Sunoo wrote on 2023-06-26, 22:43:

Sounds like you’ve reinvented ISA.

Just what I thought 🤣

Sunoo wrote on 2023-06-26, 22:43:

Sounds like you’ve reinvented ISA.

More like reinventing midi daughterboard but instead of midi, it contains the digital processing units 😀

I heard you like ISA
So I put ISA on your ISA

In most setups you'd likely have to remove the actual card to change the "module" section anyway, so you may as well just have separate cards.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-26, 18:34:

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-26, 18:18:

igna78 wrote on 2023-06-26, 17:46:

Scuse me, but Yamaha YMF 7x4 is a chip with OPL3 core that work on PCI bus, is correct?

I believe it only works with drivers while in protected mode.

This is exactly what PCPCI is for.

PC/PCI is to enable PCI cards to access ISA DMA data. You need it for Sound Blaster compatibility. IIRC, PC/PCI also allows direct access to all ISA IRQ levels, avoiding the PCI IRQ routing logic. You do not your PC/PCI for port access. OPL3 only uses port access. So no PC/PCI required to get an OPL on the PCI bus, but PC/PCI helps a lot to get a SB Pro compatible chip on the PCI bus.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-06-27, 16:11:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-26, 18:34:

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-26, 18:18:

I believe it only works with drivers while in protected mode.

This is exactly what PCPCI is for.

PC/PCI is to enable PCI cards to access ISA DMA data. You need it for Sound Blaster compatibility. IIRC, PC/PCI also allows direct access to all ISA IRQ levels, avoiding the PCI IRQ routing logic. You do not your PC/PCI for port access. OPL3 only uses port access. So no PC/PCI required to get an OPL on the PCI bus, but PC/PCI helps a lot to get a SB Pro compatible chip on the PCI bus.

If this is true, a driverless OPL3 card on a PCI card would be fantastic, even if that's all it does. Or even one that was plug and play without any resident memory would be great too.

I was under the impression that driverless OPL3 was exclusive to the USA bus.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-27, 17:51:

If this is true, a driverless OPL3 card on a PCI card would be fantastic, even if that's all it does. Or even one that was plug and play without any resident memory would be great too.

I was under the impression that driverless OPL3 was exclusive to the USA bus.

YMF-7x4 has builtin hardware OPL3 support. Need to check, though, whether it requires DOS drivers

Port only access is definitely doable on PCI, it is how the diagnostic cards work even although by spec they are "illegal" but in reality nothing prevents a PCI device claim any IO cycle it wants. As far as OPL3 goes, the hard part is just the huge speed difference between PCI and OPL3. A FIFO mechanism or something is necessary to prevent poor bus usage.

Please do TPM sound card.

Recently I watched Rasteri's video about how TPM actually works over something called LPC, low-pin-count port which is encapsulating ISA. Rasteri showed homemade converter called dISAppointment. I've searched the topic and found the chip Winbond W83626F LPC-to-ISA. It is the same chip as in dISAppointment or another one.

Rasteri did the work in assumption that one would want to plug old ISA sound card into new motherboard without ISA and with TPM. But what if sound card vendor is active and can integrate TPM-to-ISA converter into the card?

And make non-ISA card for modern motherboards. It can be PCI(e?) card that only utilizes PCI(e?) port to drain power and to be held tightly in PCI slot. Real data transmission is performed by cable to motherboard's TPM port.

I would assume that the reason these chips work for DMA when integrated onto a motherboard is because it has access to additional pins that are not present in the PCI connector, similar to PC/PCI. Even if you mounted one of these chips to a PCI card, you can't create any additional functionality that isn't available on the PCI bus already.

Hi there! I just got my hands on this pretty awesome card and since it is my first GUS one I wanted to ask you something.

I want to use the GUS classic compatibility on the Orpheus II on MS-DOS under Win98 along with a AWE64 GOLD. Both with Unisound. And I have added the 16 stick of RAM to the Orpheus II and installed the Gravis UltraSound PnP driver v2.2 on the Orpheus II page.

I put this on my .bat file I use to run the cards each time I start MS-DOS mode on Win98:
SET ULTRASND=250,6,7,11,11
C:\UNISOUND\UNISOUND.COM /C1 /V85
SET ULTRADIR=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND
SET BLASTER=A240 I7 D3 H0 F388 P0 T4
C:\UNISOUND\UNISOUND.COM /C2 /V85 /VM0 /VC0 /VL0 /VF85
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 F0 E620 J0 P0 T6
C:\UNISOUND\UNISOUND.COM /C3 /V85 /VC40 /VM0 /VL0 /VW85 /VT00 /VB00  

The cards seem to work well with no conflicts on my ASUS P5A-B motherboard. However, I noticed that to run DOOM with the Gravis Ultrasound as the Music card I had to put some patches files from the Pro Patches Light 1.61 MIDI folder in the C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\MIDI folder.

My only question is if I need to do something else to correctly use Gus Classic compatibility  with Unisound. Is there anything else I am missing? It is not clear to me if the 16MB RAM stick is doing something automatically now (like loading a legacy ROM bank) or if I need to run some other program before running the games to use it. Or if use Impulse Tracker, which works if I run first C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IWSETENV.BAT and then C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IWINIT.EXE

Also I can't get UltraMID to work with just Unisound. Do I need to run another file (SETIWENV.BAT, IWINIT.EXE ?) before using it?

Thanks!

I cannot comment on using unisound - it sure can initialize the GUS portion of the card but then you need to add the extra variables for DOS to get ultramid and gus classic patches working.
I suggest you download ULTRASND.ZIP from the site and experiment until you get things going with unisound.

it is normal that you need the "gus classic patches" or propatches to get music in games like doom, things work like the classic gus where it loads the patches into ram and uses them.
Without ram on GUS PnP there is no gus classic support so rest assured the ram you installed is doing something 😀
(much like with GUS classic, onboard ram is needed and is not optional)

the most effortless way to get things going for the GUS part of OrpheusII is to use ULTRASND.ZIP as everything is pre-configured - so I suggest you give that a try 😉

holaplaneta wrote on 2023-07-03, 02:35:

I want to use the GUS classic compatibility on the Orpheus II on MS-DOS under Win98 along with a AWE64 GOLD. Both with Unisound.

Unless I missed an update, UNISOUND does not have direct support for Orpheus II yet. As a result, you are likely to be unable to use the Yamaha chip for FM synthesis, but will be stuck with Crystal FM. The only solutions at the moment are ORPHINIT or using separate Plug and Play tools (such as those from Intel); the latter is rather cumbersome. Also, if your BIOS is enabling the FM part itself, that leaves the mixer registers incorrectly configured, and you may get inconsistent results with software that uses FM.

For now, ORPHINIT may provide better results with your card for basic configuration. The InterWave/GUS side of things can be managed with either UNISOUND or IWINIT, but as keropi mentioned, his package (using IWINIT) is easier to live with.

A very small number of black OrpheusII cards is available: http://pcmidi.eu/orpheus2-blk.html
They exist because we wanted to use all components we already have and won't be used in the upcoming batch of OrpheusII cards because of parts shortages. (more info on the site).

The next batch of classic green OrpheusII cards is also progressing nicely but it will take it's time before they are available. At the moment we have bought almost all required parts 😀

Just received my LT in the mail today!! Won't have a chance to install it for a bit though. It will be replacing a generic Labway card.

I was initially going to put a Dreamblaster X2 on the wavetable header, but since I basically just use the Arachno soundfont, I went ahead and ordered an MP32L from Serdashop to use externally so I can just have one MIDI output setup and swap between MT-32 and GM on the MP32L.

Maybe if I decide to get an X2GS for a more SC55-accurate solution might I go back to two devices, but I think the simplicity of the MP32L on the Orpheus is going to fulfill most of my needs in that regard. Can't wait to get it installed and play around with it!

keropi wrote on 2023-07-04, 13:23:

the most effortless way to get things going for the GUS part of OrpheusII is to use ULTRASND.ZIP as everything is pre-configured - so I suggest you give that a try 😉

Thank you for the reply Keropi!

I did not get the ULTRASND.ZIP file in the first place cause on the official Orpheus II page it said I should not use it if I was running DOS under Win98. It says: This package is meant to be used under a pure DOS environment (and not for DOS-under-win9x).

So it should be OK if I do it? I appreciate your time.

holaplaneta wrote on 2023-07-07, 00:18:

Thank you for the reply Keropi! […]
Show full quote

keropi wrote on 2023-07-04, 13:23:

the most effortless way to get things going for the GUS part of OrpheusII is to use ULTRASND.ZIP as everything is pre-configured - so I suggest you give that a try 😉

Thank you for the reply Keropi!

I did not get the ULTRASND.ZIP file in the first place cause on the official Orpheus II page it said I should not use it if I was running DOS under Win98. It says: This package is meant to be used under a pure DOS environment (and not for DOS-under-win9x).

So it should be OK if I do it? I appreciate your time.

Under win9x you do not need either unisound or orphinit or ultrasnd.zip for things to work... You should install the crystal 9x drivers and the Gus PNP drivers for 9x and use the CD to install the extra files needed

keropi wrote on 2023-07-07, 12:37:

Under win9x you do not need either unisound or orphinit or ultrasnd.zip for things to work... You should install the crystal 9x drivers and the Gus PNP drivers for 9x and use the CD to install the extra files needed

Perfect, thank you! Just one question, what CD are you referring to? Win98 or the one that came with the official Gravis UltraSound PnP CD back then (GUS_PNP_CD
.rar)?

Update: OK, I got the Gravis UltraSound PnP CD and installed most of its contents. But when I try to install the 4MB patch set under Win98 it says "IW.EXE cannot be modified without INTERWAVE variable set." Any ideas?

holaplaneta wrote on 2023-07-08, 00:54:

Update: OK, I got the GUS PND disc and installed most of its contents. But when I try to install the 4MB patch set under Win98 it says "IW.EXE cannot be modified without INTERWAVE variable set." Any ideas?

a reboot should fix this as it would activate the variables set by the installation

Orpheus 2 LT arrived this week. Very pleased with the card! It is by a large margin the least noisy card in my possession right now. I think the only thing I ran into was, because music in Zone 66 is a combination of digital and FM music, the digital instruments were out of tune with the FM instruments. I'm not sure which one's out of tune. I don't know of any other games that use the Sound Blaster in this way, and it's been absolutely perfect in every other instance.

Windows likes to change my IRQ/DMA settings even after ORPHINIT. I use a different sound setup for Windows anyway, so to address this, I just removed the Crystal drivers in Windows (cwb*). As long as ORPHINIT has run during boot, DOS games will continue to use the Orpheus card. I still do have the MPU-401 device installed in Windows, so that media players can still push MIDI out the same port.

Overall, it has satisfied all my needs. I'm somewhat regretting not springing more for the full Orpheus 2 in retrospect. But maybe this will encourage me to assemble the Argus instead, which I've had sitting for a bit.