If you need SB and MT-32, just mute the XR386 with the SBs mixer.

Yeah, but mixing it everytime i wanna play i game that requires it... Kinda sucks...

Anyway i dunno what happened, but i think i killed my NEC... Dunno why... No sound from it. Checked the cable, double checked, check continuity with a multimeter and everything is well connected. I'm using one of those raspberry PI ribbon cables, and connected pin by pin just to make sure. The card just stopped working, and can't remember what i did wrong. The card gets warm, although its not really very hot, it's just warm. I pulled out all of my remaing hair.

I've checked with a multimeter again while DB is connected to the Yama OPL3SA, but this time i checked for voltage.

-Pin 22 does give me the -12V required.
-Pin 18 gives the +12V required.
-Pins 6,10 and 14 give the +5V required.

Now the weird thing:
Pins 4 and 26 also give +5V. WTF???? Is this normal? Pin 4 is MIDI input and Pin 26 is Reset! How the hell can these be?

Unplugged the cable and measured the wavetable connector on the OPL3SA card, and i can confirm the values. +5V is being supplied in both pin 4 and 26.

Do you have another card with WB header to test with? Maybe it's the OPL3SA that's gone screwy.

bjt wrote:

Do you have another card with WB header to test with? Maybe it's the OPL3SA that's gone screwy.

Yeah i thought that too, but i tested it on another OPL3SA and result is the same. Gotta try it with a Sound Blaster 16.

Tried with a SB16, tried in another system and there's no sound at all. It appears my NEC XR385 is dead for good. Damn

RESET is not +RESET but /RESET. It's an active-low input. In these inputs, 0V is a logical one and VCC (5V for this case) is a logical zero. Therefore when it's at 5V it's not being resetted.

The MIDI is an UART, and those inputs are high when the bus is idle. The UART pulls the wire to GND when it wants to transmit a bit (start bit), then it transmits the data, then parity bits (if any), and it lets the wire float to VCC again for at least one bit (stop bit/s). Also the data is sent too fast to be measured using a multimeter. The bus is idle most of the time, that's why you're getting 5V. It could be faulty, but reading 5V doesn't mean that is malfunctioning.

Thanks for the technical detail socram8888, always good to know.

I might get another card, like an Avance Logic with wavetable connector to test further but i think it's dead. I wish i had another wavetable board to test too. The cables i'm using have certainly the correct pinout, they worked before and i checked them several times visually and with continuity on the multimeter.

What i hate about this is that these wavetable boards are too hard to find and are getting too expensive.

You could just get an external Yamaha MU10, same thing and much easier to get hold of.

bjt wrote:

You could just get an external Yamaha MU10, same thing and much easier to get hold of.

Yeah, i'll try but these are also quite a bit more expensive not only by itself but shipping also. But i'll keep an eye on them.

AFAIK that NEC boards is a XG synthesizer, so if you want a MIDI synthesizer that sounds exactly like that, why don't you use a software emulated one? The S-YXG50 for example (a software XG MIDI synthesizer) sounds very nice.

If you want a hardware one, I'll recommend you getting a sound card from the YMF7xx family (being the YMF724 the most common), which has an integrated OPL3 and XG.

Yeah S-YXG50 is about 100% accurate to DB60XG. The variant that is freely available seems to be 2k/XP only so I'm not sure if there is an equivalent one for 9x and whether it's possible to use it in a 9x Dosbox.

The XG softsynth that comes with YMF ISA cards is worthless though. I wouldn't touch that with a 10 feet pole.

Not only i want it hardware i also want it on old and pure DOS.

I had two XR385 failing so I also just got an external Yamaha. I think it'a a MU-80. The external stuff is just built a lot better I think.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I had two XR385 failing so I also just got an external Yamaha. I think it'a a MU-80. The external stuff is just built a lot better I think.

Yeah if i find an external solution at a good price i will definetely go that way.

d1stortion wrote:

Yeah S-YXG50 is about 100% accurate to DB60XG. The variant that is freely available seems to be 2k/XP only so I'm not sure if there is an equivalent one for 9x and whether it's possible to use it in a 9x Dosbox.

There is not only Yamaha SoftSynthesizer S-YXG50 for win9x
but also
YAMAHA SoftSynthesizer S-YXG100plus which is way better