Thank you a lot guys!!! 😁

keropi wrote on 2022-12-22, 07:58:

Jazefox, I am messing with a very small factor 286/16 system with integrated I/O (Acer M5105) and VGA (OTI 067) - chipset is the […]
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Jazefox, I am messing with a very small factor 286/16 system with integrated I/O (Acer M5105) and VGA (OTI 067) - chipset is the Headland HT12 and the BIOS is the old AMIBIOS one with a single screen for settings and separate "diagnostics". In this system none of the PnP cards I tried were detected by official or 3rd party drivers: CS4237, CMI8330 and ALS100. Non-PnP cards like Opti930, CT1320 and CT1600 work fine as expected.

The ALS100 card was detected and configured correctly according to ICU but unisound reports no card found (same for 0.78b version).
The original ALS drivers just hang on the 286 and you need to reboot.
I am not sure if this means anything or even useful to unisound development but if you want more info/tests on this system please tell me.

As a sidenote I also found 2 more 386 (SX and DX) systems with the newer AMIBIOS that cannot detect ALS100 with the original driver
ALCONFIG quits with this error message: Error CSN readback from the card
ALSINIT and Unisound report they initialized the card but it's left in some half-init state and not all games can use FM or PCM.
Unisound might take a reboot or two to report that it found the card and it initialized it .

Anyways that's what experienced - also in line with some rare reports about Orpheus not getting detected at all in non-PnP systems , it seems it's not always a given
that the late 90s chips will work on older systems.

Thank you for all the tests, keropi. I'll try to check when I have some time the cards you said with my 286 (Headland chipset) and some of 386SX/DX I have here. I usually test all cards in my systems and if I remeber well all of them worked, but I guess that a weird combo of Chipset+IO+BIOS could be problematic.

Anyway, in the meantime you can try UNISOUND with /FS and /XXF switches and check if it made any improvement. You can check with an old version too (0.75b or older).

JazeFox wrote on 2022-12-22, 08:44:

Thank you for all the tests, keropi. I'll try to check when I have some time the cards you said with my 286 (Headland chipset) and some of 386SX/DX I have here. I usually test all cards in my systems and if I remeber well all of them worked, but I guess that a weird combo of Chipset+IO+BIOS could be problematic.

Anyway, in the meantime you can try UNISOUND with /FS and /XXF switches and check if it made any improvement. You can check with an old version too (0.75b or older).

For me on the 386 front it was only the ALS100 cards that did not work with these 2 systems , CS4237/CMI8330 were both fine (386sx has an ALi chipset and the 386DX has an OPTi one).
I agree, it must be some combo of bios/chipset that makes the systems incompatible.

On the 286 front now:

/FS did not help, still no PnP card found message
/XXF reports "Unknown PnP card [AH@0000] found. Aborting....

it made no difference if ICU was loaded or not. Tests were made with the latest 0.80a version.

Great work @JazeFox, this is just insane.

BTW one question, will this project be open sourced anytime?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-12-22, 07:21:

Muchos gracias amigo.

Muchas* 😂😂

ViTi95 wrote on 2022-12-22, 09:18:

Great work @JazeFox, this is just insane. […]
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Great work @JazeFox, this is just insane.

BTW one question, will this project be open sourced anytime?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-12-22, 07:21:

Muchos gracias amigo.

Muchas* 😂😂

I stand corrected 😁

JazeFox wrote on 2022-12-21, 19:56:

Changelog: […]
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Changelog:

• New: *EXPERIMENTAL* Non-PnP card detection mode for very very few cards:
  * OAK OTI-601 "Mozart" / OPTi 82c928/A chips (almost the same chip)
  * OPTi 82C924 and 82C925 in "no PnP" mode

Thanks! Will have to try it with my miro PCM20.

• Fixed Wavetable volume not changing with /VF when SPDIF mode was enabled on Orpheus / TB Malibu cards.
  (Note: some games/apps messing with SB mixer registers 00h, 06h, 26h, might reset levels again)

Happy to report that /VF switch in SPDIF mode is now indeed changing Orpheus I Wavetable vol as intended.

First off, a big thank you for all your time and hard work on this project! I truly appreciate the level of effort this would have taken.

I wanted to join others in asking if you'd consider making the source code available? For myself, I think it would be useful as an educational tool.
I do understand that not everyone has this philosophy or possibly there are other reasons preventing it.

JazeFox wrote on 2020-03-13, 00:32:

Yamaha: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - YMF715, YMF718, YMF719 cards. Models OPL […]
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Yamaha:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- YMF715, YMF718, YMF719 cards. Models OPL-SAX, OPL-SA3, AudioTrix XG-3D...
Only ISA PnP models. Usually laptop integrated Yamaha chips are BIOS-PnP
based, and those are not supported for now.

Is there a plan to support BIOS-PnP in a future version?
I have an old Toshiba laptop with an OPL-SA3X. I can use the "SETUPSA" utility, which works well enough, but of course it'd be nice to see it in UNISOUND as well as tracking down the right versions can be a challenge nowadays.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-04, 08:42:

Hey @JazeFox do you ever intend to enable SBK loading for AWE32/64 cards?

About sound bank uploading to AWE cards:

Quick answer: no.
It's not within this tool's scope. And, moreover:
I think of SBK support only in 2 scenarios:

1- GM/GS/MT32 use. That's what AWEUTIL /EM:XX does, but the thing is: The AWE (EMU8000) does NOT have native MIDI support. It's emulated, and it's not emulated in hardware, all the complex emulation is done in software, by AWEUTIL /EM , that it's, obviously, a TSR. As UNISOUND it's not and it will never be a TSR, for that use, it's better to keep using AWEUTIL /EM

2- Custom soundfont for game "XXX". As UNISOUND couldn't know what custom use or mapping will have the soundfont in "XXX" game, the logical option is for the "XXX" game to do the bank uploading by itself.

---

@ViTi95 and @Transient (and others...)

I commented some time ago that I would not answer anything related to the direction of the project (here: Re: Universal PnP Sound Card Enabler for DOS v0.70c (UNISOUND)) but anyway, I added a Mini-FAQ in the first post clarifying. Thank you for understanding!. This is the last time I will comment on it.

---

keropi wrote:

On the 286 front now:

/FS did not help, still no PnP card found message
/XXF reports "Unknown PnP card [AH@0000] found. Aborting....

Thanks, I checked in my 286 (AMD 16Mhz) with Headland Chipset and AMI Bios, and everything went OK, maybe we could exchange BIOS images to do more tests... I'll PM to you when I have some free time maybe in end-January/february.

And happy new year to all!! (well, in about 2 days) 😀

JazeFox wrote on 2022-12-30, 12:17:

About sound bank uploading to AWE cards: […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-04, 08:42:

Hey @JazeFox do you ever intend to enable SBK loading for AWE32/64 cards?

About sound bank uploading to AWE cards:

Quick answer: no.
It's not within this tool's scope. And, moreover:
I think of SBK support only in 2 scenarios:

1- GM/GS/MT32 use. That's what AWEUTIL /EM:XX does, but the thing is: The AWE (EMU8000) does NOT have native MIDI support. It's emulated, and it's not emulated in hardware, all the complex emulation is done in software, by AWEUTIL /EM , that it's, obviously, a TSR. As UNISOUND it's not and it will never be a TSR, for that use, it's better to keep using AWEUTIL /EM

2- Custom soundfont for game "XXX". As UNISOUND couldn't know what custom use or mapping will have the soundfont in "XXX" game, the logical option is for the "XXX" game to do the bank uploading by itself.

Related to AWEUTIL, could you implement the capability of setting reverb and chorus to the FM synth? This can be done for all AWE64 cards (only for CQM in the case of AWE64 Legacy) and AWE32 variants that has the CT1747 bus chip.

And excellent work on this handy utility! 😁

Dear all,

1.: great program and thanks for all the support effort
2.: I’m not able to get my AZT2320 into working WSS mode. No game will recognize it.

I tried of course /XWSS and even setting the K/Q/W parameters in the set blaster environments doesn’t make any difference.

What I noticed:
- WSS will always be set to 534 port. No matter what setting I use with W parameter. 604 or similar nothing will change
- programs using the WSS (Like Inertia Player) request the WSS to be at 530 not 534!
- using K and Q parameters won’t have any effect on the unisound message for provided irqs and DMAs

SBPro works great.

Any idea?
Thanks a lot

Special thanks to you JazeFox! The /XWSS switch in v0.80a allowed me to finally get WSS working on my Aztech AT6800W.

That’s great. What were your set blaster settings in what your specific unisound command?

Marco wrote on 2023-01-03, 19:17:

That’s great. What were your set blaster settings in what your specific unisound command?

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

&

UNISOUND /XWSS

Nothing special

Thanks. Seems then that with the 2320 it won’t work yet. Thanks a lot

I have ALS100 Trump Audio wave32
Card is initialized but nothing hear on mpu.

Found drivers here: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=815&menustate=0
DOS is inside TRUMP32.CPS archive
and works fine

mt777 wrote on 2023-01-06, 00:43:

I have ALS100 Trump Audio wave32 Card is initialized but nothing hear on mpu. […]
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I have ALS100 Trump Audio wave32
Card is initialized but nothing hear on mpu.

Found drivers here: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=815&menustate=0
DOS is inside TRUMP32.CPS archive
and works fine

AFAIR this card has SAM9233 connected to 0x388 port (usual opl2/opl3 location). Therefore old dos games sound "a little bit" strange 😀

zyga64 wrote on 2023-01-06, 13:33:

mt777 wrote on 2023-01-06, 00:43:

I have ALS100 Trump Audio wave32 Card is initialized but nothing hear on mpu. […]
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I have ALS100 Trump Audio wave32
Card is initialized but nothing hear on mpu.

Found drivers here: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=815&menustate=0
DOS is inside TRUMP32.CPS archive
and works fine

AFAIR this card has SAM9233 connected to 0x388 port (usual opl2/opl3 location). Therefore old dos games sound "a little bit" strange 😀

You mean it should be configured as an MPU-401 at address 0x388?

I don't remember exactly how it worked, because I sold the card a few years ago, but the games that normally played FM audio using OPL3 (on other cards) on this card play it using SAM9233 wavetable. This card doesn't have FM chip at all.

i have a aztech soundgalazy 16 how do i know what values i need to use in the auto file ?
with unidrivers

This may be completely unrealistic, but is it possible to get UNISOUND to initialize or even just allow mixer adjustments for this Dream 97PNP2 card I posted about in this thread?

As mentioned in the thread, there is a CD image with firmware files, instructions, schematics, information on how to configure and write a firmware for the PNP chip, and other things that may be of use. Most of the DOS related files seem to be intended for an older 94PNP2 card and I have not been able to get them working on mine, but they would likely still be helpful on some level.

The card is built around the Dream SAM9707, which is apparently mostly drop-in compatible with the SAM9407, and should initialize in the same way as the SAM9407 on the Maxi Sound 64. For the initial PNP configuration it uses an NM95MS14. Since the card doesn't have a normal DOS CODEC (ESS, Crystal, Analog Devices, etc.), I would really only expect it to be able to use the wavetable MIDI in DOS, not digital effects. Basically, I think it's main use in DOS would be as a dedicated MIDI card unless there is some undocumented DOS compatible digital audio built into the SAM9x07 chips.

I am able to initialize the card in DOS using the 94DINIT program from the MaxiSound 64 drivers, along with the 97PNP2 Firmware file found on the CD in the thread above. When I try to actually play back sound in DOS games I get no digital effects (which is expected), but I also cannot get the UART wavetable to work, even after initialization and loading a sound bank. The music appears to play without crashing the game\program, but I only get a small crackle\pop sound.

It may even be enough if Unisound can simply access and directly configure the various mixer settings on the SAM9x07 chips, since that may be what is preventing me from being able to hear the wavetable playback in DOS. That may actually be preferable, since I'm not exactly sure how I will get the sound banks loaded into RAM if unisound doesn't do it, because I doubt the 94DINIT program will allow me to change sound banks if the card has already been initialized.

If someone is up to the task of trying to make this work, I am up to the task of testing it. 😀

I will be happy if the end result is that:
*I can load a sound bank onto this card in DOS either with the MaxiSound64's 94DINIT.EXEapplication or some other way.
*I can then use the card as a dedicated MPU-401\UART midi card in DOS applications and hear the playback.
**Bonus points for being able to adjust mixer\volume levels for the card itself.
**Extra bonus points for being able to use the card's Line-In and feed that into the mixer (to feed another sound card into this and then output both from this card)

No digital sound playback is expected in DOS with this card.

😀