-base ones.

EDIT2:
After having some success with setting up the card in pure DOS for FM and MPU-401, and routing the rest via SBEMU, I did some headphone listening and while I find it a nice card overall, compared to, say vortex or audigy, it has some downsides, so sharing here:

1. The level of noise is a bit too much for headphones gaming, and setting master to levels lower than 16 does not help at all. It could be my particular card, but there appears to be some "base noise" injected into card's output that mixer volume controls have no power over (probably coming from the PC itself) 😀

2. FM music sonds good most of the time, but somehow different from Yamaha chip. I tried Goblins 2/3 tracks from modland in adplay and they sounded quite close. Diode Milliampere tracks in AT2 while enjoyable sounded slightly different. Dune by Cryo sounded different as well. One example that stood out however, was COUNTD from Doom 2, where some voices sounded really strange. The latter makes me think that it the cards FM-chip to blame for the reuslt, not its mixer. That said, with simple desktop speakers, games sound quite nice with FM music, e.g. Kyrandia 1 sounds much better than with an audigy or vortex imho.

3. A rather niche issue, the one I described above: using the card for DOS games in Windows 9x has some compatibility issues, other cards I tried don't seem to have.