Ok 3 cards is too much 🤣

AWE64 at 260 and 280 doesn't produce any music anymore. SB 1.5 and SBP 2.0 at 220 and 240 play fine though...

For some reason Prince of Persia now does worh in Game Blaster mode on my 1.5 with CMS chips.

You launch it with prince gblast by the way...

I swear it didn't work before... Picky Retro hardware 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Oh well just switch to General Midi! […]
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Oh well just switch to General Midi!

Ok I now changed 388 to 390!

Doom FM, Wing Commander FM and Decent OPL2 FM now play from the 1.5 alone. Nothing comes out from the AWE.

However selecting OPL3 music in Descent = no music whatsoever! So it looks like changing 388 to 390 on the AWE64 makes that FM synth basically "disappear". I don't think any programmer thought about changing this...

Also the AWE synth sounds rather good with Descent!

My (very early) conclusion: While it's possible to change the port to something else than 388, it seems no game can take advantage of that. I certainly have never seen a setup menu ask for 388 and let me change that. That's why I was so surprised when I read 388 in this forum...

If you are happy to have only OPL2 in your system that's fine.

However if you want both it looks like sharing port 388 with both sound cards is the way to go. Yes you hear FM from both cards, but is this really a problem? It also supports OPL2 through the 1.5 and when you specifically select OPL3 you will get Stereo through the AWE (and mono through the 1.5).

I also changed DMA to 3 on the AWE card. I can select speech in Descent to come out on either card, same for DOOM!

Wing Commander 2 gets confused in the setup menu and tells me no Soundblaster found, but it's nice enough to let me choose all the resources and then the game works (On a P133 at full speed 😀

EDIT EDIT: having 2 cards (maybe 3 or 4?) play FM music all at the same time would make a great setup to do a comparison recording / video. Hook up a cross fader or input selector switch and you can switch back and forth between soundcards and listen to the differences...

Awesome!

Great Find!!!

Ok, I don't mind both the awe and sb1.5 playing at the same time. But it's the Ultima VI - It's not just playing together - they seem like CRASHING into each other's ports! 😁

Just let me know what you hear with Ultima VI with your current setup.

I haven't changed the low DMA in the AWE32 yet. Will do that first.

I believe DMA only affects speech...

Will test Ultima 6 now!

Update:

Plays fine! FM music from both cards. I selected Adlib in the install options. CMS also works! Beautiful score!

I tested this now with a SB 1.5 + CMS chips and SB Pro 2.0 and configured this way:

SB 1.5: 220/7/1
SB P 2.0: 240/5/3

My PC is a Pentium 133 and I disabled L1 and also L2 cache which gives me ~ 386DX

Great! I'll check my setup again!

For me that looks like another configuration hell thread, though I wonder what all this fuzz is about.
I had a EWS64XL+WT, GUS, SB AWE32 running together in a system for a while and everything worked fine. Another Covox SM wouldn't have screwed this config since noone else uses 338 anyway.
(In the specific system were only 3 ISA slots)

Ofcourse you have to make some ressource plan and know what you can share without problems.
Usually different FM OPLs at 388h are no problem, since all will play. You can also chain MIDI devices on the same port in UART mode (attached to one card).
f.e. I used this config:
EWS64XL at A260,I11,D0,P330,I9/2 P300 C104 F388
GUS A240 I7 I7 D7 D7 (MegaEM option at P330,I9/2)
AWE32 A220,I5,D1,H5,E620,F388
assuming another covox you could put it at A280,I3,P338,F388 (if SM+ with OPL2)

some comments:
LPT1 on I7 can stay enabled, cause GUS is non-PnP, so I7 gets shared - you will notice if sharing works, it usually does
MIDI2 on EWS64XL doesn't use IRQ.
Since GUS is 7,7 for Record and Playback no Full Duplex Mode is possible - but who uses GUS in FD anyway?
All 388h devices play synchroneously.
On MIDI2 of the EWS64XL in addition to the Wavetable Board an external Synthesizer can be chained as a Roland MT-32 f.e.
SCSI Adapters may interfere with ressources if you use some...

For the FM part on the AWE32, why didn"t you just disabled this PnP function block instead of moving it to a uncommon port address?

elianda the retro party crasher 🤣

Yeah well, I usually try to get SB to A220, I5, D1 since this is default for most software.
And this leaves GUS, where I try to grab I7,D7 since it is below 8 and is required for the bugged DOS4GW Extender.
Another option would be D5, but this is often used as high DMA for SB16 compatibles.
The second choice for SB16 high DMA is D7 usually, but some games won't give this a choice.
So if GUS takes the next I/O after SB it will be on 240, which leaves 260, 280 and so on free, D3,D0,I3,I11 whereas I11 won't work with bugged DOS4GWs.
Main MIDI device will be 330 / 9.
This leaves 300 / 320 for secondary MIDI.

Every special stuff like AWEs 620 (which in fact grabs always all four x20 I/Os that are PnP choosable) and 338 for Covox or 104 / 534 for Control or WSS I/O are usually quite exotic such that you just have one of those resources attached to one card.

It just gets critical if you start messing with Win9x in parallel, since these drivers and internal resource handling won't work well with your imagination and experience what can be shared.

NT4 is easy again, since you can always use only one resource for one device driver (except FM 388h maybe).

Plenty soundcards I use are like invisible for the rest of the system until I run the supplied PnP initializer program. That way, with a boot menu or batch file I select which soundcard to activate on A220 D1 I7 P330. Then reboot if I want to work with another soundcard.
It is like that with the CT2800, the CMI8330, CS4232 IIRC, and of course all PCI soundcards such as Vortex-2, SB-Live, DS-XG.

Might be plenty of ISA soundcards that will not allow this approach though, but this is how it works in my setup for years now.

Well, ofcourse in a PnP dominated environment this method is more elegant.
Though do you use the isapnp-tools to flush all ISA PnP resources prior reconfiguring a soundcard or do you reboot to flush it each time you make a different choice?

like I wrote: reboot.

gerwin wrote:

Plenty soundcards I use are like invisible for the rest of the system until I run the supplied PnP initializer program.

That's another clever idea!

Yesterday I got a surprise though when I had my AWE64 all configured and then put in a ess audiodrive 1868f into the same machine. The ESS card also seems to be Plug and Play, although it doesn't need to be initialized.

The AWE software simply reconfigured the DMA from 1 to 10 on bootup without no user intervention 🤣

Silly me. The Ultima VI problem is due to the backup - I made backups to cd-roms for all the floppy games I have. Seems like something is wrong with the files. I need to install again from the floppies. (Any card using adlib goes wrong with Ultima VI). No wonder, since Colonel's Bequest plays normally.

I guess there's no need to change or disable the FM port. 😀

Regarding rebooting and having multiple configs, it is useful for PnP cards. But for non-PnP cards, it's all hell breaks loose scenario! 😁