Thanks. Found one for 10 bucks on eBay! Here we go again...gathering quite a collection of old sound cards! Also went rummaging in the basement, and found a P1 233MMX comp. Same problem on that so it's definitely just that all of my sound cards don't work with Ad-lib Tracker without that OPL latency setting.

Pentium 1 computers have the 8-bit I/O Recovery Time setting in the bios. Just set it to 8 and you are good to go. 😀

Can confirm that the garbling occurs for me too with two different OPTI 924 cards and one Aztech card. YMF and ESS cards do work correctly (with I/O recovery = 1)

Curiously, everything works fine in Win98 without the I/O recovery setting(that can't be used in the standalone player), on the 486. The IRQ moves to 10/11 via Windows plug-n-play away from 5, not sure if that is related to anything. Nothing conflicts with 5.
I could move the site to the P1 233...but it is in worse physical condition, all the fans are shot, case is rusted etc. It also feels like moving to something newer with a PCI bus is cheating.

You guys are running it all in straight up DOS?
Maybe this just isn't going to work with the current setup regardless of the card in there, unless I move the app to Windows.

Or maybe I can figure out what the player was coded in and default it to OPL_LATENCY=1
Dunno ASM but I'm OK with C. If theres ASM bits maybe a copy\paste will work from tracker code to player code haha.

Is the PSU's fan busted too? If so you should get a new PSU (150-200W AT) if you are going to use that P1. The CPU fan can be replaced with a PC fan of the same size but some modern ones might require an adapter for the power if the motherboard doesn't have a connector for it.

df00z wrote:

Curiously, everything works fine in Win98 without the I/O recovery setting, on the 486. The IRQ moves to 10/11 via Windows plug-n-play away from 5, not sure if that is related to anything.

Some things just seem to work better in Windows 98. You should change the IRQ back to 5 if you use DOS applications that need it. It's a good thing that you have Win98 on that computer because you will need it to install the DOS drivers for the YMF719 sound card, which can be downloaded at http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/download/.

df00z wrote:

You guys are running it all in straight up DOS?

Of course! Running dos programs in windows is cheating, man.
I'm guessing your ISA bus may be too fast or something. Changing I/O recovery or opl_latency both add a small delay, and perhaps windows adds just enough overhead to slow things down too. I'd say getting a sound card that can keep up is the best option.

CryoSID wrote:

It's a good thing that you have Win98 on that computer because you will need it to install the DOS drivers for the YMF719 sound card, which can be downloaded at http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/download/.

You could also extract the installer and grab only the DOS files.

jwt27 wrote:

You could also extract the installer and grab only the DOS files.

I know that you can open the 95v2343.exe with WinRAR or 7zip but the .cab files aren't that easy. What program do you use open them?

I gotta say, this has been an uphill battle! I had the thing stable finally for a bit over 24 hours, trying different software to play back midis. Confident that the planets were finally aligned right, switched it to a different 486 with an old 3Com Etherlink III card instead of the Xirlink PE3. Put it in a permanent home in the basement.

It crashed doing network stuff a few hours ago in a way that even the TSR watchdog couldn't even reboot, nor a CTRL-ALT-DEL, squashing my earlier idea that maybe I could get the Raspberry Pi to emulate a PS2 keyboard and reboot the system when needed.

I think the next step is to get the raspberry pi to do waveform analysis on the output audio, and use a relay to pull the power if every other safeguard fails. 🤣

Edit: Or, maybe just heartbeating over the serial port.

df00z wrote:

I think the next step is to get the raspberry pi to do waveform analysis on the output audio, and use a relay to pull the power if every other safeguard fails. 🤣

Edit: Or, maybe just heartbeating over the serial port.

Heartbeat sounds like a good option, but won't help in case the midi program hangs while the timer interrupt keeps going. Not sure if that could ever happen though.
I think you could easily build a simple signal level detector in analog electronics, and use that to flip the reset switch if it stays too low for too long. But then that might not work for quiet midis, and still won't do anything if it crashes while playing and notes get stuck (like what happened with nyancat.mid).

df00z wrote:

Or a .mod/.it player that quits once a file is done. I wanna add mod support!

Cubic Player 1.7 seems to be a good one but doesn't support .it files.
Download link: www.dropbox.com/s/llnhm2ft0c06u6v/CP1.7.rar?dl=1

it does now!

Not quite, because I can only hear noise. Unless I'm doing something wrong.

Edit: Some musics seem to play fine.

I did get a Yamaha YMF719 based card in, it is playing ad-lib tracker files finally now without getting garbled. Having some audio quality issues with the card - it's a "Soundmax" 3d sound card. It's getting better - tweaking the drivers, turning off 3d sound, setting the jumpers to line out instead of speaker, disabling all audio input in the driver. I'm no longer giving overdriven audio, but there's still a slight hiss and some popping noises. I can sort of hear hard drive IO noises through the card too. If I can get the card sounding good, I'll swap it in and enable A2M playback again 😉

df00z wrote:

I'm no longer giving overdriven audio, but there's still a slight hiss and some popping noises. I can sort of hear hard drive IO noises through the card too.

Try moving the soundcard to different ISA slots and see which one is the least noisy.
On the driver settings make sure that everything is turned down to 0 on both mixers and mic except for:

SB Mixer:
FM Vol L/R
Wave Vol L/R*
SB Vol L/R

WSS Mixer:
Wave Vol L/R*
Master Vol L/R

*only if you add support for mod musics, otherwise set these to 0

Edit: My YMF718 is less noisy if its volume is high and the input on the computer that its connected to is low. I wonder if the same thing is true with your Soundmax 3D.
In my case I have the Master Vol set to 14 and the line-in of my main computer set to 12. This way I get almost no noise coming from the YMF718.

That is also true here - pretty strange, the soundblasters I have are all pretty quiet.
It's working well in the other PC I have now, thanks!

The site got posted on the front page of SomethingAwful, so going to let it cool off a week before I take it down for an outage to swap the card, it's getting a lot of use right now.