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Reply 1800 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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Phreeze wrote:

so best start setram.exe in the autoexec.bat then ? or does it just have to stay there ? (would be weird as it is an exe)

No, you run it from the CD, and it installs the patch set in your GUS PnP installation directory.

Reply 1801 of 3172, by keropi

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so what is best to use? ProPats lite or full 3.0 version?

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Reply 1802 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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They are quite different, and this is always subjective, but I prefer PPLT 1.6x. Despite the similarity in the names, PPLT and Pro Patches 3.0 were created by different people, and are not related.

I have been unable to find a complete set for Pro Patches 3.0, and I'm not even sure if they were meant to be freely available, or if they were being sold at the time. I have only been able to find about eight of the 19 or so .ZIP files that make up the set.

Reply 1803 of 3172, by keropi

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dang... yes I only found zips 01~08 as well - nothing in the DOCS indicate they are free or not, because of the lack of registration info or even a mention of any amount of money I will assume they are free.
My search for the rest of the ZIPs did not produce any results other than a 27MB zip file that includes all 19 disks.

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Reply 1804 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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There also used to be FreePats, or something similar. With that one, I think I downloaded the old .PAT set, took one look at the size of the grand piano and left it alone. It would be absolutely infeasible to get that into a ROM, and it wasn't even a full set.

If you have all of Pro Patches 3.0, can you compare and post your commentary? I think I dismissed that set not only because I couldn't find the rest of the files, but also because some of the files seemed unnecessarily large, without providing superior sound quality.

EDIT: I thought I remembered a page near the end of the old GUS manuals that offered sound sets, for a fee, from Howling Dog Systems. That seems to be related to the people responsible for Pro Patches 3.0, but I don't remember what was on the order form, or the prices.

Reply 1805 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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I have been able to successfully test two versions of an 8 MiB instrument bank; one was a complete copy of the PPLT set at 8-bit sampling resolution, and the other a subset of PPLT at 16-bit resolution with a few drum banks missing. The full PPLT set won't fit into an 8 MiB module without additional work.

Nonetheless, that was enough to convince me that the ROM module carrier is workable and, consequently, that a designed-for-ARGUS ROM module is a feasible, worthwhile endeavour. I still have more testing to to, but there may be a few minor revisions to the design of the ARGUS to consider before going ahead with another (final?) production order.

Reply 1806 of 3172, by Batyra

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Finally! My friend began sildering...
So I should received ready card soon.

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Reply 1807 of 3172, by Phreeze

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just a quick notice that my card works now 😉

i was too stupid to not correct the solderbridge as i know have a IW-chip and the bridge was still set to 29F800....

ArGUS Parts list: http://bit.ly/2Ddf89V

Reply 1808 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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I had a little more time to test the card, and have additional comments to make. I will include comments about possible design changes as well:

  1. Some through-hole parts needed a higher soldering temperature than I generally use to get a neat joint. It may be worth adjusting the thermal relief settings slightly, so that these parts are easier to solder at more reasonable temperatures.
  2. X3 has no allowances for the board guides or other supports that seem fairly common on SMD receptacles (I had to snap them off). Given that it is such a small receptacle, and will be connected as part of a larger module, one has to be exceptionally careful when mating and de-mating the module to avoid damage. If possible, holes for board guides should be considered, or change to a through-hole receptacle, which should provide greater strength. The other receptacles fitted to the ROM footprints don't seem to present as much of a problem. Another option would be to add the additional pins to the end of the ROM footprint, as was done for the SOJ DRAMs.
  3. The prescribed configurations for JP4 and JP5 are somewhat problematic, especially when using just solder blobs or 0Ω resistors/jumpers. They don't seem to cause trouble, as long as the ROM banks have a capacity of 1 MiB or less; with 2 or 4 MiB banks, one invariably ends up with garbled playback, because the voltage levels (or shorts!) present on those lines corrupt the addresses. Some re-working of this section would be advisable if support for larger ROM banks is desired for the final board.
  4. Similar to item 2, we may have trouble if the SIMM sockets we source once shock__ stops supplying them are significantly different. To use the upright socket, I had to clip off the board guides to get it to fit. I should have also filed off the remaining bumps, as it doesn't sit perfectly flat now.

For item 3 specifically, there is one approach that seems to fix the problem. For JP5, connect pins 3 and 4 with a 10kΩ resistor (0603 is probably easier to work with), and use a wire to connect pin 2 to pin 4. Of course, if there is room, there are ways to adjust the design to avoid having to use a bodge wire.

Because we are feeding 5V onto RA20, the case with JP4 may not be so simple. I think we may be able to get away with just using a 10kΩ resistor, but I didn't test extensively. The better solution seems to be using an appropriate circuit to effectively cut off the flow of current following initialisation. This seems to be the way it is done on the GUS PnP version 1. I tested this with a 100kΩ resistor in series with a 2.2µF capacitor. This appears to work, though the values may not be ideal; that's what I had on hand.

Reply 1809 of 3172, by shock__

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I'm definitely up for redesigning/fixing the aspects you mentioned - I'll get back to that some time after the 20th of April when I'm back at my place.

Current Project: new GUS PnP compatible soundcard

[Z?]

Reply 1810 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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In my rush to post the previous comments, I forgot a few items, so I'll continue my list here:

  1. The InterWave datasheet indicates that CFILT should have two capacitors: "The Capacitor Filter input must be connected to analog ground through a 0.1 μF capacitor and a 10 μF capacitor.". Currently, we only have C722. Just to follow the datasheet, I added a 0.1 µF electrolytic capacitor on the back of the card, soldered to the ends of the leads of C722. I don't know if that has any effect on functionality or audio quality, but for the cost of one capacitor, I see no reason not to have it, if only to follow specifications.
  2. The GUS PnP seems to feed 5V onto both RA20 and RA21, if I'm not mistaken, whereas the ARGUS has RA21 connected to ground. I don't think this is really worth any further discussion; we are just selecting unused signals for additional external hardware, rather than suspend fundtionality. This means that the contents of on-board DRAM may be lost during suspend, if I've understood correctly, but I have yet to see a design that provides the necessary 32 kHz clock signal to support DRAM refresh under suspend, anyhow.
  3. The current design defaults to PNP-compliant mode, which is fine for most systems that have Pentium and newer processors and a BIOS that is reasonably Plug-and-Play-compliant. Is it worth considering another set of jumper pads to default to PNP-system mode? This, in theory, should make it easier to use the card on older systems without additional software. I can't test this, but it should be possible to get the card working on 286 systems, and maybe even 8086/88-era systems.

Reply 1811 of 3172, by keropi

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that PnP enable/disable jumper sure is interesting - any way to add it for testing?

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Reply 1812 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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keropi wrote:

that PnP enable/disable jumper sure is interesting - any way to add it for testing?

If you wouldn't mind a few minutes worth of soldering, you can disable PnP for testing. Remove R11 first. Then, with the ISA card edge connector toward you, solder a 10 kΩ resistor to pin/pad 1 (left-most) of JP5 (source of 5V). Using a wire, if necessary, solder the other end of the resistor to the lower pad of R11 (closest to the ISA connector).

I tested that modification moments ago, and it seems to work, even though I don't have a system old enough to be non-PnP. It is no longer listed as a PnP ISA device with resources allocated, and "iwinit -pnp" fails, while plain iwinit and "iwinit -legacy" work fine.

Reply 1813 of 3172, by keropi

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allright! made this crude drawing just in case someone else wants to try that - I plan to test it during the Easter time

MqGSQ02l.jpg

basically one can repurpose the R11 resistor as it's 10kΩ - no need to use a hole-thru one like the drawing above

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Reply 1814 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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I think we would need more parts than that to do it properly, but for testing, that works. It may still allow some "fighting" on the memory bus, since we don't disable the EEPROM afterwards, but we can put the proper circuit together if we decide that it is a desirable feature.

One can probably also borrow 5V from the upper pad of C18, to make things somewhat neater, but I haven't tried that, so use it at your own risk.

Reply 1815 of 3172, by aquishix

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Although I'd certainly be willing to try my hand at putting together one of these homebrew GUS clones, I'm far more interested in purchasing several of them from one of y'all that has done the labor.

So, if this project gets to the point where a few of them can be made with full functionality and reliability, please let me know. True GUS cards on eBay are posted at $300 - $925 right now, and all the GUS clones sell so quickly that I never even see them before they're gone. I just find the evidence that they were posted and sold by digging through Sold listings.

I'm pretty frustrated by this. The ultimate sound card combination for a 386/486/586 is MIF-IPC-A/B + MPU-401 + MT-32, SB 16 Vibra, and GUS. I've only been able to get my hands on one GUS card, and I really don't want to swap it between systems every time that I want to load up a game that supports it.

Given the difficulty that it takes to assemble one of these, I suspect that the prices might even be higher than for the official cards.

Thoughts?

Reply 1816 of 3172, by Phreeze

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Thoughts: you should buy1,2 or 3 to use in your computers instead of, what I think you have in mind as you said "several", sell them on ebay 😉

ArGUS Parts list: http://bit.ly/2Ddf89V

Reply 1817 of 3172, by 640K!enough

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aquishix wrote:

So, if this project gets to the point where a few of them can be made with full functionality and reliability, please let me know. True GUS cards on eBay are posted at $300 - $925 right now, and all the GUS clones sell so quickly that I never even see them before they're gone. I just find the evidence that they were posted and sold by digging through Sold listings.

It is already at the stage where cards can be built that consistently provide full functionality and expected levels of reliability. Reading through the last few pages, you can see that we are working to refine the design, do further testing, and add more options. The significant advantage of a card like this is that it not only offers more capabilities than any InterWave card ever sold, but they are being built now, with all new parts, so there is no need to worry about stale or leaking capacitors, or the need to repair the card after paying through the nose to get it.

As you may be aware, this is shock__'s project; it's his design, and, justifiably, he is the only one with the design files that can be used to produce a board. Unless something has changed, boards are only being offered to those who donated to the project early on, or made technical contributions along the way. This is partly due to the number of eBay vultures who would surely try to profit handsomely from his efforts otherwise, and partly due to the somewhat limited supply of InterWave chips.

It is still possible to make a technical contribution, if one can find something that catches his interest, but at this point, I don't see what that could be or how that might be done without having a prototype already in hand. This doesn't mean that he won't decide to source more InterWave chips and offer some boards for general sale once the design is finalised, but whether he does, and at what price point, will be for him to decide.

Last edited by 640K!enough on 2018-04-05, 17:48. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1818 of 3172, by aquishix

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Phreeze wrote:

Thoughts: you should buy1,2 or 3 to use in your computers instead of, what I think you have in mind as you said "several", sell them on ebay 😉

I'm having a hard time parsing this post. I have no interest in buying OR selling any of this GUS stuff on eBay. I just want 3 GUS cards so that I can have my 386, 486, and Pentium-II systems fully equipped. But I'm not paying $300, let alone $500 or $925, in order to accomplish this.

One of the jokers on eBay selling a true GUS card has it at that high of a price despite the fact that the card looks like total crap and has a rusted Mic On/Off switch. It's unbelievable what these scalpers think they can get away with.

Reply 1819 of 3172, by aquishix

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640K!enough wrote:
It is already at the stage where cards can be built that consistently provide full functionality and expected levels of reliabil […]
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aquishix wrote:

So, if this project gets to the point where a few of them can be made with full functionality and reliability, please let me know. True GUS cards on eBay are posted at $300 - $925 right now, and all the GUS clones sell so quickly that I never even see them before they're gone. I just find the evidence that they were posted and sold by digging through Sold listings.

It is already at the stage where cards can be built that consistently provide full functionality and expected levels of reliability. Reading through the last few pages, you can see that we are working to refine the design, do further testing, and add more options. The significant advantage of a card like this is that it not only offers more capabilities than any InterWave card ever sold, but they are being built now, with all new parts, so there is no need to worry about stale or leaking capacitors, or the need to repair the card after paying through the nose to get it.

As you may be aware, this is shock__'s project; it's his design, and, justifiably, he is the only one with the design files that can be used to produce a board. Unless something has changed, boards are only being offered to those who donated to the project early on, or made technical contributions along the way. This is partly due to the number of eBay vultures who would surely try to profit handsomely from his efforts otherwise, and partly due to the somewhat limited supply of InterWave chips.

It is still possible to make a technical contribution, if one can find something that catches his interest, but at this point, I don't see what that could be or how that might be done without having a prototype already in hand. This doesn't mean that he won't decide to source more InterWave chips and offer some boards for general sale once the design is finalised, but whether he does and at what price point will be for him to decide.

Aye...

Well, there's a part of me that would be willing to pay even more for one of these (really, two) than the extremely high eBay prices for true GUS cards -- because I really respect and admire these homebrew hardware projects. I like rewarding people for awesome technical work. I don't like rewarding scumbag sellers on eBay who make me reconsider my feelings on free markets. 😉

I'm becoming more and more technically adept, but I'm not at the level that is on display on this thread. Currently trying to improve my soldering skills and gain some knowledge about low level PC architecture. So, as you said, I probably wouldn't be able to gain favor via that avenue.

I am very, very good at testing hardware and software, though. I seem to have an uncanny ability to find corner cases.