This thread is to document any DOS games/ apps/ demos that have issues with this great Yamaha sound card. Hardware used: YMF-724F sound card using SB-Link, VIA C3 CPU on a 440BX chipset motherboard.
In pure DOS, this card works best with SB-Link/ PC-PCI connectors on both the sound card and motherboard, and also works with SoftMPU. From my tests, the YMF724 is more compatible than its ISA cousin, the YMF 719 (intro doesn't work on Prince of Persia 2).
I've yet to come accross anything that doesn't work with this card, and as an individual with limited time, I obviously haven't tested everything. Others have tested, so I investigated some games/demos they had issues with:
The reviewer rated this card 4.5/5, citing the aforementioned demo crashing half-way through. I'm not sure if the reviewer was using an SB-Link connector, but I tested the demo and it works great. The default volume seems to be very high for the demo, so I adjusted the master volume on my card and had no issues.
One of our regular forum members mentioned this game, where there were issues with certain sound effects opening doors. Not sure exactly what I was looking for, but the sounds of doors blasted were not omitted and sounded great.
Please post troublesome games/demos/apps that you think have issues with this card, and I'd like to use this thread to document any fixes. I'd like to remove any stigma attached to this particular PCI card not being as compatible as ISA soundcards. Thanks in advance.
Some further testing in MS-DOS 6.22: Both CT-VOICE.DRV and SBFMDRV.COM games/apps working - these are usually tough to get working, even on ISA SB clones. I've got a normal SBPRO directory installed with all its usual files and sub-directories, and with SET SOUND=C:\SBPRO pointing in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
The most compatible setup so far, using SETUPDS, is IRQ Mode = S-IRQ and DMA Mode = PC/PCI. Besides that, it helps that the VIA C3 CPU can be slowed down to 386/ 486 speeds easily... I think this card is going to be my main one, alongside a GUS and AWE variant.
^^ Nope, nothing so far. As far as this build is concerned, it thinks there is a SB Pro 2 installed, with better signal to noice ratio and FM quality. This is now my favourite OPL3 device, previously it was a Turtle Beach Tropez+, which also has great FM output.
There are minor variations between YMF-724 cards: WaveForce 192XG (used as reference - YMF724E) is noisier than a clone I tested - YMF724F. Amongst all these cards made by various manufacturers, there maybe a 'best' version out there...
What about MIDI options? Do any YMF7x4 boards have a true MIDI device or wavetable header? That is the only thing that weights in favour of its ISA cousin, though it is a non-issue for people using external modules.
Never seen one with a Wavetable header, nor with any other dedicated MIDI hardware on-board, though they may still exist. If you have a bunch of daughterboards, you can convert them into external MIDI boxes...
You can still use its DLS compatible XG synth in a Windows DOS session, and with S/PDIF digital out on some cards, feed FM/ PCM/ MIDI to external DSPs/ effects processors/ DAWs and whatnot. These cards behave differently in Windows regarding DOS compatibility though.
Some games to test that can cause issues with PCI cards:
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis with digital speech
Space Quest 1 VGA with digital sound effects
I would find testing without SB-Link more interesting though. Especially with later machines, e.g. Socket A or Pentium 4, I don't think SB-Link exists that much, and on such machines DOS PCI compatibility is useful. So far I swear by the Vortex 2, but haven't really tried many other cards.
And maybe expand this project to include other cards, with or without SB-Link? We could have several of us contribute, test and create a compatibility matrix or something like that. Most of use will have a Slot 1 board, so it shouldn't be hard coming up with similar enough hardware.
I now remember that the PC-PCI connector offers both Serial IRQ and DMA lines, so if you are not using S-IRQ together with the DMA options you are not fully using the PC-PCI features and, therefore, having to resort to emulation tricks, which could be the cause of the compatibility issues other members have experienced. With S-IRQ and DMA=PC/PCI this should be as compatible with games as if it were an ISA card.
The PC/PCI is only for serial IRQ; there is no DMA done through PC/PCI. DDMA (distributed DMA) is done entirely through the PCI bus, no external connector/cable.
It crashes on an Epox MVP3. I suspekt the reason being that it has real ISA slots alongside the PC/Pci.
I have tested it with no isa cards installed, and all IRQ and DMA's set to PCI/ISA and not legacy.
Without the PC/Pci cable, it will not work at all. (cant find IRQ or DMA), and with the cable it can find in the setup util.
I have a true PCI-Only board, with PC/Pci header on it. "Intel VC820", and I need to get it going again, to test in MS-Dos.
That's my next build-project. I read somewhere on the net, that MVP3 boards tend to be incompatible with YMF724.
Doom, Duke3D, CIV1 and every other games tested crashes. That's for shure. Only thing working are the setup util test.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
There is no such thing. DOS compatibility is achieved through one of 2 methods, which are separate, independent and incompatible with one another. One is PC/PCI aka SB-Link, which uses an external connector and serial IRQ. The other is distributed DMA which is done through the PCI bus. There is no overlap between them. You use either one, or the other.
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O
There is no such thing. DOS compatibility is achieved through one of 2 methods, which are separate, independent and incompatible. One is PC/PCI aka SB-Link, which uses an external connector and serial IRQ. The other is distributed DMA which is done through the PCI bus. There is no overlap between them. You use either one, or the other.
I mean, what does the PC/PCI option for DMA Mode in SETUPDS use if PC/PCI doesn't help with DMA?
brostenen wrote:It crashes on an Epox MVP3. I suspekt the reason being that it has real ISA slots alongside the PC/Pci.
I have tested it with no […] Show full quote
It crashes on an Epox MVP3. I suspekt the reason being that it has real ISA slots alongside the PC/Pci.
I have tested it with no isa cards installed, and all IRQ and DMA's set to PCI/ISA and not legacy.
Without the PC/Pci cable, it will not work at all. (cant find IRQ or DMA), and with the cable it can find in the setup util.
I have a true PCI-Only board, with PC/Pci header on it. "Intel VC820", and I need to get it going again, to test in MS-Dos.
That's my next build-project. I read somewhere on the net, that MVP3 boards tend to be incompatible with YMF724.
Doom, Duke3D, CIV1 and every other games tested crashes. That's for shure. Only thing working are the setup util test.
It could be the that the implementation of PC/PCI is different in Intel chipsets compared to SS7 ones. The 440BX has a native ISA bus as well (and many boards based on that chipset do have the slots), and the OP did not run into these issues you are having.
I had trouble with a Crystal PCI card with DOS DDMA drivers that caused it to randomly freeze during startup, so this could be the flakiness of non-Intel chipsets showing.
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
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)
Some games to test that can cause issues with PCI cards:
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis with digital speech
Space Quest 1 VGA with digital sound effects
Thanks for the suggestions. Both those games were tested and worked fine.
"Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis with digital speech" was the trickiest. I got used to running the VIA C3 without any caches enabled, and the game would lock-up after a few minutes. With both caches enabled or instruction cache disabled, the game worked fine. I manually chose "Atalantis s220/5/500", where the last parameter was buffer size, IIRC. BTW, the non-talkie version of the game worked with both FM and effects with all caches disabled.
philscomputerlab wrote:
I would find testing without SB-Link more interesting though. Especially with later machines, e.g. Socket A or Pentium 4, I don't think SB-Link exists that much, and on such machines DOS PCI compatibility is useful. So far I swear by the Vortex 2, but haven't really tried many other cards.
And maybe expand this project to include other cards, with or without SB-Link? We could have several of us contribute, test and create a compatibility matrix or something like that. Most of use will have a Slot 1 board, so it shouldn't be hard coming up with similar enough hardware.
I also have interests in non-SBLink compatibility in those types of builds. I did some preliminary tests without SBLink, and my top 3 compatible chipsets were: Yamaha YMF-7xx, ESS Solo-1 (ES1938S) and Vortex 2. The least appealing was the Vortex 2; it just sounded bad in DOS for FM and wasn't that compatible. The ESS Solo-1 was the most compatible and sounded good. The YMF-7xx sounded the best and was in the middle-ground for compatibilty.
I may do a matrix in the future for all SB-Link cards (I have a few chipsets), but my OP link has a nice round-up already with incompatible games. I could also consider a round-up of non-SBLink PCI cards, too. But for the scope of this thread, I wanted to focus on what I consider the most compatible and best sounding card, and find out the games/ demos that aren't compatible with it.
brostenen wrote:It crashes on an Epox MVP3. I suspekt the reason being that it has real ISA slots alongside the PC/Pci.
I have tested it with no […] Show full quote
It crashes on an Epox MVP3. I suspekt the reason being that it has real ISA slots alongside the PC/Pci.
I have tested it with no isa cards installed, and all IRQ and DMA's set to PCI/ISA and not legacy.
Without the PC/Pci cable, it will not work at all. (cant find IRQ or DMA), and with the cable it can find in the setup util.
I have a true PCI-Only board, with PC/Pci header on it. "Intel VC820", and I need to get it going again, to test in MS-Dos.
That's my next build-project. I read somewhere on the net, that MVP3 boards tend to be incompatible with YMF724.
Doom, Duke3D, CIV1 and every other games tested crashes. That's for shure. Only thing working are the setup util test.
Do you have a screen print of your SETUPDS settings? What IRQ and DMA Modes are you using?
A while ago, I tested two MVP3 boards, one EPOX SS7 and one QDI S370, and they worked really well with the SBLink connector, but that was with DOS 7.1. I'll pencil in some tests for these boards at some point in the future.
alexanrs wrote:
I now remember that the PC-PCI connector offers both Serial IRQ and DMA lines, so if you are not using S-IRQ together with the DMA options you are not fully using the PC-PCI features and, therefore, having to resort to emulation tricks, which could be the cause of the compatibility issues other members have experienced. With S-IRQ and DMA=PC/PCI this should be as compatible with games as if it were an ISA card.
I'm inclined to agree with this, though I'm not clear on the definition of PC/PCI in all the literature that I've read. From my understanding, SB-Link seems to be a superset of PC/PCI and S-IRQ...
stamasd wrote:
I don't know. Maybe it's there to confuse people? 😀
It is kinda confusing. Here's what I've gathered:
When setting up the card in DOS, the SETUPDS config tool has these options:
Three IRQ Modes: ISA, S-IRQ, INTA#
Two DMA Modes: PC/PCI, D-DMA
When the physical SBLink cable is connected, all options are available, but S-IRQ and PC/PCI selctions are the most compatible. When the SBLink cable is removed, both these modes cease to work. And INTA# with D-DMA is left, and significantly less compatible. So, there are two distinct DMA modes which affect compatibility, and this is linked to the physical connection with the SBLink connector. (BTW, I could never get IRQ Mode with "ISA" working.)
You can see the communication between the YMF724 (DS-1) and the Southbridge (PIIX4E): Namely the SERIRQ# (S-IRQ) and PCREQ#, PCGNT# (PC/PCI Grant and Request Sideband Signals). These lines clearly by-pass the PCI bus and look like they are carried by the physical SBLink connection.
And importantly, the datasheet mentions: "DS-1 supports PC/PCI and D-DMA protocols to emulate the DMA of SB Pro on the PCI." So, clearly there are *two* distinct DMA modes: PC/PCI and D-DMA.
falloutboy wrote:
tom4DOS did some PCI soundcard tests:
...
Thanks for the info - I'll try to test those games as well.
Do you have a screen print of your SETUPDS settings? What IRQ and DMA Modes are you using?
Nope. Sorry. I did erase all YMF724 software on this machine, as I was only testing.
Normally it is running CT2910 and GUS-ACE.
I will however test this on my 820-Chipset board. (Intel VC820)
As far as I remember, I started by assigning the IRQ's and DMA's to PC/ISA and not Legacy ISA.
Then setting PCI-Slot3 to IRQ5 and installed the card into Slot3.
For the msdos setup tool. I can not really remember what I did.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
^^ No probs - let us know how you get on with that Intel board.
Regarding compatibility, revisited Duke Nukem II again as mentioned in the OP, and swapped out the YMF724 for a Sound Blaster Pro 2 (CT2600). This cards sound effects were better; explosions were deeper.
When I checked the sound settings, the games setup had 3 options chosen: Adlib, Sounblaster and Music. When I swapped the YMF back, I continued hearing sound effects of doors exploding and so forth, however, the sounds were mixed from both the Adlib and SB. If the Adlib option is removed, so that only SB is left in the games sound setup, then there are missing sounds from explosions from doors and so on.
Looking at the YMF724 datasheet, these are the DSP Commands that are unsupported by the SB Pro engine:
116h 8bit to 2bit ADPCM single-cycle DMA mode digitized sound output 217h 8bit to 2bit ADPCM single-cycle DMA mode digitized sound output with ref. byte 31Fh 8bit to 2bit ADPCM auto-init DMA mode digitized sound output with ref. byte 476h 8bit to 3bit ADPCM single-cycle DAM mode digitized sound output 577h 8bit to 3bit ADPCM single-cycle DMA mode digitized sound output with ref. byte 67Fh 8bit to 3bit ADPCM auto-init DMA mode digitized sound output with ref. byte
So, anyone know any games/ demos/ apps that would make use of the aforementioned commands?
The SB-Link on the Intel VC820, does not work in MS-Dos-6.22
I suspect that most of this technology is only working when Win9X is running.
Installing Win98SE now, to test with and without SB-Link cable.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
The SB-Link on the Intel VC820, does not work in MS-Dos-6.22
I suspect that most of this technology is only working when Win9X is running.
Installing Win98SE now, to test with and without SB-Link cable.
Installing in DOS should be very straightforward. I've got pure DOS 6.22 and nothing else installed. Things get more complicated when installing Win9x.
(Run SETUPDS first, then SETUPDS /S afterwords to initialise in DOS.)
Have you changed relevant IRQs and DMAs in your BIOS to Legacy? E.g. IRQ 5/7 and DMA 1 should be set to Legacy - that's what I'm using for S-IRQ/ PC-PCI.
Also ensure you have disabled all unnecessary ports and IRQs in your BIOS. E.g. Serial/ Parallel/ USBs etc...
Finally, ensure you have all your SET BLASTER lines in your AUTOEXEC.BAT.
