Does it have an ASP/CSP chip? The SB16, which the AWE was based on, sometimes had it installed.

"Accelerating" Windows 95 with Creative's Advanced Signal Processor (CSP)

Jo22 wrote on 2022-04-07, 14:45:

Does it have an ASP/CSP chip? The SB16, which the AWE was based on, sometimes had it installed.

"Accelerating" Windows 95 with Creative's Advanced Signal Processor (CSP)

Thank you for the replying, i'm reading it.

Taking a look to my sound card, it doesn't appear to be any "ASP/CSP chip on it, How can i recognize it?.

edit:

Bad news, appears to be that only AWE 32 has this asp/csp chip compatibility:

"The original AWE32 had, as standard, the CT-1748 QSound Advanced Signal Processor (ASP), later known as the Creative Signal Processor (CSP), which was an optional upgrade in the Sound Blaster 16. All full-length AWE32s should have one soldered onto the PCB. The AWE32 Value has a socket for a CT-1748 chip, which could have been purchased from Creative Labs. The SB32s and AWE64s do not have any support for the chip."

...

"To replace the missing daughterboard header, instead the AWE64 uses a 32-note polyphonic software wavetable synthesizer called WaveSynth/WaveGuide. This software synthesizer has been reported to use between 10-%15% of your CPU power. There are also reports that WS/WG doesn't work on Cyrix CPUs."

http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/sb_awe32_64.php

What a drag...

Hm. Sorry to hear. But the SB32 and AWEs had the EMU-8000, which was an excellent synthesizer chip by EMU Systems.

Some games may support it for mixing or wavetable music.
Some MOD trackers like Impulse Tracker can use that chip.
I tried that in the past myself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound#Features

Well, the ASP/CSP chip just helps with some kind of compressed sounds, like ADPCM.
Although this DSP chip works with 12 MHz it lacks on local RAM, so there is no way to speed up codecs like MP3.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-04-15, 19:28:

Hm. Sorry to hear. But the SB32 and AWEs had the EMU-8000, which was an excellent synthesizer chip by EMU Systems. […]
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Hm. Sorry to hear. But the SB32 and AWEs had the EMU-8000, which was an excellent synthesizer chip by EMU Systems.

Some games may support it for mixing or wavetable music.
Some MOD trackers like Impulse Tracker can use that chip.
I tried that in the past myself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound#Features

Yes, the AWE 64 gold has the EMU 8000 too, but, if i'm not understanding bad, the CT-1748 is something like a way to do DMA without the helping of any cpu.

With all the data transferred, then yes, the EMU 8000 will do all the work without any kind of support.

I don't know if i'm right.

Disruptor wrote on 2022-04-15, 20:17:

Well, the ASP/CSP chip just helps with some kind of compressed sounds, like ADPCM.
Although this DSP chip works with 12 MHz it lacks on local RAM, so there is no way to speed up codecs like MP3.

What is the difference, then?.

With the CT-1748 it doens't need the support of the cpu, but... Do need the support in some circumstances anyways?.

Two different things.

The CT-1748 is for playback of ADPCM compressed audio. You bacially send it ADPCM compressed data (usually through DMA/IRQ) and the chip will decompress and play back the audio. This obviously takes some pressure of the CPU becuase if you had to do the decompression with the CPU before sending it over DMA/IRQ, it would cost CPU cycles. However, the CPU is still interrupted each time it needs to st up the next bit of audio data to play back. You also can't really play two pieces of ADPCM compress audio at the same time.

The EMU-8000 is a bit simliar to the GF1 on the Ultrasound in that you load digital sampes into onboard RAM of the sound card (the reason AWE32 & AWE64 come with onboard RAM). Once the digital audio is in onboard RAM you can instruct the card the play back these samples and control the pitch, volume etc by sending instructions to the card. The card itself will take care of the mixing if multiple samples are played back at the same time. In this case, to play back audio you only need a timer to instruct the card with new information at a specific interval. No need for a DMA/IRQ set up (unless on an Ultrasound you want to "stream" audio).

So, the EMU-8000 can take a lot of load of the CPU and give better playback since the audio is mixed in hardware.

Hi again and happy Easter everyone ! 🐰

Does the SB32/ do the AWEs accelerate DirectX or Win95 in any way ?
I vaguely remember that Windows gamers in the 90s liked the AWE32/64.
However, I wasn't really up-to-date back then.

DirectX was something I recognized as a technology roughly past the year 2000.
Before that, I was more of a Windows 3.1 or Win 95 (original) person.
I had a PAS16 and the games I played used GDI/MCI mainly rather than DirectDraw/DirectSound (3D)/DirectMusic.

I'd be really glad if someone from the Win95/97 days could elaborate what useful features the AWEs had and if they had a positive impact on gaming.

I mean, the whole MIDI synthesis was doable via EMU-8000 technically.
No need for a CPU-driven softsynth ala SYXG50 thus.
Didn't this help with games that had MIDI background music etc?

Edit: I forget to mention. There's a MOD player for Windows 3.1/95 that supports the EMU-8000.
But I vaguely remember that it needs the correct set of Creative drivers to work.

AMP for Windows 2.2
http://r3m.narod.ru/old/M_AWE_SB_Live_PAGE.htm

Edit: PCem/86Box emulate the EMU-8000, as well.
I once did dump my cards wavetable font and successfully used the dump with PCem. 😀

In theory EMU8000 will fit DirectSound accelerations model, to support playback of SFX type things without CPU having to mix and scale the samples, but limited sample RAM in default confs makes it quite useless. 512KB holds only a small handful of sounds and it doesn't seem RAM expansions were commonplace, updating that RAM is slower than processing the samples in software manually on hardware where DirectX is relevant 🤣

Tiido and Jo22 it's interesting you bring up direcsound as at this point the gravis ultrasound was your very last resort. I wonder why they had so much difficulties releasing the drivers. Even directmusic lost capabilities to manage wavetable devices patch for the gus.