Great project, but I feel that intelligent mode support is not required for late DOS and Windows 98 games. You do want it for the early DOS games from Sierra or Origin.

So IMO, that motherboard is not a good pick for such a project. It would be great though for a machine for high resolution DOS gaming.

That's a good point. Intelligent mode midi isn't really needed I suppose. I wanted the midi card for Ultima 6, but a super fast machine would probably tear through that game and make it unplayable. Still, I have an older PC as well and I'm lucky enough to have another intelligent midi card for that other system. When that other machine is busy or otherwise indisposed, I would like to at least be able to fire up the earlier games to record the music from the games or whatever else. Anyway I am mostly just curious if non-DMA ISA slots would be useful before I waste money one of these boards. They aren't cheap. I will probably just play it safe and stick with a i845 or i865 board. Most games during the late era wouldn't even run much better on a core 2 duo anyway as I would be bottlenecked by the video card. One thing I like about the idea of a "have it all" ISA motherboard is that it would open up more use cases for the machine such as surfing the web to get freeware/shareware dos games. A lot of the freeware dos games sites are slow, but I suppose it's easy enough to get them on another PC and transfer the files. I'm lazy I guess.

Yes, and it's about the journey, even if it's a rough one 😀

Back to the GUS, yes it does use interrupts.

It does seem to use DMA. On a different thread someone had posted a the installation instructions for the GUS ACE specifically. It requires you to set a DMA, so clearly it is using one. The real question is what is it using it for and how much can I do without it?

It's ok if I lose sounds in games as long as I can still load the samples and play midi then a PCI card could be used for the other stuff. What I would really like to know is, does the act of loading samples touch DMA at all? If not then I think I could get by. These boards run about $300, which would make for an interesting experiment, but paying $300 just because I was wondering about something seems irresponsible (and fun as many fun things can be)!

popfuture wrote:

It's ok if I lose sounds in games as long as I can still load the samples and play midi then a PCI card could be used for the other stuff. What I would really like to know is, does the act of loading samples touch DMA at all? If not then I think I could get by. These boards run about $300, which would make for an interesting experiment, but paying $300 just because I was wondering about something seems irresponsible (and fun as many fun things can be)!

That depends on the program loading samples. I would suggest that most programs do load samples via DMA because it is far more efficient than using another method with the ISA bus. While an extremely fast CPU may be able to brute force the equivalent speed, most GUS programs were written in a time when the CPU power was not so strong. A DMA-less system will probably lead to nothing but problems, so why not use a PCI card (they use a bus mastering, which is a more advanced form of DMA) and a program that can play back MODs with generic DirectSound compatible hardware?

And the industrial P4-ISA board's are downright extremely expensive, as they are specialized product's.
Just go with two systems. One that are inspired by these high-end-high-speed P4's (like the one Phil proposed)
wich will be used for Win98. Then get something like in the range of an K6-II-500 for dos-gaming.

Don't go with DMA-Less gaming rig's when you want to play dos games.

In theory it should be possible to use v86 mode to virtualize the ports of the DMA controller, and create some kind of software emulation for DMA transfers, I think.

Scali wrote:

In theory it should be possible to use v86 mode to virtualize the ports of the DMA controller, and create some kind of software emulation for DMA transfers, I think.

Not an optimal solution... By far.
I think it would be extremely difficult on Windows98.
(Never heard of Win98-software that can do it)

Some games/players for GUS use DMA, some not. I would estimate that about 80% of the software uses DMA for sample upload.
I had once the situation of a memory upgrade that worked with PIO but freezed with DMA. So it was easy to see, which software uses DMA 😀.
Combining the GUS with a P4 board that can not handle DMA would be not much fun.

Regarding GUS cards. Then yes, they are awesomme. On the other hand, they are really underdogs, when you run Win98 games.
When using Win98 games (not talking doom and such through win98) then you get a better result with PCI cards.
GUS is for Dos gaming and not Win98 gaming.

All of your comments are incredibly awesome. That's why vogons rocks! I think I'm going to give up on the non-DMA boards. Elianda, I never would have suspected that some games load samples via DMA and some not. You have inadvertently discovered a way to test which games are which, not that it would be any fun to create the full list of GUS-supported games of each type using such a method. Ugh.

Yes, I guess GUS is not ideal for windows gaming. Windows programs don't take advantage of features of individual cards usually. One thing you can do is change patch sets and experiment in that way, but then you are in effect making a game mod which you can probably do with most other windows cards in the early windows gaming era. The SBAwe series cards probably let you do this with sound fonts though I've never tried it.

Reminds about the stuff I read about GUSemu32:
http://www.deinmeister.de/gusemu/manual.htm
Especially this statement is interesting: "Port accesses are slower than on real GUS, DMA transfer is faster"
Makes a lot of sense from a programmer's standpoint.
(I have no idea how good this emulator is, never got around to try it.)

My Retro-Machine has two ISA-Soundcards. ( CT4170 and GUS-Ace )
For Win9x (Win98se) I still load the CT4170 and the GUS-Drivers before starting Win98se.
Therefore almost every Dosgame/Demo/Intro that is not CPU-Speed-Sensitive (I currently use a 433 Celeron) works just fine.
I also use softmpu with the ct4170 for powering the mt32 behind the ct4170. No hanging notes bug!
But I have to admit, that there are some Games that a CPU-Speed-Sensitive. e.g. old Adventures do not detect the MT32 because the machine is way to fast.
I have to check out, if I can use a win9x-slowdown-utility for dosgames playing in fullscreen-dos-mode in a started win98se desktop.

Doc

Oh yeah... Those dual soundcard setup. Forgot about that.... Anyway....

Depending on the games that you want to play, then choose a mobo+cpu that suits you'r need well.
If you plan on playing something like 1998/99 as the newest games, then something like a K6-III+ or K6-III cpu will do.
Newer games should breathe better on faster hardware. Just keep that in mind.
Why the amd K6-line of CPU's? Well... They can be made slower, down to a 486 class system in terms of speed.

If you plan on getting something like this class of hardware, then a GUS is great.
You just need to get some other soundcard, because the GUS is not the king of king's, as it lack certain newer technology.
Stuff like far newer 3d-sound standard and it is ISA, and ISA has limitations regarding data-transfer speed.
There may or may not be better soundbanks for other type of cards out there too. Just keep that in mind.

My choice of soundcards for the ultimate setup, are not defined by a single setup. Though one setup could look like this:
GUS (one of the long standalone cards, not ACE) + AWE32 (one with OPL chip) and a Yamaha-YMF724.
This gives you standard's like: Adlib, XG-Midi, GUS, SB16 and AWE.
You could then just swap out the YMF724 for something like an Vortex2 or swap another card from my list with
another card of you'r own choice. It all depends on what standards you really need.

brostenen wrote:

Not an optimal solution... By far.
I think it would be extremely difficult on Windows98.
(Never heard of Win98-software that can do it)

I was thinking about DOS of course. UltraSound sucks in Windows anyway. Windows doesn't really know what to do with the GF1, and the UltraSound drivers weren't that great either. Better to have a regular DAC/ADC.

GUS is pretty nice in Win3x!

I remember when I first got my GUS Max, Win 3.x was all there was. Windows 95 was not out yet! The GUS was sheer bliss. I spent hours making music and rarely had technical problems. I had Cakewalk 3.0 for Windows and the GUS Win 3.x utilities to load the sounds with. I ruled the world! Nowadays I just get lost in all the tools available. Sonar and Logic are tolerable I suppose, but very complex.

For gaming I was moslty in DOS though. Pre Win9x there was nary a decent game that could grace the infamous Program Manager, at least none that I cared for. Doom, Epic Mega games, Ultima 7, oh what a joy! Doom II came out shortly after. Those were the days. I still remember downloading a Doom mod that allowed me shoot giant pies at my foes. That was way fun.