VOGONS


Reply 120 of 339, by ruthan

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Nice project, but because im greedy:), how much work would be make something like that for PCI? Or would this card work with some PCI to ISA bridge on modern non ISA MBs?

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 121 of 339, by Tiido

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PCI is a dead end as far as retro sound goes, it is not possible to get 100% compatibility without big help from the motherboard as you have already found out and none of the modern boards offer any of the required help.

This card will work with Fintek LPC to ISA bridge and will work on Winbond based PCI to ISA bridge but recording may not work always and you can get ticking and pops in DOS games due to IRQ jitter that Winbond chips seem to have a problem with. I have no personal experience with ITE's PCI or PCI-E to ISA bridges so I cannot give any guarantees about working or not working. Motherboards using them are expensive enough that I will not be putting the money into it just to try.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 122 of 339, by digger

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The only relevant thing missing on the PCI bus is Intel 8237 DMA controller compatibility, correct? So how about a PCI sound card that contains an OPL3 chip as well as a virtual parallel port with a DAC that could be switched in software mode between Covox Speech Thing mode and Disney Sound Source mode?

Granted, the list of of DOS games that would support the DAC part of such a PCI card would be considerably shorter than the list of games that natively supported Sound Blaster, but with the help of proper Miles/AIL, DIGPAK, VESA VBE/AI and Sierra DRV drivers, as well as unofficial patches for some games, the number of games that would work with such a card would still be considerable. And that's just the DAC part. 100% Adlib compatibility at the hardware level would be easily achievable in a PCI card. As for OPL3 compatibility, in the case that the OPL3 chips had to be programmed differently on an Adlib Gold card compared to a Sound Blaster Pro 2 or a Sound Blaster 16, such modes could also be implemented in a software-switchable way, right?

Additionally, perhaps some kind of "hardware-assisted software DMA emulation" DAC mode could be implemented on such a PCI card. So that it would support the Sound Blaster I/O ports and IRQ 7 or 5, as well as ADPCM decoding in hardware, leaving only the DMA handling to be implemented in a software emulator. Would that be a crazy idea?

Reply 123 of 339, by Tiido

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DMA signalling capability and ability to fire a specific IRQ though this could be worked around in some ways by routing a PCI IRQ to specific ISA IRQ if the chipset/BIOS/OS allows, and making sure no other card uses that IRQ.

On very modern boards that completely lack ISA DMA controller it could be possible to emulate in without hardware conflicts, but on hardware where DMA controller already exists you have the problem of all the DMA IO writes and all its memory transactions being completely hidden from PCI bus due to getting automatically forwarded to ISA/LPC by the chipset so you cannot even spy on the PCI bus that there were writes done to the DMA controller. But even if you could do that the actual DMA controller will not update its status due to no actual DMA transactions happening and any software reading the DMA controller status while expecting playback will fail even if the sound hardware might be successfully simulating the transfers.

Purely IO based stuff like the various LPT devices and FM chips are not a problem on PCI if the OS doesn't move the IO conf into wrong place or chipset won't forward the specific IO address to LPC/ISA making it hidden from PCI device. Such devices are generally not a problem on the PCI cards that exist already but DMA based sample playback has no easy solution. All the PCI to ISA bridges that have DMA and IRQs use several signals not found on PCI bus to implement things and thus require explicit chipset support.

If you're gonna use partial software emulation I find there's no point in using any of the hardware, might aswell do it all in software since it isn't difficult but it will require going to protected mode (i.e EMM386).

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 124 of 339, by Jonas-fr

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Tiido wrote:

Not anymore, last one went away a week ago. I expect to start making more next month but I don't think any selling happens until next year as I'll likely go to Norway for a month to see my GF in December and won't return until January.

Nice ! I always wanted to visit Norway, though my aversion to the cold would surely prevent me from going there in the winter ! I'll be willing to get in the queue for buying you one of this card from the next batch if there's still some slot left ! Color me definitively interested !

Reply 125 of 339, by Tiido

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With the help of a friend from China I'm sourcing the parts necessary to make 25 more cards, mostly the obsolete chips but also the connectors as they can be had for very cheap. The rest I can buy within days from any big distributor sometime later, I'm not sure any actual building will happen during November though. It is absolutely certain I am going to Norway and as previous years I return sometime near mid January. It is very pretty there and weather isn't really much different than in Estonia during the time, but nature is whoa (I'm a sucker for mountains and such 🤣).

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 127 of 339, by cyclone3d

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Tiido wrote:

PCI is a dead end as far as retro sound goes, it is not possible to get 100% compatibility without big help from the motherboard as you have already found out and none of the modern boards offer any of the required help.

This card will work with Fintek LPC to ISA bridge and will work on Winbond based PCI to ISA bridge but recording may not work always and you can get ticking and pops in DOS games due to IRQ jitter that Winbond chips seem to have a problem with. I have no personal experience with ITE's PCI or PCI-E to ISA bridges so I cannot give any guarantees about working or not working. Motherboards using them are expensive enough that I will not be putting the money into it just to try.

I have at least one extra PCI/ISA backplane and Pentium 4 SBC that has an ITE8888 PCI-ISA bridge chip.

I am planning on buying one of these cards from you and can test on one of my systems that has the ITE PCI-ISA bridge chip. If you are interested in a backplane and SBC for yourself, we could probably work something out.

Enjoy your vacation!

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 128 of 339, by ruthan

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back to PCI soundcard discussion.. For those who not follow PCI sound card and chipsets thread.,
We found out that there is unofficial ALS4000 driver source and this card this driver and official too have FM + Adlib working up to Z97 chipset.
Is there someone with knowledge of dos sound card driver programming, could check quality of this sources - its only ~1200 lines, maybe we dont need reinvent wheel again, but just driver..

I know that there lots of people which high standards of sound quality, who would be not interested, but with new chipsets is everything better than just pc speaker good and this one have even SB16 emulation and good OPL3, already 3 DMA modes implemented.

There some short summary of ALS4000 from Kamerat:

ALS4000
Pros:
Sound Blaster 16 support
Works on later VIA chipsets in DDMA mode
Works at least up to the SiS 645DX+962UA chipset in DDMA mode
FM very true to OPL3

Cons:
Noisy, especially the FM part // RuThaN: For me personally it FM ok, much better than Aureals squealing symphony..
The other DMA modes (WBDMA and WSDMA) are really unstable, so no use for this card on ICH chipsets / R: ok, but so far only card where is at least FM working fine with Z97 MB with PCI slots..

Last edited by ruthan on 2018-11-16, 20:51. Edited 1 time in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 129 of 339, by digger

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ruthan wrote:

back to PCI soundcard discussion.. For those who not follow PCI sound card and chipsets thread.,
We found out that there is unofficial ALS4000 driver source and this card this driver and official too have FM working up to Z97 chipset.
Is there someone with knowledge of dos sound card driver programming, could check quality of this sources - its only ~1200 lines, maybe we dont need reinvent wheel again, but just driver..

This is really interesting and potentially useful, ruthan!

Do you have any idea who released this source code and under what license? Where was this code initially published or found?

Reply 130 of 339, by ruthan

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digger wrote:

Do you have any idea who released this source code and under what license? Where was this code initially published or found?

I didnt try to search, but there this message - ALS4000 DOS initializer by saka < als4k@anet.ne.jp > and its old from 2002/9 . BTW ALS4000 was made by Realtek.
Update: email address is dead.

There are detailed specs:
ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/manuals/avance … ic/ALS4000a.PDF

Last edited by ruthan on 2018-11-24, 11:18. Edited 1 time in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 131 of 339, by Tiido

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I have custom brackets (still in china) ! Next card uses RCAs for line out, the line in is still TRS based. The cost is something near 1.25€ per bracket. I don't actually know anything about the company who did them, this stuff was arranged to me by a friend in China.

I am also gonna use a larger CPLD and I have a thought that might allow me to fix the problem with freezes on 486. I plan to buffer the entire address bus and only pass it to the YM when ALE pulses (indicating completely stable address lines), this should hopefully clear out any misfires that the chip sometimes seems to experience. Another option is to do most address decode on the CPLD side, which I think I can do also. In any case I am confident I can fix the 486 freeze.
I would love to do Disney Sound Source also but there's no way I can fit full sized FIFO into the CPLD, only few levels at most.

I'm also going to Norway on december 13th. I don't think I'll have any cards done before that, especially since I have some other things that must take priority first. The project that allowed me to get this far got delayed by a month and few other things including this card got delayed due to it also...

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 132 of 339, by SaxxonPike

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Take all the time you need! These brackets look great. Looking forward to the next batch 😀

Sound device guides:
Sound Blaster
Aztech
OPL3-SA

Reply 133 of 339, by Tiido

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<3

First setback happened, the box sent from China didn't leave the country and got sent back to my friend for unknown reasons (he is yet to receive it). There's no way it'll arrive before my trip to Norway so I won't see the fun stuff until after I return in January... such a shame 😒

On the bright side, most of my other committments are done and I have time for my own stuff, repairs of things and whatnot are happening finally ~

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 134 of 339, by digger

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Tiido wrote:

<3

First setback happened, the box sent from China didn't leave the country and got sent back to my friend for unknown reasons (he is yet to receive it). There's no way it'll arrive before my trip to Norway so I won't see the fun stuff until after I return in January... such a shame 😒

On the bright side, most of my other committments are done and I have time for my own stuff, repairs of things and whatnot are happening finally ~

I envy you a bit, being so skilled with hardware like that. I'd like to tinker more with hardware related to retro-computing myself, but I feel like I need to gain more experience with it. I have some crazy ideas I would like to try. Maybe I should join a hacker/maker space somewhere nearby with people who could perhaps teach me and help me realize at least some of those ideas.

Best of luck and fun working on your projects!

Reply 135 of 339, by Tiido

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The learning curve can be quite high but only way out is just to do it. If there's someone to help you along the way then things get way nicer. Some sort of hackerspace is definitely a good place to find such people, I wish I had anything like that nearby...

Thänk you ~

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 136 of 339, by digger

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Tiido wrote:

The learning curve can be quite high but only way out is just to do it. If there's someone to help you along the way then things get way nicer. Some sort of hackerspace is definitely a good place to find such people, I wish I had anything like that nearby...

Thänk you ~

If there are enough likeminded geeks and tinkerers in your area, why not establish one? 😀 That way, you'll have the fun of working on projects in good company, possibly together, and you'll be able to share more expensive equipment and workspace that might otherwise be too costly to own yourself. And you can have drinks together there afterwards.

Reply 137 of 339, by Tiido

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Trip to Norway is in progress now. Unfortunately the USB stick with latest project files got lost on the way so I won't be able to continue with dev as I hoped to do. But I do have a semi related thing here to show :

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It is an enhanced DB60XG pretty much, with few extra features like SPDIF output. Unfortunately there's excess noise on DAC output and I ran out of time to fix it prior to my trip so it gets looked at next year when I am back home.
I won't be selling any full kits, only way for one to get such a thing is to send me their DX60XG for cannibalization (both XR712 and XR385 are usable). Prime candidates are boards that suddenly went silent one day, they're guaranteed to have a dead DAC + ADC chip on them with rest being fully functional still.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 138 of 339, by hard1k

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DO WANT

Fortex, the A3D & XG/OPL3 accelerator (Vortex 2 + YMF744 combo sound card)
AWE64 Legacy
Please have a look at my wishlist (hosted on Amibay)

Reply 139 of 339, by Thermalwrong

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That's an excellent idea 😀 I hope the DAC noise is easy to sort but the addition of SPDIF is great.

I wonder if the Mu10 could also be cannibalised? (probably not since the ROMs are different even if the main chips are the same)
It probably shouldn't be, but that's wonderful that broken DB50XG cards can be not just repaired, but improved.