I have a particular ISA sound card that is extremely noisy. Adding a ground loop isolator to the speaker out cable silenced the noise completely.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-15, 21:19:

I have a particular ISA sound card that is extremely noisy. Adding a ground loop isolator to the speaker out cable silenced the noise completely.

Yes, in my case the ground loop noise was between the output of the Roland MT32 and the line in of the soundcard, as i understood after i have tried all combination of power plugs for my setup and a ground loop isolator from Amazon solved my noise problem when placed between the MT32 and the soundcard. It was inefficient when directly into the speakers.

Marmes wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:59:

Try to go to iw mixer in windows and dos, and silence the inputs.

GUS mixer setting have no effect on noise. Even with GUS mixer Master Mute noise still stays.

Anyways I feel I'm artificially creating negativity here. Card truly shines with fully analog playback. Carefully designed analog amp with audio grade caps will be ignored with spdif output after all. So if I paid for it I should actually use it. 😉
Spdif output is working flawlessly as intended using CS chip internal SB/SB-PRO/WSS playback (min-digital mode). Also by definition "Synth/WT/OPL3/GUS" extra digital conversion by CS chip cannot add audio quality to pipeline anyway. So why force it then.

All in all I'm happy customer. So thank you Leo and Edro for your work!

I tried to recreate your issue, I can't right now. Isa bus is a bit noisy. Try to test with a good ATX PSU and see if it gets better. That noise is digital noise from bus. I'm sure about it. All analogue routing is isolated from that. There are no crossing lines between analog and digital, they are separated.

vutt wrote on 2023-04-16, 09:58:

GUS mixer setting have no effect on noise. Even with GUS mixer Master Mute noise still stays. […]
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Marmes wrote on 2023-04-15, 19:59:

Try to go to iw mixer in windows and dos, and silence the inputs.

GUS mixer setting have no effect on noise. Even with GUS mixer Master Mute noise still stays.

Anyways I feel I'm artificially creating negativity here. Card truly shines with fully analog playback. Carefully designed analog amp with audio grade caps will be ignored with spdif output after all. So if I paid for it I should actually use it. 😉
Spdif output is working flawlessly as intended using CS chip internal SB/SB-PRO/WSS playback (min-digital mode). Also by definition "Synth/WT/OPL3/GUS" extra digital conversion by CS chip cannot add audio quality to pipeline anyway. So why force it then.

All in all I'm happy customer. So thank you Leo and Edro for your work!

Got mine! Works nicely out of the box! Damn the sound quality is just epic... and that Dreamblaster, i'm in love.

Only problem that I'm having is that WTheader-volumesetting in orpheus.ini does nothing and WT-music is too loud, in some cases it's distorting.

Am I doing something wrong?

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-17, 17:23:

Got mine! Works nicely out of the box! Damn the sound quality is just epic... and that Dreamblaster, i'm in love.

Only problem that I'm having is that WTheader-volumesetting in orpheus.ini does nothing and WT-music is too loud, in some cases it's distorting.

Am I doing something wrong?

the WT header volume is actually controlled by the SB-FMVol variable in SoundBlaster mode , so try lowering this setting

edit:
just a reminder that the X2GS can be finetuned in hardware with the "X2PresetEditor" inside the archive here
it is useful in cases where games do not offer volume control and do the annoying thing that maxes out the SB mixer settings...

keropi wrote on 2023-04-17, 17:38:

[…]
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dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-17, 17:23:

Got mine! Works nicely out of the box! Damn the sound quality is just epic... and that Dreamblaster, i'm in love.

Only problem that I'm having is that WTheader-volumesetting in orpheus.ini does nothing and WT-music is too loud, in some cases it's distorting.

Am I doing something wrong?

the WT header volume is actually controlled by the SB-FMVol variable in SoundBlaster mode , so try lowering this setting

edit:
just a reminder that the X2GS can be finetuned in hardware with the "X2PresetEditor" inside the archive here
it is useful in cases where games do not offer volume control and do the annoying thing that maxes out the SB mixer settings...

Thanks for the info!

This may sound like a silly question, but can the Adlib chip be turned off? I actually prefer to use a separate ISA card for Adlib exclusively, and then redirect it into my primary card via line-in. This way I have more precise control over the volume. FM synthesis volume always seems to be tied to some other volume slider. Setting it to the line-in slider gives me exclusive access to adjust it exactly without having to worry about anything else.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-18, 00:47:

This may sound like a silly question, but can the Adlib chip be turned off? I actually prefer to use a separate ISA card for Adlib exclusively, and then redirect it into my primary card via line-in. This way I have more precise control over the volume. FM synthesis volume always seems to be tied to some other volume slider. Setting it to the line-in slider gives me exclusive access to adjust it exactly without having to worry about anything else.

Interesting. Being able to route Adlib volume through Line-in via a jumper would be an interesting solution if possible...

I hadn't ever thought to suggest this. Having this integrated into Orpheus would be amazing. It would save me an ISA slot, for sure.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-18, 00:47:

This may sound like a silly question, but can the Adlib chip be turned off?

The simple answer is that you can use FMMode=off with ORPHINIT; then it will behave as if the on-card YMF289 and Crystal FM module were not on the bus at all. Without another device in place, no software would find OPL-compatible hardware.

Upon more careful consideration, you end up finding that there are titles that still manipulate the line-in levels, just as they do the others. As keropi often suggests, an external mixer is the only sure-fire way to maintain control, and even then, you'd need a card that doesn't respond to volume-level changes for FM to act as the source. There have been attempts at TSR-based solutions, but I don't know how effective they are (haven't tried at all).

Even if it's not a perfect solution, it could be another trick in Orpheus's bag of tricks. I've definitely played games where the FM volume at max is too low, and adjusting the master volume raises the sound effects volume as well, so then it drowns out the FM again. This is the reason I used this workaround.

My DOS test game for FM and PCM sounds is Gods, when the intro music plays nice then the volume balance is right.

One thing that surprised me, Prince of Persia don't play digitized sounds at all and Dynablaster is totally silent with Orpheus 2. Tried to slow down my computer to 386-levels but didn't help.
Both of these worked with ESS Solo-1 PCI (which really is the best SB PRO clone in PCI slot you can have).

Can somebody else try those titles?

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-19, 04:48:

[...]
Can somebody else try those titles?

just did, no issues ... POP and Dynablaster have both sfx/music playing just fine
tested on my 200mmx system , no slowdown needed for these games

keropi wrote on 2023-04-19, 06:49:

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-19, 04:48:

[...]
Can somebody else try those titles?

just did, no issues ... POP and Dynablaster have both sfx/music playing just fine
tested on my 200mmx system , no slowdown needed for these games

Thanks for testing, so it's my system, not the card. Actually I was quite sure it's not the card but still asked...

My Retrorig is Abit KT7A & Athlon XP-M Barton @2GHz and I can slow the FSB down to 100MHz, multiplier to 3x with SETMUL (so 300MHz) and then disable L1 cache so it's veery slow and I can play Wing Commander and so on. Great all-arounder.

While I initially used full size 16MB one sided SIMM module (kmm5364105bkg) it felt kind of overkill for dos tracker music playback. btw I think it's even EDO module so EDO is working. It's sticking out a lot. Decided to streamline look. I went for nice low profile 8MB FPM module from LG (GMM7322000BNS6), two sided. But ... ...only half 4MB is recognized by Orpheus. Is that normal?

yes it's normal
orpheusII can do nothing about how InterWave detects it's ram, double sided sticks are 99% sure to be recognized at half capacity
single-sided FPM 60~70ns sticks are your safest bet

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-19, 07:12:

keropi wrote on 2023-04-19, 06:49:

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-19, 04:48:

[...]
Can somebody else try those titles?

just did, no issues ... POP and Dynablaster have both sfx/music playing just fine
tested on my 200mmx system , no slowdown needed for these games

Thanks for testing, so it's my system, not the card. Actually I was quite sure it's not the card but still asked...

My Retrorig is Abit KT7A & Athlon XP-M Barton @2GHz and I can slow the FSB down to 100MHz, multiplier to 3x with SETMUL (so 300MHz) and then disable L1 cache so it's veery slow and I can play Wing Commander and so on. Great all-arounder.

My Abit KT7A system just doesn't like Orpheus2. PCM-sounds are missing in many games or in old demoscene productions (which don't support GUS yet). Lowering FSB, multiplier, disabling caches, nothing helps. ESS Solo-1 PCI didn't have those problems. Think it's the chipset/ISA-bus implementation which fails here. Ultrasound Classic works.

But, swapped Orpheus2 to my Cyrix 5x86/100 (QDI V4S741) system and no problems, everything works! Maybe it's better machine anyway for DOS-gaming which purpose this card fulfills like no other.

Still loving the epic sound quality, old games, mod- and midi-music, everything just sounds so good... Need to test this on my HiFi-system.

dj_pirtu wrote on 2023-04-22, 12:06:

My Abit KT7A system just doesn't like Orpheus2. PCM-sounds are missing in many games or in old demoscene productions (which don't support GUS yet). Lowering FSB, multiplier, disabling caches, nothing helps. ESS Solo-1 PCI didn't have those problems. Think it's the chipset/ISA-bus implementation which fails here. Ultrasound Classic works.

In some cases, you will need to experiment with different combinations of ISA bus clock, I/O recovery time, delayed transaction and passive release to find the right balance. Firstly, some motherboard designs don't behave as expected with some of these settings, and then, the different components of Orpheus II are somewhat sensitive to ISA bus timings (YMF289 needs additional delays, InterWave doesn't like too much delay and really doesn't work well too far from 8 MHz ISA clock, and CS4237 is usually fairly well-behaved and rather tolerant, as long as you give it some amount of delay). If, at some point, you want to try Orpheus II in that system again, those settings may be worth considering.

Fun fact. While the ESS Solo-1 is generally very compatible in older boards, I have experienced it failing to work in some modern (Socket 775) motherboards in both DOS and Windows.