Crushdown wrote on 2023-10-28, 09:04:

[...]
At this point, would you agree that the problem is bios / mobo related, and not windows related ?

still not sure, try with pure DOS + ORPHINIT some games , ORPHEUS /V will display messages and if there are issues the messages will provide more details than "environment error" one

keropi wrote on 2023-10-28, 09:14:

Crushdown wrote on 2023-10-28, 09:04:

[...]
At this point, would you agree that the problem is bios / mobo related, and not windows related ?

still not sure, try with pure DOS + ORPHINIT some games , ORPHEUS /V will display messages and if there are issues the messages will provide more details than "environment error" one

OK !

You were right indeed, after running orphinit.exe and orphenv.bat in pure DOS mode, I am now able to run wolf3d with perfect SB music and fx !

Now I need to figure out whats going wrong on windows startup ...

ok good - remember all you need to run is ORPHEUS.BAT , no need to run orphinit/orphenv seperately

try this, go to device manager under windows and manually assign the desired ports/IRQ/DMA , save and reboot and see if this helps

Any update on when more Orpheus 2LT's will be available? Thanks

[FMC]Ravage wrote on 2023-10-28, 16:36:

Any update on when more Orpheus 2LT's will be available? Thanks

Currently in production at factory, I want to say in 3 weeks they will be available

I have some problems getting the GUS-part of my Orpheus II detected:

During POST I get the following message:

1Initialize Plug and Play Cards...
2Card-01: CS4237B
3PNP Init Completed

But I only get the Card-01-line sometimes. I do not remember for sure if I got something about the GUS once, but I think I did. It does not matter if I have PNP disabled or enabled.

Sometimes even the crystal-part is not detected under Win 98 SE. As long as it is detected it works but it is pretty noisy as long as the synth-input is enabled. The OPL works, but it is pretty silent and not much louder than the noise itself. The crystal FM-Synth emulation is a lot louder.

I could install the GUS-driver in Win 98SE (fresh install) once, however I am not sure if this necessarily means it was detected. Now I only see the crystal-part (and the MPU) in the device manager and cannot detect any new devices there. Just once or twice I got an unknown device.

Using MS-DOS 6.22 I tried both UniSound and the preinstalled driver from the Orpheus II-page.
UniSound gives me the following message for /C4 and /C8 (on repeated execution, trying all the /Cn-options):

1Card #1 [___FFFF] Skipped.
2Card #2 [CSC7537] Skipped.

So maybe something is wrong with the GUS or the firmware? However I can only find the EEPROM-reset tool for the Orpheus I - if that would even be of any help.

Using the preinstalled driver I got the following message:

1Error: No UltraSound Cards Were Found

I am using the following mainboard and settings:
- ASUS P5A (rev 1.04 BIOS 1011.005) which is referenced on the Orpheus II-Page. So I assume it should be possible to get this running. I tried to apply the fix suggested there but I do not find the "PCI DELAY TRANSACTION"-setting in "PNP/PCI CONFIGURATION". Do I maybe need an older BIOS-Version to see this? I also tried unlocking hidden options but apparently there were none. However I also do not get the error message mentioned on the page so I hope I am good. Also I am not 100% sure if flashing the BIOS works correctly: Uniflash reports errors during verification. Aflash did a regular BIOS update successfully but flashing a modified BIOS didn't result in any visible changes. Testing the modded BIOS in 86Box shows it is clearly different.
- The mainboard does not show any option to reserve DMA 7 for ISA (DMA 5 is the highest one). However it does not seem to be used for anything else in Win 98 SE.
- I tried both PNP off and on
- I also have an ASUS P2B-S that I could test but I also cannot set DMA 7. Also the POST-screen only shows the crystal and not the GUS. I have not done any further tests as I'd first need to replace the CPU-Cooler.

So does anyone have any idea what could be happening here? Am I doing something wrong? Is the GUS-Part somehow damaged?

P4C800 wrote on 2023-11-16, 11:52:

I have some problems getting the GUS-part of my Orpheus II detected: [...]

I am not sure what to recommend here, it seems your system has a bunch of issues and with the orpheusII you are essentially adding 3 more cards to it.
If only the GUS part was not being detected then we could try to troubleshoot but to my understanding the Crystal part does not always work and you can't even do a BIOS update?
It would worth IMHO to replace or at least check your PSU for starters.

If you want to make ULTRASND.ZIP driver use an IRQ other than 7 then you will have to edit IW.INI - specifically the IRQ1=7 and IRQ2=7 lines.
The INI is setup to ignore PnP and use the settings above as a way to have user-control on resources (default was PnP settings but these would vary greatly from system to system).

I hope you can find the culprit so you can enjoy your card, if it turns out that it's an OrpheusII hardware fault we will repair/replace as needed 😀

edit:
if you test with P2B make sure to select "PnP OS installed: YES" as this board needs it for crystal/interwave chips

Thanks for your quick reply!

Now that you said it trying another PSU sounds so obvious. I took a look at the Orpheus II PCB and it looks like it does not use -5V, I hope this is correct. So I used a much newer PSU that doesn't have -5V. Testing under Win 98 the noise is gone and the OPL has pretty much the same volume as the Crystal FM synth. So this is much better! Next I started a scan in the device manager again. This is where the Orpheus II disappeared in Win 98 never to be seen again 🙁. I can still get it to work in DOS using orphinit but it often needs a few attempts. The GUS-part however is not detected at all.

I also got my P2B-S up and running and installed a fresh Win 98 but the results are the same as for the P5A.

So I hope the bad PSU did not damage my Orpheus II...

I will doublecheck everything again and maybe try to get even another older board (I also have a Shuttle HOT-433 Socket 3 mainboard with a 486 DX4) to do some more testing.

Why would -5V on the bus cause noise for an Orpheus of it doesn't use this power rail?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-17, 04:15:

Why would -5V on the bus cause noise for an Orpheus of it doesn't use this power rail?

pretty sure the old PSU was not good in some way so P4C800 tried a newer one without -5v rail (that orpheus does not use anyway) and saw improvements.

I would also suggest to upgrade to the latest version of the motherboard BIOS and to a complete reset and also enable the "reset configuration data" option.
Testing on the other 486 system wouldn't hurt either if said system is working fine.

Also P2B needs for sure the "PNP OS installed" option to be enabled as it was found in Orphinit thread.

Thanks for your hints! So I did some more tests on my P2B-S. I updated the BIOS to the newest version (1014-003) and it was sucessful! So finally a working flash. So I'll have to get some new ones for my P5A and a programmer as well... After updating the BIOS I reset all settings both by removing the power and the battery for a few minutes and in the BIOS as well. Still I found some setting that got preserved despite all of this (the setting to not complain about missing -5V). So maybe there is another non volatile storage? Or I messed up somehow. Then I reconfigured everything, disabled as many devices as possible and set "PNP OS installed" to YES.

Using DOS (both 6.22 and rebooting to DOS from Win 98 SE) the crystal-part works fine, the Interwave/GUS however does not. Using Win 98 SE the results are somewhat similar (Crystal + MPU work, Interwave does not), however it does not work every time but just every 10th reboot or something like that the sound card is detected. However when it is detected, it runs well for as long as I tested (at least 60min).

Some more in-depth details:

DOS:
Orphinit works more or less fine, however sometimes I see the following output repeated multiple times before it succeeds. In rare cases I even need to start it multiple times.

1Hostload/SLAM
2        WSS: 534
3        CTRL: 538/0
4Sent 284 bytes.

After the initialization Adlib and Soundblaster work in games.
Every time I tried Unisound with the Orpheus II plugged in it detects the Crystal and a 2nd device with a weird looking ID (___FFFF) as mentioned previously. When I unplug the Orpheus II no device at all is detected. So this weird device could be the Interwave?
The preinstalled ultrasound-driver just reports

1Error: No UltraSound Cards Were Found

as before.
Running dump.exe from this post by JazeFox gives the same result both with the Orpheus installed as well as with the Orpheus removed. In the output I cannot see any device that looks like the Orpheus II to me. Still I attached the dump, in case I missed something. I am wondering how Unisound is still able to detect the card anyways. Maybe I should try again making sure I run both programs without doing a reboot in between.

Win:
I broke the first Win-install on the P2B-S in a way that it always kept all devices in the device manager even if I unplugged them (I broke it by trying to reserve all IRQs and DMAs the Orpheus should have using the device manager while they still were in use). This lead to resource conflicts by detecting two graphics cards and also I had two keyboards detected. However this made the Crystal-part of the Orpheus work wonderfully, it was just present and working on every reboot. As this windows was pretty much broken however I reinstalled and I didn't take a backup before...
Also under windows there sometimes are some unknown devices detected that I suspect to be the Interwave. As with unisound they always have weird, broken Device IDs when looking at them in HWiNFO. IRQ7 and DMA7 are unused. However, even if they were used, the Device ID still should be reported correctly, right?
This leads me to the conclusion that I somehow have a massive PnP-Issue so that the card is only detected really rarely. All other devices work fine and I suspect at least some of them to be PnP as well (or maybe they aren't?). But what causes this? See below for my ideas, I'd be happy for any recommendations!
Update: I just tested, the MPU-401 works even if the Crystal is not detected. It is just pretty silent.

The ideas I have left of what to try:
- I'll go hunt in my basement if I find another ISA PnP card to see if just the Orpheus II is affected or other ISA-devices are affected as well.
- I'll try some other mainboards, but I need to get them running first, haven't tested them in years. I hope at least some of them don't need -5V (I have no clue about which devices needed it).
- Maybe try another version of Windows (or fully updating win 98 in case this maybe helps?) as other users reported success with both the boards I tried.
- Ill bring my oscilloscope back home from work to not just do simple tests of my PSUs as I did before but instead also measure the ripple. In hindsight I should have done that before. But as none of the capacitors looked bad or got warm at all and simple voltage measurements looked good I assumed the PSU to be good... If you have any measurements you can recommend to do on my Orpheus II I'll happily do them as long as the pins are somewhat reasonable to reach/attach to. I have 4 channels available but I still have to custom-compile sigrok to be able to do some logic analyzing in case that would be needed.
- I'll try yet another PSU, the one that is currently deeply integrated in my computer that I am using right now.

P4C800 wrote on 2023-11-18, 23:33:

Thanks for your hints! [...]

do you get any of these PnP devices on the BIOS messages when the system boots? similar to this?

And what happens when Crystal part does not work, do you get it listed and it does not work or it disappears from BIOS list as well?
If the behavior was constant (meaning interwave never worked but crystal does) I would say that something is damaged but this crystal intermittent working could be a clue...
if you can test on some other completely different system that is known good working it would give more clues I think - doesn't have to be a PnP system even a 386 mobo would do.
also keep in mind that even though PCMIDI/MPU-401 is getting detected it does not produce sound on it's own: it will either send midi signals to outside synths or to the wavetable header that in turn uses the Crystal chip to output it's sound so if Crystal chip is not initialized correctly then you will hear nothing or very low volume.

I will send you a PM with some tool, be sure to read it

Hello!
Use orphinit.exe /vv
Please tell us how many cards are detected.
I had an ASUS P2B-L , it's the lan version of your board that uses SCSI. Can you tell us how SCSI is configured? which IRQs and DMAs are occupied?
On P5A with ali chipset there are some issues also, just browse Orpheus+P5A and you will see what was done to solve some issues.

keropi wrote on 2023-11-19, 06:47:

do you get any of these PnP devices on the BIOS messages when the system boots? similar to this?
...
And what happens when Crystal part does not work, do you get it listed and it does not work or it disappears from BIOS list as well?

I do get somewhat similar messages: On the post screen I sometimes get one PnP-card detected. However this does not correlate with the Crystal-part working in windows in any way (I can get both the card detected during post but not working in windows as well as not detected during post but working in windows).

On the "PnP"-screen that follows I only get PCI devices listed and never any ISA devices.

keropi wrote on 2023-11-19, 06:47:

If the behavior was constant (meaning interwave never worked but crystal does) I would say that something is damaged but this crystal intermittent working could be a clue...
if you can test on some other completely different system that is known good working it would give more clues I think - doesn't have to be a PnP system even a 386 mobo would do.

Well, I thought the P2B-S to be good as everything appeared to be working well until I tested the Orpheus. So I do not know how to make sure any of my systems are 100% good. I can only try the following two things: 1. Try more different mobos where everything else appears to be working. 2. Try some other ISA cards if they are working in my P2B-S. I am not sure however if I have any ISA-PnP-cards, I'll take a look if I have any. I do have non-PnP-ones, though.

keropi wrote on 2023-11-19, 06:47:

also keep in mind that even though PCMIDI/MPU-401 is getting detected it does not produce sound on it's own: it will either send midi signals to outside synths or to the wavetable header that in turn uses the Crystal chip to output it's sound so if Crystal chip is not initialized correctly then you will hear nothing or very low volume.

Sorry, I should have been more specific: I plugged something into the wavetable header and could hear the sound from the output of the orpheus. And I can confirm the low volume. The volume is normal if the crystal-part is detected in windows.

keropi wrote on 2023-11-19, 06:47:

I will send you a PM with some tool, be sure to read it

Thanks, I will reply in a few minutes.

Marmes wrote on 2023-11-19, 14:39:

Hello!
Use orphinit.exe /vv
Please tell us how many cards are detected.

Sometimes ther are 0 PnP-Cards detected and sometimes there is one. I merged both outputs in a single file because I am at the 5 attachments limit. I cannot tell for sure if I got these reports on a first initialization or on a repeated one, though. If that is important I'll redo them.

Unisound always detects 2 cards with the Orpheus plugged in and none without it.

Marmes wrote on 2023-11-19, 14:39:

I had an ASUS P2B-L , it's the lan version of your board that uses SCSI. Can you tell us how SCSI is configured? which IRQs and DMAs are occupied?

First I tried to disable SCSI in the bios but I just could disable its BIOS. But now I found a jumper to disable it completely (and I did).
Here are screenshots of my IRQs and DMAs while only the MPU is detected.

Marmes wrote on 2023-11-19, 14:39:

On P5A with ali chipset there are some issues also, just browse Orpheus+P5A and you will see what was done to solve some issues.

Yes, I already read of one (point 3 in the FAQ on http://pcmidi.eu/orpheus2.html) and it didn't apply to me. Also I couldn't even find the BIOS setting on the PNP/PCI configuration page. But I will check again if there are more.

Thanks for helping me figuring this out!

Your read pnp data keeps shifting. It looks strange. It seems it's out of range. Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems something with bios.

I had a quick look through all of this, and there is definitely something strange going on. The DUMP report shows what we already knew: the PnP BIOS didn't find or report any cards. So, the fact remains that even the BIOS designed for those boards cannot consistently find any PnP ISA devices. When it does, it appears to report only one.

The thing that is particularly strange is that the results are not at all consistent, and every tool so far tends to hunt before settling on a read data port. This is not normal, and suggests a problem somewhere. One thing we have seen a number of times is these types of storage adaptors causing trouble. Is there any possibility of using a real hard disk, or at least using a DOS boot floppy with only ORPHINIT and the DUMP tool, and disconnecting that SD card conversion adaptor?

I would also disable what USB controller , if it's the onboard one then it's a USB1.1 that is also a resource hog... it could be a case of lack of resources in the end
it is a good idea to do what 640k!enough suggests - remove all cards except orpheus2 and VGA and disable any extra com/lpt/devices that are not used , what will happen then?

I have an ASUS P5A board and tested my Orpheus II card in it. Besides the Award PnP BIOS being a pain with default resources and fighting Windows 98SE to put each section of the card on the "correct" resources, the card works fine in Windows and pure DOS. I didn't even have to disable PCI DELAY TRANSACTION to get the Crystal Windows 9x drivers to work. Overall the ASUS customized Award BIOS is annoying. It doesn't list ISA/PnP devices on the hardware configuration summery like a stock Award BIOS does. Its automatic IRQ assignment sets resources for PCI devices before ISA cards too, so you MUST reserve the IRQs in the BIOS configuration for the Orpheus.

640K!enough wrote on 2023-11-20, 06:18:

The thing that is particularly strange is that the results are not at all consistent, and every tool so far tends to hunt before settling on a read data port. This is not normal, and suggests a problem somewhere. One thing we have seen a number of times is these types of storage adaptors causing trouble. Is there any possibility of using a real hard disk, or at least using a DOS boot floppy with only ORPHINIT and the DUMP tool, and disconnecting that SD card conversion adaptor?

Thanks fort the hint! I took one of my old HDDs and installed Win 98 on it, the results stay the same. I still need to try dump once again but I need to go to bed now, so I'll probably post the result tomorrow.

keropi wrote on 2023-11-20, 06:50:

I would also disable what USB controller , if it's the onboard one then it's a USB1.1 that is also a resource hog... it could be a case of lack of resources in the end
it is a good idea to do what 640k!enough suggests - remove all cards except orpheus2 and VGA and disable any extra com/lpt/devices that are not used , what will happen then?

I didn't find a way to disable it, but I could disable the IRQs for it. Also I disabled everything I could. I already disabled pretty much everything I could before but now I even added one IDE channel. However this board still seems to scan for devices on a disabled channel. Maybe I should try an older but non-beta bios...

NJRoadfan wrote on 2023-11-21, 00:35:

I have an ASUS P5A board and tested my Orpheus II card in it. Besides the Award PnP BIOS being a pain with default resources and fighting Windows 98SE to put each section of the card on the "correct" resources, the card works fine in Windows and pure DOS. I didn't even have to disable PCI DELAY TRANSACTION to get the Crystal Windows 9x drivers to work. Overall the ASUS customized Award BIOS is annoying. It doesn't list ISA/PnP devices on the hardware configuration summery like a stock Award BIOS does. Its automatic IRQ assignment sets resources for PCI devices before ISA cards too, so you MUST reserve the IRQs in the BIOS configuration for the Orpheus.

Thanks a lot for testing! Maybe you could answer some additional questions: 1. Which BIOS version do you use? 2. Could you find the "PCI DELAY TRANSACTION"-option in the BIOS? 3. Did you see an option to reserve DMA-7?

I also started to get two other mainboards up and running
1: Gigabyte GA-586TX3 REV 1.08
It is a Socket 7 board with an Intel chipset and it has a Pentium MMX 233. Pretty similar Award BIOS as the previous boards, but it is no ASUS-board so it should behave somewhat differently. At least there are more options in the BIOS and they seem to work better, too! However I also didn't see any PnP-ISA devices listed during booting. I cannot get the interwave detected under DOS as on the other boards. Next up are Windows tests, but I cannot get the 40GB HDD detected, so I either need to use a smaller one or I probably need to flash the BIOs.

2: Shuttle HOT-433
Socket 3, 486 CPU, the oldest board that I currently have available. I just did a quick I got it running with my old (bad?) PSU with -5V but not with a newer one without -5V. The CMOS battery is dead but integrated into the Dallas clock module, so it is not easy to replace. The bad thing is it apparently doesn't want to store any settings, even if it restarts without cutting power. That way I currently cannot even configure the correct floppy drive. I only checked this quickly, so some of this may be wrong. I need to do further testing.

Also I did some quick measurements on my PSUs with my oscilloscope, however mostly at some cheap small load where I could accept some damage. I didn't find any ripple that instantly looked really bad to me, but there was some high frequency ripple (or maybe just noise, there were only small peaks on a mostly flat voltage curve) of at most 300mV on the suspectedly bad PSU. So I have to do some further reading on what kind of ripple is acceptable. But at least I didn't see any crazy voltage spikes that would make me fear hardware damage. Also I'll have to test at more realistic loads.

Sorry for getting pretty much everything just half-done, I'll post again if I found the time to get more thorough testing done.

I am running the latest stock BIOS for the motherboard, 1011 Beta 005. My board does not have onboard audio. Note that both the Ultrasound PnP and Crystal parts of the board should show up under configured PnP cards on the initial POST screen. In the BIOS, the following was set under the PnP Configuration.

Plug and Play OS Installed: NO

IRQs 3, 5, 7 set to "Legacy ISA"

Onboard serial and parallel ports were disabled to free resources up. Machine has an Adaptec SCSI card, Firewire card, and NIC all grabbing IRQs. I eventually got them to all share an IRQ.