First post, by auron
i've recently come to notice that just running CTCM is not enough to make the AWE32 music option in games play on the CT4520, despite it saying that 3 devices were configured. while it does appear to play (no "no sound driver" message in descent setup, which appears when the card isn't initialized at all), playback is simply silent. only after running AWEUTIL /S will the music be audible, and i did already check mixerset beforehand to see whether it could be that, and everything was turned up there. this only applies when booting directly to dos, not rebooting to dos from win9x - in that case, the card clearly retains the initialization from windows and AWEUTIL /S is not needed for AWE32 playback.
this might be obvious to some, but the reason i'm confused is that i'm pretty sure the common wisdom has been that AWEUTIL /S is needed just to enable FM playback on AWE32/64 cards. it doesn't usually seem to be referenced regarding EMU8k playback via direct game support (so not GM emulation via TSR), and in fact the AWE64 FAQ says just as much:
13. Does AWEUTIL have to stay memory resident? […]
13. Does AWEUTIL have to stay memory resident?
AWEUTIL serves two purposes; to initialize and control
the reverb and chorus effects of the FM hardware on the SB AWE
card, and to provide NMI MIDI Feedback.AWEUTIL /S
will initialize and set the reverb and chorus effect of
the FM hardware, and then terminate. It will not stay resident
in memory.
same for AWEUTIL.TXT (CTCM's readme doesn't even make any mention of it at all):
ADVANCED WAVEFFECTS UTILITY ============================= […]
ADVANCED WAVEFFECTS UTILITY
=============================Your sound directory contains a DOS utility called AWEUTIL which
allows you to perform the following operations on your Advanced
WavEffects audio card:* Initialize AWE hardware to play music synthesis effects
* Use MIDI Emulation to support computer games
* Control Music Synthesis Effects
* Troubleshooting[...]
Initializing AWE Hardware to Play Music Synthesis Effects
---------------------------------------------------------Before you can play music synthesis effects, you need to initialize
the AWE hardware by typing this command line:AWEUTIL /S
NOTE: This command initializes the AWE hardware only and does not
leave the program resident in system memory.Using MIDI Emulation to Support Computer Games
----------------------------------------------Although protected mode software does not support MIDI Emulation, you
can still play music from this software using the 4-operator
synthesizer chip.AWEUTIL allows you to enable the MIDI Emulation feature of your audio
card. This feature allows games and other software that do not
support wavetable synthesis to play wavetable music from the sound
card. Note that you also need to enable the MFBEN jumper on your
audio card for MIDI Emulation to work.
"music synthesis" is very ambiguous terminology but it's in fact clear this refers to FM synthesis - elsewhere in the file the AWEUTIL chorus/reverb effects are mentioned as only applying to said "music synthesis", and that this "music synthesis" is also what needs to be used when AWEUTIL in TSR mode cannot coexist with DOS extenders. the "MIDI emulation" of course refers to AWEUTIL as TSR to support the GM mode in games. so, again, no documentation of it enabling direct EMU8k support.
is the CT4520 simply an outlier in the AWE32/64 family due to its newer CT8920 chip, or does this behavior actually apply to all AWE cards? i've read that when the EMU8k uses the onboard RAM, two voices are actually used for DRAM refresh+timing, so the full 32 voices are only available with pure ROM playback - so it's perhaps not just because of FM routing like some people think. two sources regarding this: 1 2 maybe CTCM initializes it to the wrong mode and AWEUTIL /S switches it to the correct one?
