This evening I tested Silpheed with a Roland RAP-10 / MCB-10 and FB-01 and SoftMPU. It appears to work. I well test it more extensively this weekend. I have to get some audio cables to funnel L & R audio to my Bose speakers. The FB-01 does display a dump/protected! message! when I play.

I may also try SoftMPU on a S-MPU-IIAT that I got in today as well sometime this weekend.

Hardware:
IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX/D with Pentium Overdrive
16 MB RAM
Roland RAP-10 with MCB-10 & CT1600 & FB-01
Windows 95 (in MS-DOS mode)

I also bought a MT-32 that should be arriving any day now. I will hook that up to the RAP-10 and S-MPU-IIAT as well.

Welcome to VOGONS!

Thanks for testing this very interesting combination. Looking forward to your results, it sounds promising.

Jolaes76 wrote:

I will try to have a look at Jones tomorrow. I could already dig out my old floppy version late tonight but also loaned a CDROM version with redbook audio tracks for tomorrow for cross checking. I do not believe a word of MobyGames any more; maybe, in the meantime, a hard-core Sierra fan can verify that the CDROM version has indeed no MIDI tracks as claimed...

The CD-ROM version of Jones uses the CD only for speech, it has the same music as the floppy versions.

PeterLI wrote:

The FB-01 does display a dump/protected! message! when I play.

You need to set the memory protect to off on the module. Press the System Setup button on the FB-01 until you see #1 Protect ON on the module's front panel, then press the Data Entry -1/NO button and you will see ON become OFF. You shouldn't see that message again until you turn the module off and back on.

Thanks G.H. for the feedback!
I have just finished testing the 1st and 2nd floppy version (latter is VGA only) and the CDROM. All three work fine on any UART port. SoftMPU is not needed here, unless for slowdown purpose.

Thanks for confirming that.

Thanks GH! 😀

Tested Silpheed with both speakers this evening (stereo) with SoftMPU, RAP-10/MCB-10 & FB-01 and it works great so far. I have to practice Silpheed because I do not get past the 3rd level. 😊

Codename Iceman appears to work just fine as well with the same combination. Codename Iceman has some really groovy 1970s tunes. 😀

Dune and Civilization also work with SoftMPU and the FB-01. 😎 With the FB-01 the music is still OK when run with MT-32 as the driver.

Dune and Silpheed work great with my MT-32 and the same other components as above.

Great news. I've added the RAP-10 to the list of supported sound cards.

I believe Dune and Civilization will work without SoftMPU as well, but let me know if I'm wrong.

Interesting that the FB-01 sounds OK with some MT-32 tracks. I wonder how similar the instrument map is.

Looking at the FB-01 manual, it seems that it is similar to the Roland RA-50 in that it doesn't support "All Note Off" MIDI messages. You might come across hanging notes in some games (e.g. Wing Commander) because of this. SoftMPU has a fix for this issue which should also work for the FB-01. It's enabled by using the /RA50 switch when starting SoftMPU.

bjt: Any chance you could maybe update your first post in what you think is missing of testing? Would make it easier to help out if any of us has the hardware in question.

Good point, updated first post

Here's what I'm aware of that's untested:

- Analog Devices AD1816 Soundport (e.g. Terratec Base-1 & EWS64S)
- Any ESS ISA chipset
- PCI soundcards

Anything that's not on the hardware or software lists (http://github.com/bjt42/softmpu/wiki) is also worth testing.

PC version of Desert Strike.

Put in a few hours last night.
AWE64+Sound Canvas.

When I choose Roland for music it crashes hard unless SoftMPU is loaded.
Works great with SoftMPU.

Maybe it can cure the common cold too 🤣

Sounds like it might be speed related. Would be interested to know how fast the machine is and if it still crashes with caches disabled.

Thanks for the update.

Civilization freezes with SoftMPU enabled for the MT-32 / RAP-10/MCB-10 setup BTW.

Civilization doesn't need SoftMPU loaded to work with the MT-32, does it?

Great Hierophant wrote:

If SoftMPU works with a Yamaha YMF-719 chip now, is there any possibility that it would work with a 724 or 744? The key difference in these chips is that they use the PCI bus. Can anyone test these with the latest version of SoftMPU?

By chance, I had an old version of SoftMPU V1.3 already installed, and tried again with a PCI Yamaha 724-F sound card connected via a SB-Link cable, and it worked!

I used a different IRQ Mode to setup the card this time around - instead of S-IRQ Mode, used INTA# Mode. Tested on:

Motherboard: Via MVP3 chipset
CPU: AMD K6-3 450 MHz
GPU: S3 Virge GX2
MIDI: Roland CM-64

Worked great running Might and Magic 3 with SoftMPU settings of 220, 5 and 330. Also tried the demo Ecargxus, which requires a MIDI IRQ, and that ran fine too! Used SoftMPU settings of 220, 9, 330 with the IRQ 2/9 trick (chose IRQ 2 when prompted by the demo).

Cheers bjt - much appreciated.

EDIT: One thing to bear in mind that worked for this card was to run DSDMA after running Setupds /s , then finally run SoftMPU.

Great news, thanks. Have updated the compatibility list. BTW if I remember correctly MM3's digital sound was a bit crackly for me during the intro when the bad guy talks, this was fixed in SoftMPU 1.4.

This will be especially good for people without ISA slots 😀

^^ I'll update SoftMPU to a later version - too lazy to update my batch files at the moment! I never noticed that slight crackle with v1.3 during the intro - maybe because of the card being PCI?

A slight update: Also got the YMF724F to work with S-IRQ Mode, but only with 220, 9, 330 - couldn't get any other IRQ to work with this mode. However, this mode did work with and without DSDMA.

Nearly forgot how I got the YMF724F to work with INTA# IRQ mode because it's very easy to configure the wrong settings. For future reference: When you initialise the card with Setupds /s in this mode, make sure to configure SET BLASTER IRQ to a different IRQ chosen for INTA#. Assuming the IRQ is free, this should work when initialising SoftMPU with the corresponding SET BLASTER setting. I can easily switch between IRQ 5 and 2/9 with batch files. If you chose the INTA# IRQ setting for SoftMPU and SET BLASTER, this locks the PC for me.

Finally, got another PCI card to work: ESS Maestro-1 (ES1948S). Tested with Might and Magic 3. However, couldn't test the 2/9 IRQ trick because it seems to be stuck with IRQ 5 when it initialises in DOS. Tried a few things to change this, but no luck.

Cool, added to the list 😀

Found another EA game that needs intelligent mode (and works with SoftMPU) - Budokan.

Both Populous and Budokan are from 1989 - if anyone has other EA games from this period it would be great to test them with SoftMPU. Keep an eye out for buffer overflow as Populous has this problem.

OK I've tested SoftMPU on my ESS AudioDrive (ES1868F) as requested and it doesn't seem to work. I might be doing something wrong but it seems pretty straight forward, I type:

1SoftMPU /SB:220 /IRQ:5 /MPU:330

And I get the error:

1! Error: Sound Blaster not detected at port 220 IRQ 5

My MPU-401 however is detected at 330, according to the on screen message.

The Sound Blaster is detected at those settings by everything else, here's my SET BLASTER line:

1BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

This is on a PIII 1GHz machine booting directly to DOS 7