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No MIDI music with ALS4000 in games (WIN98SE) and other suggestions

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First post, by Scandy

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Hi,
I'm building a retro-PC for WINDOWS 98 and MS-DOS gaming using mixed components that I found at home:
- case: Cooler Master N400
- motherboard: ASUS P4PE-XTE (user manual)
- CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (2.8 Ghz)
- GPU: Matrox Mystique 220
- Sound card: Avance Logic ALS4000 (VOGONS topic)

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I have successfully installed WIN98SE and all drivers for motherboard, sound and video card.
I also disabled onboard LAN, sound card and gaming ports to free up resources (although the integrated sound card is fully compatible with WIN98SE).

Now with the ALS4000 sound card under WIN98SE I only get sound effects and not music in games (Wolf-3D, vanilla DOOM, Hexen...). The only software in which I was able to get the music is MBF 2.04 (where the ALS4000, as MIDI, is recognized as an MPU-401 peripheral on port 330). How can I set-up ALS4000 to get also MIDI music and what's the issue?

Thank you very much!

THE NIGHTLAND is my board + video game for Commodore 64.

Reply 1 of 4, by Tiido

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You need a device connected to the waveblaster header on the card or the MIDI out connector (via gameport) such as MU50, SC55, MT32 etc.
The chip itself lacks a MIDI synthesizer and will not make music. It should have FM though so you can choose AdLib option and get something going.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
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Reply 2 of 4, by Scandy

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Tiido wrote:

It should have FM though so you can choose AdLib option and get something going.

Hi and thank you very much for your feedback.
Of course I choose AdLib (sometimes is even autodetected) but I get no music, only sound effects (voices etc.), e.g. in Wolfenstein 3-D. 😐

THE NIGHTLAND is my board + video game for Commodore 64.

Reply 3 of 4, by noshutdown

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Scandy wrote:

Hi and thank you very much for your feedback.
Of course I choose AdLib (sometimes is even autodetected) but I get no music, only sound effects (voices etc.), e.g. in Wolfenstein 3-D. 😐

maybe you can try finding the dos configuration program of your card.

Reply 4 of 4, by Scandy

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Hello,
even with the DOS configuration program I get no music or sound effects at all.
So my questions are more generic now:
1. Is the ALS4K effectively able to play both sound effects and music in games like Doom? I suppose "yes" 'cause I get sound effects + music in MBF 2.04 (Doom engine)
2. How can I change the ALS4K port, IRQ and DMA in Windows 98? Turning off the "PnP OS" option in the bios allows me to change IRQ but not the port, while in DOS ("Reboot in MS-DOS") the configuration program does not work (quits immediately).

I know that best settings for a sound card are port 220, IRQ 5 (or 7) and DMA 1 but it's not clear to me if I can change these in software, bios or not at all. It's also not clear to me if the lack of music is due to these settings.

I'm aware that there is a lot of confusion here, but please help me to understand... thank you!

THE NIGHTLAND is my board + video game for Commodore 64.

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