Finally building this thing this morning.
Using a Slot-1 Pentium-3 Motherboard with no built in Audio. Award bios.

I am going to use 3 MV audio cards ISA .

What are some good IRQ and DMA settings to use ?

I have run out of resources so I will only be able to install 1 or 2 cards.

Which one of these cards do you recommend ?

Jazz 16 ( ISA )
Pro Spectrum 16 PAR ( ISA )
Pro Audio 16 LMSI ( ISA )
Pro Audio 16 PAS ( ISA )

They all have a Yamaha OPL chip too for MIDI play back.

I would try them one by one to find which sounds best to you, I have used my PAS 16 and I think it is a bit more bassy then sound blasters or ESS Audiodrives but the extra bass you get used to after a while and it is better in my opinion only because it is shielded and does not have as many pops you get from voice in gabriel knight 1. Also from memory there is an eq of sorts and there might be a spacial setting so playing around with that will give different results. Take your time in building your retro rig rome wasnt built in a day and the fun can last longer when you add things like sound modules or PC case accessories like removable drive bays and fan controllers and replacing the old HDD/power supply using adaptors converters. Im defiantly taking my time as im building 3 PCs at the moment as one case is getting a new coat of paint and when its finished I will showcase it in the system specs forum folder.

"They all have a Yamaha OPL chip too for MIDI play back."

Will you be using a sound module or the small add on boards that go to the wavetable headder (is this the right name I think im wrong) on the sound card?

GabrielKnight123 wrote:

"They all have a Yamaha OPL chip too for MIDI play back."

Will you be using a sound module or the small add on boards that go to the wavetable headder (is this the right name I think im wrong) on the sound card?

No, I don't have a 401-MPU device.
I use the generic Win98se driver for the Media Vision sound cards.
They also install a MIDI playback device.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

No, I don't have a 401-MPU device.

Yes you do. Do you know the difference b/w these cards? Do you have an idea what you want to use these cards for? These are the questions you need to answer before asking us, over and over, what hardware you should use.

I think the same, but I heard that early PAS16 models lacked a MIDI interface.
Anyway, my PAS16 that I had in the 90s DID have an MPU-401, but it could be enabled/disabled in software.
That beeing said, I was using the card in DOS/Windows 3.1 for the longest time and thus used a configuration software from
Media Vision. The drivers that come with Windows 9x might be different, I don't know for sure.
Windows 98SE was the last OS that I used the PAS16 with. From what I remember, it worked fine there, but I didn't spend
a lot of attention to the device manager to see if there was an MPU-401 device, since I had no external MIDI device at the time.

Edit: It is interesting to see a multi PAS setup. So far, I've only read about such a possibility in the PAS16 manual.
Up to four cards can be installed in a single machine. I guess that's what the IRQ/DMA sharing option was intended for.

What about the noise with these PAS cards? I had a Pro Audio Studio installed and found it to be annoyingly noisy so left it in storage. Where all these models this bad?

sf78 wrote:

What about the noise with these PAS cards? I had a Pro Audio Studio installed and found it to be annoyingly noisy so left it in storage. Where all these models this bad?

Yes the PAS16 hisses pretty badly by default but can be corrected with some fiddling in the mixer: Re: PAS16 constant noise

Once the hiss is under control it's a lovely card.

The Jazz16 doesn't hiss in my experience but the few that I tried (Media Vision Jazz 16 - anyone use one of these?) weren't great at anything - they're not PAS16 compatible!

I found these old ads for the Media Vision cards on infoWorld magazine.

Thanks for the ads! 😀

Since this thread is about Media Vision PAS, I've also taken some pictures of the Media Vision Memphis.
That's a multimedia kit containing the PAS16, speakers and an external scusi drive.

Yeah, Multimedia kits where expensive back in the early 1990's
How much did that Memphis kit sell for ?

In 1993 my first custom build computer came with a 2x Sony CDROM and sound blaster compatible ISA sound card and those components costs me about $150.
As you can see from the ad, The Media Vision Pro16 kit costs $599.

I'm sorry, I don't know how much it did cost back in the day. 🙁
I had another multimedia kit, though, that I got in the 90s.
It also contained a PAS16 with a SCSI drive (picture).
I believe it did cost 150DM or so.

Okay, getting back to this build and the configuration.

What operating system do you think will work best in providing the best audio play back of these Media Vision cards ?
Determining the the best operating system will help determine the best hardware to use.

I know that Windows 98se have built in drivers for these Media Vision cards.
Or should I just use Media Vision provided drivers ?

I want to hear the best possible play back of these Media Vision cards.

What CPU should I use ?

Here is what I have to build with:

486dx-33
486dx2-50
486dx2-66

Pentium MMX 166mhz.
Pentium MMX 200mhz.
Pentium MMX 233mhz.

AMD K62 533mhz.
AMD K63 450mhz.

Pentium-2 233mhz.
Pentium-2 333mhz.
Pentium-2 400mhz.

Pentium-3 500mhz.
Pentium-3 1ghz.

These are ISA cards so I am limited on with CPU and motherboards I can use.

Also how much ram do I need ?

Okay, So getting back to this build and configuration.
I tried setting these up on a P3 500mhz. computer running Windows 98se just to test out the cards.
I could only get one card to work, I think I need to change the jumper settings on these cards.

So ultimately I want to install these cards on a Pentium MMX 233mhz computer running Dual boot DOS / Win98se.
But I need some help figuring out these jumper settings. I was never any good at figuring out jumper settings.
I am going to use a motherboard with 4 ISA slots and 3 PCI slots and Award Bios.

Here are the cards I have:
Jazz 16 ( ISA )
Pro Spectrum 16 PAR ( ISA )
Pro Audio 16 LMSI ( ISA )
Pro Audio 16 PAS ( ISA )

So in order to get these 4 cards to work what jumper settings do I need to use for each card ?
I will be using DOS and a menu system with batch files to automate installation of configuration.

So When I boot into DOS a menu will appear asking which Audio card to load ?
Something like this:

DOS Menu […]
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DOS Menu

Sound Card Menu

loaded = Jazz 16

Which sound card do you wish to enable ?
1) Jazz 16
2) Pro Spectrum 16 PAR
3) Pro Audio 16 LMSI
4) Pro Audio 16 PAS

On the C: drive I will already have the drivers installed for each sound card in there own directory.
In each sound card directory I will have the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to use for each Sound card.

So in the Menu when I select which card to load it will execute a batch file and copy over the appropriate Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for that sound card and reboot.
This way I should never have to mess with the Autoexec and Config.sys files ever again.
The Menu system will do all of this for me.

So here are some diagrams I found on the internet about the jumper settings.

Which jumpers do I need to change ?
I currently have them all setup with default jumper settings.
I have only been able to get one card to work the "Pro Audio 16 LMSI" with default settings.

What IRQ and DMA settings do I need to change ?

Unlike Creative's cards, which can usually work without drivers, every Pro Audio Spectrum requires the loading of a driver to wo […]
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Unlike Creative's cards, which can usually work without drivers, every Pro Audio Spectrum requires the loading of a driver to work. Without the driver, the card will not even work as an Adlib card. The driver is called MVSOUND.SYS and is loaded in config.sys. I used the driver package here, https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … 198&menustate=0, which contains an install program. Between the native PAS and the emulated SB, you will have to sacrifice 2 IRQs and 2 DMAs to the card. You must select a 16-bit DMA channel for 16-bit PAS audio recording and playback. Some games, like Privateer only properly support a PAS using an 8-bit DMA. See here for a list of games with IRQ/DMA restrictions : Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum and Pro Audio Spectrum 16?

There are a couple of caveats about using the PAS16. The first is to turn off DMA sharing as shown in the following diagram :

DMA sharing just does not work on the ISA bus and is one more way to break programs. The second is to use the mixer program to set the card's volume levels appropriately. This card can be noisier than you might expect, turning off unused inputs and outputs will help quite a bit to cut down on the noise. The mixer is completely incompatible with the mixer of the SB Pro and later SB cards. The third is to avoid using the MPU-401 compatible MIDI interface. While the PAS16 has its own native MIDI interface, which was not widely supported, the MVD-101 D and higher revision chips also supported UART MPU-401 and eliminated the need to select the I/O addresses for the Sound Blaster. Unfortunately, the UART MPU-401 has hanging note issues worse than any Sound Blaster.

The MVSOUND.SYS driver has the following settings in the CONFIG.SYS :

DEVICE=C:\PAS16\MVSOUND.SYS d:5 i:7 s:1,220,1,5 m:0 j:1

The "d:5 i:7" variables set the PAS16 IRQ and DMA. The PAS16 can use any DMA channel except 4 and IRQ 2,3,5,7,10,11,12 or 15.
The s:1,220,1,5 set the Sound Blaster emulation, with a s:0 disabling it. The 220,1,5 designate the Sound Blaster I/O address, DMA and IRQ. The I/O addresses supported are 220,230 or 240, the IRQs are 2,3,5,7 but the only DMA that is fully compatible is 1.
"m:0" disables the MPU-401 emulation, the I/O addresses supported are 330 and 300, the IRQs supported are 2,3,5,7.
"j:1" enables the joystick port

The Sound Blaster emulation uses essentially the same chip DSP as the Thunderboard. The DSP is still reported as 2.00. This means that you can expect no better than 8-bit/22KHz playback, just like a Sound Blaster 1.5. The Thunderboard supported recording at 8-bit/22KHz whereas the SB 1.5 only supported up to 12KHz. It also supported playback at up to 22KHz for the ADPCM modes whereas the Sound Blaster could only do about 12KHz.

The way the card handles the main I/O address assignment is interesting. The card can automatically select one of four I/O address ranges, with the default range starting at 388H. This is the beginning of the Adlib register. You can use a jumper block to assign the card an ID, which affects the range it will select. You can also use the jumper block to force the I/O 388 range. The address ranges are 388, 384, 38C and 288. It can accept writes to I/O 42, 43 and 61 for the PC Speaker emulation. If the default range at 388-38B is used, it will also use addresses at : 788-78B, B88-B8B, F88-F8B, 1388-138B, 1788-178B and 1B88-1B8B. Other default ranges will use other address ranges.

The mixer adjust program is called PAS but it looks very intimidating. However, there is a much easier way to control the functions. Start the mixer program as "PAS *". This will start the GUI version of the program, allowing you to adjust settings with greater ease. To reduce noise in your game audio playback, you should put the levels for the external connector and microphone to 0 (the leftmost position on the slider) Then press F2 and set the recording monitor to 0 and turn off the monitor features below using the Enter key. Finally, set all sources on the main screen to "Play Only" using the Enter key. Save your settings with Shift + F5 and exit. Put this command in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file : "C:\PAS16\PAS F5". Note that MVSOUND.SYS allows you to increase, decrease and mute the volume using Ctrl + Alt U, D or M, respectively.

Sierra was a strong supporter of the PAS line. The original PAS was noted for being the only card supporting dual OPL2 stereo FM music in Sierra's adventure games using the SCI1 engine. However, NewRisingSun released a series of patches that allow for stereo playback on an OPL3 card such as the SBPro 2.0 and PAS16. This makes the functionality of the original PAS mostly redundant.

The PAS16 was the first, and for a time the only card that supported 16-bit digital audio playback in Sierra's SCI1.1 games. Sierra added 16-bit support to the Sound Blaster driver in the July 1993 and later versions of AUDBLAST.DRV. You can find this driver in the floppy or low-resolution CD-ROM versions of Leisure Suit Larry 6 and copy it over to other games. While the PAS16 supports stereo FM music in Sierra SCI1.1 and 2.0 games, so does the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, 16 and AWE32/64. Sierra had separate 8-bit and 16-bit drivers for the PAS and the PAS16, respectively, in its SCI1.1 games. For the later SCI2 games, Sierra had three drivers, a driver for the PAS, a driver for the PAS16 that supported 8-bit playback and a driver for the PAS16 that supported 16-bit playback but required more memory.

The PAS16 does not work properly with the PAS driver found in Sierra's SCI1 games. You won't get any sound. I conclude that the PAS16 is not fully backwards compatible with the PAS. The digital audio and speech will work correctly, but the music will sound wrong because the music was programmed for dual OPL2 chips, not an OPL3 chip. SCI1 drivers require the PAS must be set to I/O 220, IRQ7 and DMA1.

SCI1 games do not offer separate driver selections for music and speech. I would note that a few SCI1 games have a driver called MTPRO.DRV which allows you to use an MT-32 connected to an MPU-401 interface with a PAS for digital audio playback. The MPU-401 emulation of the PAS16 can be used. I cannot tell what kind of issues that may be apparent with MIDI playback in these games, but my cursory testing revealed none. SCI1 drivers can be copied from game to game.

There are also rare SCI1 drivers called MT32MV.DRV and GENMIDMV.DRV. These appear to support the MIDI Interface on the PAS, which uses a Yamaha YM3802-F chip. As their names imply, the MT32MV will allow you to use an MT-32 or compatible connected to the MIDI port of a PAS and GENMID will allow the same for a General MIDI device connected to the MIDI port of a PAS. They will not work on the native MV101 MIDI Interface on the PAS16 or the emulated MPU-401 on the PAS16s with the rev. D MV101 chips. This suggests that access to the MIDI Interfaces in the PAS was essentially done by direct hardware writes instead of through MVSOUND.SYS.

If a PAS or PAS16 does not work natively with a game, then the game's SB driver should. See here for a fix for Star Control II on faster (maybe all) systems : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/star … c8/2CO1GQIOeFQJ

The PAS16 was forward thinking in several ways. It is unlikely that many people ever had to deal with the few jumpers that were on the card. The card can configure itself completely in software, unlike the SB Pro, early and middle SB 16s and early AWE32s. The MVSOUND.SYS provided a layer of hardware abstraction similar to Windows drivers. If you want to record or playback digital audio with the PAS16, you use driver calls. The Sound Blaster had drivers as well, but most programmers wrote directly to the card. By requiring programmers to use the driver, they shielded the programmer from the quirks of the hardware itself. This only went so far, programming the OPL chips was still done by register writes.

While the SB Pro and later SB cards have a 2-pin header on their cards to mix in PC speaker audio, the PAS and PAS16 emulate the PC Speaker using a discrete (PAS) or integrated (PAS16) 8253 timer chip. PC Speaker sound emulation is enabled by default and it has a Realsound filter option in the mixer program to make Realsound PWM-style audio sound less distorted. I do not like it very much because it is filtered to a far greater degree than a true PC speaker. My friend Cloudschatze has opined that the lack of filtering for the FM chip on the PAS16 is less than ideal because the insufficient filtering adds a high-pitched whine to the audio output.

The PAS16 line was marketed with a couple of names, some of which were distinguished only by software. There is the very rare Pro Audio Spectrum Plus, which is a cutdown version of the PAS16 without 16-bit digital recording and playback capabilities. You may need to use jumpers to select the SB I/O addresses. It also doesn't have the Yamaha MIDI interface of the original PAS. Then there is the Pro Audio Spectrum Basic, which ditched the CD-ROM interface. The Pro Audio Studio 16 uses the same card as the PAS16, but comes with voice recognition software. Some cards come with a proprietary CD-ROM interface instead of a SCSI CD-ROM interface. There were a few PAS16s that come with a waveblaster header, but because the MPU-401 implementation is so poor, it isn't very useful. Later Mediavision sound cards use the Jazz 16 chipset, which is not PAS16 compatible. If your card has an MV-101 chip on it, then it is PAS16 compatible. You can see good quality pictures of several PAS cards here : http://www.yjfy.com/museum/sound/Media_Vison.htm

Media Vision ISA card DOS system config.

Autoexec.bat and Config.sys examples:
Re: Autoexec.bat & Config.sys Help

DOS Menu examples
How to create a boot (start up) menu under Windows 9x/ME

GabrielKnight123 wrote:

I built a 486DX2 66 using Dos 6.21 just weeks ago with a PAS16 and it runs very smooth with the 66 MHz but I dont know about the others (33/50 MHz) so maybe go with a 66 for best speeds for games that need it and I have a turbo button on the front of the case that works well too for anything that needs to be at crawling speed.

What Autoexec and Config.sys settings did you use ?
Which version of Media Vision drivers work bests ?

I found this on the install diskette.

ScanDOS.txt […]
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ScanDOS.txt

QAPlus/Info V5.01
for MediaVision
Copyright (c) 1989-1992 DiagSoft, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

IRQ/DMA detection
System Software:
ROM BIOS: Award
DOS Version: 5.00

DMA Channel Usage:
DMA 0: Available *
DMA 1: Available *
DMA 2: Floppy
DMA 3: Available *
DMA 4: [CASCADE]
DMA 5: Available *
DMA 6: Available *
DMA 7: Available *

* Not used by any
standard device

Interrupt Assignments
IRQ 00: Timer
IRQ 01: Keyboard
IRQ 02: [CASCADE]
IRQ 03: COM2
IRQ 04: COM1
IRQ 05: Available *
IRQ 06: Floppy
IRQ 07: Available *
IRQ 08: Clock/Cal
IRQ 09: OCCUPIED
IRQ 10: Available *
IRQ 11: Available *
IRQ 12: OCCUPIED
IRQ 13: NPU
IRQ 14: OCCUPIED
IRQ 15: Available *
No IRQ: LPT1

Hardware Configuration
Processor Type ....... 80486
Numeric Processor .... 80486DX
Base Memory Size ..... 637K
Ext Memory ........... 4608K
Ext Memory Available . 0K
Exp Memory ........... 1024K
Exp Memory Available . 1024K
Primary Video ........ VGA
Video BIOS ......... Quadtel
Text Base Address .. B800h
Secondary Video ...... None
Video mode, EGA switch 03h, sw(1-4) 1001
DOS Hard Drives ...... C:[503M]
Clock Type ........... AT
COM Ports ............ COM1[03F8h] COM2[02F8h]
LPT Ports ............ LPT1[0378h]
Mouse Driver ......... none
Game Ports ........... none

I am going to put together a P3 build today to test out my Media Vision cards.

I wish you much success.

Good luck! 😀

Jo22 wrote:

Thanks for the ads! 😀

Since this thread is about Media Vision PAS, I've also taken some pictures of the Media Vision Memphis.
That's a multimedia kit containing the PAS16, speakers and an external scusi drive.

I was thinking about buying one of these Media Vision Memphis.. Do you think it would work along side with a MV_PAS16 ?