Sorry to hear about the problems you encountered with the Waverider soundcard. Trying to remember whether or not I ever tested this card, and tested the midi part as well. The drivers I gave have a 'pre-installed' folder which would suggest that I have. I feel like plugging it in again, and check things out, but I have some other responsibilities first...

Sorry for the delay, but I finally had the opportunity to to test my Waverider 32+ Card. It was installed in a Pentium III 800MHz at FSB 100MHz. I noticed the OPL3 FM giving garbled output after running the diagnose.exe test program, this was resolved by downclocking to 400MHz at FSB 50MHz. Sound Blaster Pro output works. I did not test the Windows Sound System compatibility yet, but 16-bit sound does work in the diagnose.exe test program.

Then for the wavetable part: The WaveTide DOS TSR driver actually works fine here, it occupies 37.936 bytes of memory. The wavetable music through MPU-401 is working well in Doom MBF and in GSPlay. It sounds pretty good, some patches obviously differ from a Roland, but they have a retro charm.
Note that I did not configure anything else to get the wavetable to work in DOS. Even when the WaveTide TSR is run as the first program after a MS-DOS 7 safe-mode boot, it just works.
Jumpers settings are still like how I received the card, and are shown in this photo here.
.

Now my turn to come back to this after a long time. I've since sold most of the system I was using it with before and built a new one based on an IBM PS/1 motherboard with IBM Blue Lightning DX2 (i.e. Cyrix/IBM) in a generic LPX case. This time I'm running DOS 6.22 (freshly installed from original MS floppy images).

It's still not working, but symptoms are slightly different. Now I get to the "WAVETIDE Synth Engine Program now resident in memory." - and then hangs the system completely, requiring a hard reset.

I almost suspect some kind of resource config, but I've tried about every possible I/O, IRQ and DMA (for SoundBlaster) setting available - A 220 and A240, I 2, 5, 7 and 10, DMA 0, 1 and 3, MIDI A 300 and 330, I 2, 7 and 10. Putting the SB on IRQ 2 gave choppy, hanging FM, so I suspect a conflict there, but even when turning off everything possibe in BIOS (not much - both serial ports and parallel port, the latter freeing up IRQ7) at best the SB functions work and the system hangs when running wavetide.exe

One interesting observation: if pressing any keys whil running Wavetide, it hangs marginally earlier, after the "WAVETIDE Synth Engine", so half way through the line. A conflict with the keyboard controller strikes me as very unlikely, but perhaps this is a clue.

Either way, I've had enough for now again - I just got hold of an MT32, so I'm using that for MIDI right now 😉

Update:
Recently a second Waverider32+ popped up for a price so low I couldn't ignore. So I bought it, installed it, tested it and... on the third try (after removing conflicting devices and enabling MIDI in the config) it gave me all its wavey goodness.

So, next thing I did was stick the old card back in again with identical settings. Guess what: it worked perfectly too.

Both times I even used the same DOS install on the same CF card. Only difference is that this time I was using an Intel AN430TX motherboard instead of the 486 ones I was before. Would be surprised if that was the issue as it failed before on two different boards. One way or another, the only conclusion is that the hardware is fine, but there must have been some kind of IRQ conflict.

End result is not too bad either: I now have two working Aztech MMSN826 WaveRider32+ boards, with good SBPro2 compatibility and real OPL3, as well as decent-ish wavetable (it's definitely not up to Roland MT-32 or GS standards).

Maybe I will be re-testing on the 486 boards sometime in the future, but for now I'm satisfied - and moving on to my next project - Aztech NX Pro, SB32 with 8MB RAM and a GUS Classic in the same system for everything from Covox via SB(Pro), SB16, AWE to GUS in all its glory. Maybe even a MusicQuest for hardware intelligent mode MPU401 - but then I need a motherboard with more ISA 😉

Glad that both of them work now. Yeah I suppose you should always try another motherboard when all else fails.

Of course it is not much use for MT-32 music.

Im joining the not working WaveRider party. Wavetide.exe says "unknown chip". Have tried almost everything except a different mobo.

doaks80 wrote:

Im joining the not working WaveRider party. Wavetide.exe says "unknown chip". Have tried almost everything except a different mobo.

What's model number (FCC ID) on your card? Did start with I38-MMSNxxx.

jesolo wrote:

doaks80 wrote:

Im joining the not working WaveRider party. Wavetide.exe says "unknown chip". Have tried almost everything except a different mobo.

What's model number (FCC ID) on your card? Did start with I38-MMSNxxx.

Yup, it's exactly the I38-MMSN826 , i tried Win98 as well on a different mobo, and the windows driver says the same thing: WaveTide hardware not detected!

It's possible there could be a problem with your sound card.
I actually bought a Waverider 32+ a couple of years ago and it also didn't want to initialise properly.
Just to be sure, where did you obtain your drivers from?
Does the sound card's FM synthesis and digital voice playback work?
Just check that your MPU-401 MIDI port is enabled in your sound card's config.

Got drivers here, and yes fm/speech work OK. Weird the eeprom jumper seems reversed...when I set it to software it remembers settings, when eeprom it forgets. I can save settings OK.

I let mpu enabled, but I am not sure it is relevant as I think wavetide emulates the mpu using the waverider synth backend.

Bit of a bummer.

With me it was some kind of conflict (never found out what) with the 486 motherboard/system I was using. On an Intel AN430TX it worked flawlessly. I accidentally sold that (don't ask...) so now it's stuck in a Tekram P5MVP3 - and playing up again. Different symptoms though, now it does FM fine, but misbehaves with digital audio and Wavetide runs but no sound comes out. Probably conflict again, this time PnP-related (even though I reserved the relevant IRQs and DMAs in BIOS). Anyway, no time to troubleshoot now, but moral of the story: before assuming the card is faulty, try in a few different systems.

doaks80 wrote:

Got drivers here, and yes fm/speech work OK. Weird the eeprom jumper seems reversed...when I set it to software it remembers settings, when eeprom it forgets. I can save settings OK.

I let mpu enabled, but I am not sure it is relevant as I think wavetide emulates the mpu using the waverider synth backend.

Bit of a bummer.

I think just to be sure, download the Waverider 32+ drivers from here: ftp://ftp.aztech.com/support/DOWNLOAD/sg/WRIDER/
The Wavetide tsr that you load is to initialise the ICS Wavefront chip.
You still have to enable your MPU-401 MIDI interface for proper game support that requires it.

Yep they seem to match exactly the ones I downloaded from VogonsDrivers. I think the card must be stuffed. Oh well. I suppose it still does reasonable FM/SB.

Hi guys.
I recently aquired exactly the same card and I'm very happy about it because I'm quite an Aztech fanboy and collect those goodies.
Now to my "problems":
1. After struggeling some time to get digi sound working, I realized that FM sound is aprox. as half as loud as digi and wavetable.
2. Wavetide.exe works flawlessly but games with the DOS4GW Extender like Doom or Dark Forces just trigger a reboot.
Only exeption is HiOctane. It just freezes after the Intro. Intro itself runs fine with SB Pro and General Midi.
Edit: Update on this one: after removing EMM386.EXE from my CONFIG.SYS, mentioned Games work fine too. Only HiOctane still refuses to run.
Anyone else who had this phenomenons?
Tried all the combinations in adresses and IRQs and so on.
MB is Matsonic MS6260S with Pentium P 100MHz @ 1.5x66MHz because @ 2x50MHz it does not post. Same with 1.5x50MHz what I'd prefer if possible.
Aztech board revision is 1.2 and it has the Analog Devices codec chip.
Grtz,
Thomas.

Hi guys, sorry for touching the old thread. However, I also got my hands on one of of this cards and have a question, may be you can answer. I got SB/FM up and running and this seem to work well, however using GM I ran into problems. The WAVETIDE.EXE started properly, but first I didn't get any GM output from any game. Then I found some "fixes" inside of the drivers package here on vogons. There are this HMIMDRV.386 files each for different games, which I had to put into accordant game folder. Doing this, GM starts to work and works really well, I like how it sounds very much. However, there are only some games, for which this "fix" is available. Despite the fact, that I don't like such inconvenient solutions, there are many games, which just don't work at all using GM using this sound card without a fix. For example Dark Forces doesn't have such a file in its folder and there is also no fix for it from Aztech, so I don't get any GM there. So, my question, do you know, why exactly this doesn't work with any game? Why do we need a fix for every game we want to play with GM?

Thanks in advance.

scorp wrote:

Hi guys, sorry for touching the old thread. However, I also got my hands on one of of this cards and have a question, may be you can answer. I got SB/FM up and running and this seem to work well, however using GM I ran into problems. The WAVETIDE.EXE started properly, but first I didn't get any GM output from any game. Then I found some "fixes" inside of the drivers package here on vogons. There are this HMIMDRV.386 files each for different games, which I had to put into accordant game folder. Doing this, GM starts to work and works really well, I like how it sounds very much. However, there are only some games, for which this "fix" is available. Despite the fact, that I don't like such inconvenient solutions, there are many games, which just don't work at all using GM using this sound card without a fix. For example Dark Forces doesn't have such a file in its folder and there is also no fix for it from Aztech, so I don't get any GM there. So, my question, do you know, why exactly this doesn't work with any game? Why do we need a fix for every game we want to play with GM?

Thanks in advance.

The "fixes" were released for specific games that made use of a specific sound engine. Dark Forces didn't utilise that sound engine.
I seem to recall having listening to the Dark Forces intro recorded from a Waverider 32+.
Best would be to list your Autoexec.bat & Config.sys contents and also provide more detail about your system specs (hardware & software).
For example - are you loading EMM386.EXE? What other tsr's have you loaded?