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First post, by dnewhous

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Did any game have multiple soundblaster 16 midi modes? Like Soundblaster 16 I, Soundblaster 16 II, or Soundblaster 16 III?

Daniel L Newhouse

Reply 1 of 9, by tpowell.ca

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Not sure I follow.
What do you mean by midi modes?

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Reply 3 of 9, by gdjacobs

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You asked about MIDI which is a standard for sending musical notation and other control information over serial communication lines, so that's what I'm addressing. If you want to know about something else (digital PCM audio or FM), please let us know. Based on your question, I figure there's a fair chance confusion's at work which, you know, happens from time to time.

I don't believe SB16 cards support the SB Pro type of MIDI interface (correct me if I'm wrong, guys!), but they do support an industry standard MPU-401 interface. AWE32 and AWE64 cards also have an onboard wavetable synthesizer engine which can be addressed as an MPU-401 device with the help of software emulation resident in memory.

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Reply 4 of 9, by leileilol

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Fortunately, SSI's mistakes in sound card names are not the ultimate authority.

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Reply 5 of 9, by gdjacobs

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I was wondering if that's what OP was referring to, but I'll let OP clarify the question.

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Reply 7 of 9, by Scali

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gdjacobs wrote:

I don't believe SB16 cards support the SB Pro type of MIDI interface (correct me if I'm wrong, guys!)

The SB-MIDI interface works via DSP commands. Afaik, SB16 is fully backward-compatible with these commands.
The programming manual claims as much anyway, see chapter 5: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2008/reading … oundBlaster.pdf

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Reply 8 of 9, by gdjacobs

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Scali wrote:
gdjacobs wrote:

I don't believe SB16 cards support the SB Pro type of MIDI interface (correct me if I'm wrong, guys!)

The SB-MIDI interface works via DSP commands. Afaik, SB16 is fully backward-compatible with these commands.
The programming manual claims as much anyway, see chapter 5: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2008/reading … oundBlaster.pdf

Cool! I hadn't read much reference material on SB MIDI as I'm not the SB guru you are, but I had heard no mention of it wrt SB16 cards. Interesting that they had an interrupt driven mode for SB Pro cards as well.

dnewhous wrote:

A menu like that, yes.

Yup, those SB Pro modes are not referring exclusively to MIDI. They lay out various card features to enable and presumably quirks to work around within the drivers. All the SB Pro options allow the use of old style Soundblaster MIDI communications (useless without a synthesizer defined) and the SB Pro I option presumably uses a driver that enables dual OPL2 chips. Both the SB Pro II and III options support OPL3 based FM and all three settings variants support SB Pro digital audio output. The II and III only differ in the Card ID used.

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