Beneath a Steel Sky?
Re: AdLib Gold 1000 games support

I've been working on a multi-sound card 386 build which includes an Adlib Gold. One of my goals with that setup is to test Adlib Gold games alongside standard Adlib OPL support (via YMF719) to see which games have noticeable differences.

I'm also curious about Adlib Gold supported gamed that aren't in those online lists. For example, Beneath a Steel Sky has support for Adlib Gold in its audio setup, but isn't in any of those lists.

In general I've noticed that despite listing a lot of games and audio options, even Moby Games doesn't list everything. There are more undocumented audio options out there for DOS games that aren't listed anywhere.

You can add The Lost Vikings to games with enhanced Adlib Gold music. Just tested it and noticed it has some neat stereo effects in the main theme compared to the regular Adlib soundtrack.

Retested The Lost Vikings and it's not a unique Adlib Gold soundtrack. The Adlib Gold option uses a stereo OPL3 track, but in testing it sounds identical on my generic Yamaha YMF-719 chip.

I tried BASS quickly, and it does seem to work, for music at least. I should really setup a proper recording connection to produce comparisons... a few quick observations as I didn't have much time yet:

The install menu still gives you the resources configuration when selecting the Adlib Gold option, which made me hopeful for digital audio. The selectable IO addresses are limited to usual SB ranges tho (220h to 280h), similar to what dionb observed with Colonization in his post that I had missed...I tried to set at least IRQ and DMA and run the Gold's drivers.bat, but if I do that I don't get any sound at all out of the game, while music works fine when I don't run drivers.bat as the game is probably addressing 388h directly by default when set to Audio Gold. So I'm still unsure if digital audio is possible at all in this game as well.

I can't exclude resource conflicts in my config and need to sort this out first, as I do have plenty of soundcards in there as well 😁
Changing the card's IRQ and DMA is done through SETUPGLD.exe, which requires drivers to be running. Does anyone know more about these "drivers", are they required to do stuff such as changing the configuration only, or will actually run the configuration as well? I need to toy with that stuff more but happy to hear others about this. I'll probably use Colonization as a test as dionb confirmed having digital sound there.

And I will try The Lost Vikings too 😀 thanks for the input!

Cheers

@mods thinking about it maybe it would be worth merging dionb's post and this post? I believe they're similar enough in content and goal

Re: AdLib Gold 1000 games support

I tested Beneath a Steel Sky as well. Picking the Adlib Gold leaving the the audio settings as default, it seems to work exactly the same as the Adlib / Sound Blaster option. I get digital audio via my Sound Blaster Pro compatible card while music is played through the Adlib Gold. It doesn't sound like the music is any different compared to the regular Adlib.

I also re-watched LGR's Adlib Gold review and he mentions KGB as having an Adlib Gold soundtrack. It's also by Cryo Games (makes of Dune 2) and has the same composer. In giving it a quick listen, it doesn't sound any different from the regular Adlib sound option. It is an amazing soundtrack though.

I also tried Warlords 2 which has options for both digital audio and music via the Adlib Gold. When picking the Adlib Gold for sound, it causes my system to lock up when trying to play digital audio. Though given the number of sound cards in my current system, I'm not surprised.

Boohyaka wrote on 2023-07-14, 12:10:

The only thing I regularly do with the card is listen to mods, as the particular texture and filtering is quite pleasant.

I've mentioned it before, but it may be worth repeating here again: the usual MOD player (WOW II) isn't so well behaved. Instead of properly retrieving the configuration from the card, it changes it to suit its own preferences. This usually means forcing DMA 1 for playback, regardless of the card's configuration at start-up, or what you tell it via the command line. This can often cause problems if you try to use other software that tries to play back digital audio afterwards, particularly if you have other hardware installed that uses ISA DMA (or emulates it).

Back when I first bought the card, I was furious that this kept happening. I blamed Ad Lib, I blamed their software, and nothing (even their suggestions) seemed to work. It wasn't until just a few years ago that I wrote a bit of test software, and finally found out what was going on and, ultimately, which application was the main culprit.