It's a PCI-Only board 🙁 And from Intel, thus no real settings present in the BIOS.
I will be getting a P2B-DS and a P2B-S plus 2 other unknown Asus motherboards in week number 42 this year.
I will resume testing in pure Dos at that point.

^^ That's a shame about the BIOS options. There maybe a way to hack it though. I've seen PCI-only boards with Legacy ISA options for IRQs and DMAs...

falloutboy wrote:

tom4DOS did some PCI soundcard tests: […]
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tom4DOS did some PCI soundcard tests:

YMF-744 Hoontech SoundTrack Digital XG
i430TX (Triton2), AMD K6-2 400, 128 MB RAM
S3 Virge DX (4MB), MS-DOS 6.2
No PC/PCI, SB-Link

PCI ISA routing: "#INTA"
"ISA" & "S-IRQ" didn't work ("Can not detect Interrupt at ...")

Silverball: crash at start.
Day of the Tentacle: no Sfx
Zone66: SoundBlaster not automatically recognized, start game with zone66 /s
Crystal Dreams 2: no Sfx

source:
http://www.w53ulr54c.homepage.t-online.de/
http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67 … start=15#p27730

I had problems to, with my YMF-724E-V, in "Day of the Tentacle".
Music & speech don't work together.
K6-III+ Tyan S1590, PCI ISA routing: "#INTA", (No PC/PCI, SB-Link)

Zone 66 runs fine. Initially, the game would only play sound effects in-game and no music. I needed to fine tune the CPU as this game is speed sensitive for all sounds to work. At first, just disabling the Instruction Cache on the VIA C3 was fine, but the game crashes after several minutes of the music playing in-game. I found that out when I left the game on pause whilst listing to its music. I needed to disable both L1/ L2 caches for the game to work properly. The CPU was set to 133x8.5 ~ 1133MHz, and with both caches disabled, a score of around 28 in Speedsys, the game worked fine with both in-game effects and music. Also, I needed to disable HIMEM.SYS and EMM386 for this game to work.

Day of the Tentacle runs fine. This game behaves like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - with speech, they both need caches enabled on the VIA CPU, otherwise, they eventually crash after running for a few minutes. Presumably, some buffering is needed to enable the speech to work correctly.

Silverball runs fine. I didn't need to change anything - it just ran at default settings, and worked fine for both effects and music.

Crystal Dreams 2 worked fine. I had Instruction Cache already disabled on the CPU, and the demo worked fine until the end, where it allowed you to chose various menu options and end credits. Also, I chose the 44000 Hz option for Soundblaster at the beginning of the demo.

Thanks for the list, please keep 'em coming...

Are these "generic" YMF724 cards different from the Yamaha Waveforce 192XG? The latter has a 2MB hardware wavetable onboard, I believe. Just wondering how they compare.

Can the OP test DUNE 2 with the Yamaha YMF724 connected through SB Link? Unfortunately the game didn't work for me on my ASUS TX97-XE which can only support DDMA.

carlostex wrote:

Can the OP test DUNE 2 with the Yamaha YMF724 connected through SB Link? Unfortunately the game didn't work for me on my ASUS TX97-XE which can only support DDMA.

I just tested Dune 2 with my YMF724 card and SB-Link.

From pure DOS, it seems to work fine selecting the SB Pro option. I tried it using the original setup program (only one sound source) and the patched setup program (multiple sound sources).

In a Windows DOS box, I get SB Pro digital audio PLUS GM music (having selected "Sound Canvas" during the setup process). However, during setup, I have to select the "no expanded memory" option. If I select the "use expanded memory" option, the game will crash after the Westwood logo saying that I do not have enough memory.

The game also seems to work with MT-32 music with the YMF724. The game will even show the "Initializing MT-32 ..." screen at the beginning. Not sure how it compares to a real MT-32, but it sounds decent to me.

j^aws wrote:

There are minor variations between YMF-724 cards: WaveForce 192XG (used as reference - YMF724E) is noisier than a clone I tested - YMF724F.

May you please place a picture of your 724F wich is less noiser than WaveForce? What codec chip is used on 724F? Were both cards in LineOut or speaker mode?

Tertz wrote:

j^aws wrote:

There are minor variations between YMF-724 cards: WaveForce 192XG (used as reference - YMF724E) is noisier than a clone I tested - YMF724F.

May you please place a picture of your 724F wich is less noiser than WaveForce? What codec chip is used on 724F? Were both cards in LineOut or speaker mode?

Here's an image from the web:

Not sure on the CODEC differences off-hand, if any.

IIRC, the outputs compared were Speaker Out. One thing the Yamaha WaveForce lacks is SPDIF output. I've only managed to get SPDIF working via a Windows DOS session.

Once I make this a permanent build, I'll play around with it and feed it to some external DSP effects via SPDIF, and add Chorus/ Reverb / 3D Surround etc. to OPL3...

j^aws wrote:

Not sure on the CODEC differences off-hand, if any.

It's small square chip above main chip. It may be different on SP401F cards and its model affects on the level of noise.

the outputs compared were Speaker Out

As the card has an amplifier there should be a LineOut connector or a jumper which switches the card to LineOut mode with less noise. It's generally bad idea to use cheap cards' amplifier, so the comparision of noise is more correctly to do in LineOut mode.

I saw you mentioned 754 card has less than 724 DOS compatibility. What games have shown this?

More detailed pics to compare chips:

Regarding compatibility: IIRC, I was testing various YMF cards, including an ISA YMF719, PCI YMF744 & 754, and the 724 remained the most compatible in my tests on a 440BX board. With the PCI cards, I was testing various drivers in Windows DOS sessions, so that SPDIF worked. The games tested were many installed on the test bench hard disk, but that has been wiped since. What I remember is regressing driver versions to ones that were so old that the 744 and 754 weren't recognised anymore. I didn't compare these cards in pure DOS due to my interest in getting the SPDIF working.

j^aws wrote:

More detailed pics to compare chips

This 724 has Sigmatel stac9704 codec which with stac9708 are ones of least noisy on YMF7x4 cards.

What I remember is regressing driver versions to ones that were so old that the 744 and 754 weren't recognised anymore.

Tested in Win98SE? What YMF drivers versions you've found as most DOS compatible?
What games did not worked in DOS box with those drivers which supported 754?
Was SB-Link helpful to run games in Win9x DOS box or all games worked ok there without SB-Link? D-DMA was not used in any way?

^^ My testing wasn't exhaustive, it was to merely filter out my most compatible card. When I revisit my final build, I'll make more exact documentations on various settings and drivers. I don't recall which games exhibited the issues off-hand, though there were a few.

The OS was Win98SE, and the games compatibility in a Windows DOSBox didn't mirror compatibility in pure DOS. This lead me to believe that SB-Link didn't make a difference in a DOSBox. Moreover, I couldn't find a way to set various DMA/ IRQ modes in Windows.

j^aws wrote:

When I revisit my final build, I'll make more exact documentations on various settings and drivers.

This is interesting.

The OS was Win98SE, and the games compatibility in a Windows DOSBox didn't mirror compatibility in pure DOS. This lead me to believe that SB-Link didn't make a difference in a DOSBox. Moreover, I couldn't find a way to set various DMA/ IRQ modes in Windows.

In Win9x there should be "Legacy Device" to set base, irq, dma.
So SB-Link was connected during DOS box testing and there was no try to make comparative testing without it in Win.

Tertz wrote:

In Win9x there should be "Legacy Device" to set base, irq, dma.
So SB-Link was connected during DOS box testing and there was no try to make comparative testing without it in Win.

The "Legacy Device" setup in Windows is very basic; it lacks the extensive DMA and IRQ modes present in the corresponding DOS Setupds utility, such as PC-PCI and S-IRQ. Maybe there are ways to hack the Windows Registry to get these options, but I didn't investigate further.

And, IIRC, I disconnected the SB-Link cable and this didn't seem to make any difference to compatibility in a Windows DOSBox - the driver revision had more affect.

j^aws wrote:

The "Legacy Device" setup in Windows is very basic; it lacks the extensive DMA and IRQ modes present in the corresponding DOS Setupds utility, such as PC-PCI and S-IRQ.

Seems like other principle is used in Win9x DOS box, kind of TSR emulation.

Test Earth 2140 with it, I can almost guarantee it isn't going to work with that PCI card, although I'd be glad to be wrong since I have one of these and love the way the XG chip sounds! I could never get mine to work with any DOS games though, I'll try with the stuff you posted though when I get home 🤣. Also you say it can be complicated under Windows 9x, how so? What do you need to do to get it working right?

^^ I think I still have Earth 2140 somewhere - I'll check it out in the next few days.

When I say 'it gets complicated under Windows', I'm referring to switching back-and -forth between pure DOS and Windows. Unless you know how both environments are setup, it can get confusing, especially if you use 'Exit to MS-DOS' option from Windows. Make sure you check DOSSTART.BAT and ensure entries don't conflict with AUTOEXEC.BAT, for example.

As requested, tested the DOS version of Earth 2140 (demo), in pure DOS 6.22 using SB-Link. The autodetect routine in the Setup detected the card as a SB Pro 2, and both SFX & music work fine in the game.

Wow nice!

falloutboy wrote:

Day of the Tentacle: no Sfx

This game has issue with fast CPUs - sfx does not work. It needs 386 or low 486.

> source:
http://www.w53ulr54c.homepage.t-online.de
http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67 … start=15#p27730

have attached w53ulr54c's info

^^ I managed to get this to work... Check the top of this page. I used ICD on my Ezra CPU.