VOGONS


First post, by Woolie Wool

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After getting a Yamaha Genius A151-A00 sound card that was DOA, I explained my problem to the seller on eBay and he sent me another one, and it works fine in Windows. But in FreeDOS 1.2 there are...problems.

The OPL works fine in every game, but the PCM audio is bugged (will cut off, crash the game, or most often, not play at all) in most games, with the exceptions being Descent and Quake from the games I've tried, which work fine. Line-in will only work if setupsa /s is run first. Terminal Velocity reacts the worst to my card, hanging the entire system after playing a test sound once that is supposed to be played twice. I've considered messing with the jumper pins but I have no jumpers on hand, nor can I find a manual. I could buy some jumpers but I would basically be poking things at random with no idea what I'm doing.

I'm at a loss. Should I get another model of OPL3-SAx card? Or give up and use a PCI card and run the TSR and EMM386 all the time? Or even just pony up the $100 or so to get an AWE64 and live with CQM for FM synth? Does the OPL3-SAx only work in MS-DOS and not FreeDOS? MS-DOS 6.22 is also affected.

I've attached my AUTOEXEC.BAT in case it will help. It looks like the forum software ate the attachment and my USB floppy drive bricked itself and I can't copy it over again, sorry!

Last edited by Woolie Wool on 2018-02-21, 06:48. Edited 2 times in total.

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Reply 1 of 16, by Woolie Wool

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I tried the Auidotrix 3D-XG drivers from this thread and while more games work, there are still problems--Doom will not play any audio if the music is set to General MIDI, but works fine with it set to OPL. TIE Fighter and Wacky Wheels will still not do PCM sound, Realms of Chaos just crashes on game start.

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Reply 3 of 16, by Woolie Wool

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Kamerat wrote:

Tell us about the other componets of your rig.

Abit KT7A motherboard (initially thought it was a KT7A-RAID)
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz
1.5GB RAM
Asylum nVidia GeForce FX 5900
Netgear FA311 ethernet adapter
TEAC FD-235 3.5" floppy drive
Apple/Matsushita 6X DVD-ROM drive
Passive CompactFlash IDE bracket (for DOS)
80GB WD Caviar IDE HDD (for Windows)

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Reply 4 of 16, by Tiido

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If you're using DMA0 then try changing it to DMA1 or 3, some newer boards such as what you use do not always play along with DMA0 on the YMF71x chips, I have to do that on my VIA based PIII-S machine and when I still had my P4 with Windbond ISA bridge. On the latter I never got YMF715 (OPL3SA3) and 719 (OPL3-SA3C) based cards work reliably, there were always buffer underruns (thus clicks in sound)and occasional loss of sound altogether until a restart, but YMF711(OPL3-SA2) and YMF718 (OPL3-SA2C) worked fine without any problems. If possible, adding wait states on 8bit IO operations might help, newer BIOSes usually do not have such options though...
In past I also had great trouble with PCM side on one AMD based board but I no longer remember what it was exactly but it used VIA chipset.

Can you show a photo of the card ?

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 5 of 16, by Woolie Wool

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This is the eBay listing with photos.

As for the chipset, my chipset (KT33) was indeed made by VIA.

E: locking out DMA0 by assigning it to "Legacy ISA" in the BIOS makes things work a bit better, though Doom will not play sound if General MIDI is enabled. The BIOS says my card has two DMA addresses, originally 0 and 1 but now 1 and 3. Should I set my OPL3-SAX to use DMA3?

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Reply 6 of 16, by Scali

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VIA chipsets are notoriously buggy. VIA thought they could save money by not licensing PCI and AGP buses, but instead reverse-engineer the stuff themselves... You get what you pay for.
The KT133/KT133A also had huge problems with Creative SB Live! cards.
It could be that the problem is not the card, but the chipset. I would suggest that you try it in another PC, preferably one with a decent 'brand' chipset, such as Intel, nVidia, ATi or whatnot.

Also, indeed DMA channel 0 is normally reserved (it was used for memory refresh on the original PC and XT and many early clones). It could be that the chipset simply doesn't implement channel 0 at all.

Not to mention that your system is WAY too fast for reliably running any kind of ISA device. I had a KT7A myself, and it was one of the few Athlon boards which still had an ISA slot... I never got anything to work in it though... certainly not my Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 or GUS MAX (which was the original goal of the rig).

If you want ISA, I recommend a socket 7 system. Anything faster is asking for trouble.

Last edited by Scali on 2018-02-21, 14:56. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 8 of 16, by Scali

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Woolie Wool wrote:

I do not have another PC with an ISA slot. This is it.

Well, either get a slower system with an ISA slot (eg Pentium 133-200), or get a PCI sound card, I'd say.

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Reply 9 of 16, by Tiido

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Woolie Wool wrote:

This is the eBay listing with photos.

As for the chipset, my chipset (KT33) was indeed made by VIA.

E: locking out DMA0 by assigning it to "Legacy ISA" in the BIOS makes things work a bit better, though Doom will not play sound if General MIDI is enabled. The BIOS says my card has two DMA addresses, originally 0 and 1 but now 1 and 3. Should I set my OPL3-SAX to use DMA3?

The card uses two DMAs, DMAA and DMAB, the SETUPSA utility abstracts it away however. Since you have VIA based machine you most definitely have to make sure that DMA0 is not used by either SB or WSS side. Use 1 for SB side and 3 for WSS side. If this is not going to help you're most likely not going to get positive results. VIA + AMD combination is what I couldn't get working in past no matter what I tried. PIII based VIA chipsets do work as long as DMA0 is not used.

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 10 of 16, by Woolie Wool

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I find it rather hard to believe that the computer is "too fast" for the ISA bus considering that ISA has its own clock that has been the same since the 1980s and its standard was unencumbered by licensing (much to IBM's chagrin later on).

Anyway, I'm going to set WSS DMA to 3 tonight and see what happens. Currently both WSS and SB DMA are 1 so maybe Doom uses WSS for general MIDI, causing a DMA conflict? Though that's almost as far-fetched as my CPU messing up ISA cards.

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Reply 11 of 16, by Tiido

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ISA clock may be 8MHz, but there are a number of timings that have to be met, i.e when AEN goes low and when will read/write strobes go low, and when will data become available on the bus and when it disappears. Since the Yamaha chipset (and most others) are accessed completely asynchronously these details start mattering a whole lot. If I had that same board i could see with an oscilloscope what will go on on the bus. Are there any ISA wait states adjustment (IO recovery time) in the BIOS ?

MIDI stuff uses WSS side only in Windows if you have softsynth enabled for DOS programs and Windows driver will use two DMAs automatically, but you will have to manually change things in device manager not to use DMA0.
In pure DOS there isn't gonna be any such stuff going on, MIDI goes straight to gameport and waveblaster header and only thing that could possibly cause issues is MIDi IRQ being shared with SB side, but games like Doom and Duke3D do not use MIDI IRQ.

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 12 of 16, by Scali

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Woolie Wool wrote:

I find it rather hard to believe that the computer is "too fast" for the ISA bus considering that ISA has its own clock that has been the same since the 1980s and its standard was unencumbered by licensing (much to IBM's chagrin later on).

That's not the problem (although there are broken chipsets/motherboards that run the ISA bus too fast).
The problem is that most DOS software uses simple loops for delay between commands to detect and initialize sound cards.
The problem is that a Pentium II or faster will execute these loops faster than the hardware can respond. So a lot of software either fails to detect a sound card at all, or will send commands more quickly than the sound card can handle.

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Reply 13 of 16, by Kamerat

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You can try to disable cache and/or underclock your CPU to see if things get more cooperative. I think 5.5x is the lowest multiplier the Athlon Tunderbird handles.

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Reply 14 of 16, by Woolie Wool

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Kamerat wrote:

You can try to disable cache and/or underclock your CPU to see if things get more cooperative. I think 5.5x is the lowest multiplier the Athlon Tunderbird handles.

Throttle.exe can underclock my CPU by up to 93.75% but I think it underclocks the FSB or something because the effects are disproportionately extreme when taken too far (when I throttled to 178.75 MHz to play Tyrian and avoid Runtime Error 200, the game ran like it was on a 486, and not even one of the good ones). I'll try reducing the multiplier and applying throttle for that game.

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Reply 16 of 16, by Tiido

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You can find drivers aswell as SETYMF that I developed from here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/TKAYBSC
SETYMF is my own custom setup utility for the YMF71x based cards with better user friendliness and hopefully less issues 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 😜