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Reply 20 of 68, by d1stortion

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The YMF724 seems to sound a bit sharper to me, generally the differences aren't that big though...

What is the hardware equivalent in terms of instruments for this S-YXG100? Any info on S-YXG/DM (DirectMusic)?

Reply 21 of 68, by j7n

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Yamaha appears to have confusing names for these models (and further version numbers). The S-YXG100 is not MU100, because it has the same basic sample ROM. An imaginary equivalent would be the DB50XG to which 4 or 8 of these VL plug-ins and one SG plug-in are somehow attached. The non-PVL version would have one of these cards.

The VL sounds are interesting. Expression doesn't simply adjust the amplitude of these patches, but the strength at which the player strikes or blows into the simulated instrument. VL, basic xg. There is no known way to run any kind of software VL outside of Windows 9x.

Reply 22 of 68, by Stojke

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If comparison is needed for 12MB set i have the Yamaha SW1000XG/P. Sadly i do not have any PLG boards (Almost snagged an PLG 150 DX).

Note | LLSID | "Big boobs are important!"

Reply 24 of 68, by erpster-xg4

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Stojke wrote:

How did you manage to get the wave set to work? I tried the ini editing approach but i didnt notice any sound improvement.

what version of either the S-YXG50 or S-YXG100 software do you have installed, Stojke?
I got the 4Mb wavetable sound files to run on either the following Yamaha Softsynths to work on an old Win98se computer:

S-YXG50 version 3.11.78 Legacy (2003) from the s-yxg50v3_200301.zip file
S-YXG100 Plus version 1.12.15 US-T (2002) the s-yxg100 9x v1.12.15T YME.zip file

You need either S-YXG50 or S-YXG100 softsynth version released in early 2001 or later, which has at least v1.03.11 of the sxgma.drv file AND you need to store the 4Mb wavetable files into the c:\windows\system folder. You must place those sxgbin41.tbl & sxgwave4.tbl files AFTER installing either S-YXG50 or S-YXG100.

Also, after editing the SXGMA.INI file in the Windows folder, you must reboot the computer to reload the SXGMA.DRV driver as editing the INI file alone won't make any immediate changes.

The sound improvement with the 4Mb wavetable files does have some effect on some music instruments like Harp (047) and SynBass1 (039). Look for the pinball.mid file (do some Google searches on this) or install the Microsoft 3D Pinball game under Win98 and play the pinball.mid file with the Yamaha Softsynth by trying out the 2Mb wavetable files and then with the 4Mb wavetable files. I know for sure the SynBass1 sound used in the pinball.mid file plays a little better with the 4Mb files.

Last edited by erpster-xg4 on 2014-11-25, 00:20. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 25 of 68, by erpster-xg4

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simbin wrote:

Apparently, I'm still running the 2MB wavetables. If anyone has a newer version than V3.13.06 of Yamaha SoftSynthesizer for Win9x please contact me!

The one I'm using is ASUS branded and has SXGMA.DRV V1.03.03, but I need V1.03.11 or higher to set the 4MB waveset, thanks.

Upgrade your Yamaha S-YXG50 Softsynth to V3.13.42, which has the newer SXGMA.DRV file AND the download is packaged in an unlikely place - the ASUS L7E Audio driver package for Win2000. I've been trying to hunt down this specific version of S-YXG50 for Windows 9x/ME for almost six years and I finally found it. Be sure to un-install v3.13.06 first, reboot and then install v3.13.42.

Reply 26 of 68, by avx

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I have some older XG hardware, they have more chips than the ymf724 devices and sound bit different as evidenced by the flacs in previous page.. and in the songs I've tested sound exactly like the VST except for being either more muddy or less, probably due to differences in analog path instead of the samples.

To my ears the xgtestjn_VST_4MB.flac sounds "most right" in terms of the sounds, not overall balance. The examples played might have not been composed for the same early XG revision that the VST replicates (the same that was in some widely available ~95~96 XG kit but less widely available than the PCI based audio stuff with less chips). So some songs might sounds wrong if composed for the PCI based XG.

I'll attach some XG songs that I have compared to sound same in my hardware and the VST. The hardware I have has no tg300 sound and neither does the VST. I know some hardware has those as extra so if composer used them, later unit or ymf724 they'd sound wrong in the VST. There were several devices using the same stuff that the VST replicates just fine, ymf724 is later stuff and might not sound as 'good' probably because composer used the earlier stuff and yamaha tweaked something so ymf724 sounds wrong for those earlier compositions.

edit: I'm not 100% sure where I go the xg files from but sound fine in the VST. Though maybe the 'darkness' has tad too much reverb wetness or feedback on the guitar.
As anyone with any taste can tell, these very low end XG sound super in right hands... I wonder what controller(s) was used to input the articulation.

Attachments

  • Filename
    xg.zip
    File size
    45.89 KiB
    Downloads
    441 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 28 of 68, by PerryRhodan

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I apologise if this is off topic, I have a X-FI sound card Fatality Pro and onboard Realtek sound chip, both working, but is there any software sound synthesiser that works under windows 7 X64? Using dgVoodoo2_53, I've managed to get Thandor:the Invasion working under Windows 7 x64, the only problem is that most of the sound effects and speech is missing. Graphically the game is working fine. I was thinking that maybe installing a software synthesiser might solve the sound problem? I tried the latest Windows XP patch 1.05xp using Windows XP, but all I get is graphical glitches and the sound effects are still missing. I came across a German Youtube video showing the game working perfectly fine under Windows XP using the same patch, but it doesn't work for me. Graphically the game works best under Windows 7 for me, it's just the sound that needs fixing. Any ideas?

Reply 29 of 68, by cyclone3d

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Now I have to try this out. Didn't even know about the win9x version until I stumbled on this thread.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 30 of 68, by PerryRhodan

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Here's the windows XP patch 1.05 for anyone who is interested in getting Thandor: The Invasion to work. I've tried everything, but still no speech or sound effects. The graphics work fine under Windows 7 x64 using dgVoodoo 2.52.

http://www.elfentraeume.eu/subdomain/thandor/

Reply 31 of 68, by PerryRhodan

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After lots of googling and trying different things I've now managed to get Thandor: The invasion working perfectly under Windows 7 x64, using dgVodoo 2.54 D3D & dsound.dll fix for the missing sounds. It now runs much better than under Windows XP and with MSAA. See attachment for sound fix.

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  • Thandor.jpg
    Filename
    Thandor.jpg
    File size
    136.98 KiB
    Views
    6264 views
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    Thandor & NFS2 dsound Fix.zip
    File size
    158.58 KiB
    Downloads
    147 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 32 of 68, by Nazo

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So I'm super late to the party. I was setting up a 98SE VM for some old gaming (yeah, I know, no direct running on a PC anymore as I just don't have anything still working, but a VM is fine for the few things I have to do this way I think) and for some reason can't find my installer (seriously, somewhere around all my archives I have a proper official S-YXG50 installer complete with an official license key that originally came on a little paper but I added to a text file when the paper started getting... dead... I mean, I had the full works and it's now all gone.) I'm glad I ran across this thread after googling a fair while (I almost skipped it since it was discussing the S-YXG100 synthesizer.) First of all, I must thank the OP. I'm going to try the S-YXG100 synthesizer first and see how that goes. Though it mostly was intended for music creation rather than gaming, the XG100 pretty much a XG50 with bonus stuff games don't really use, but it should work the same as the XG50 as far as games are concerned. (And if that fails, thanks to the person who provided the copy of S-YXG50 itself.) Well, thanks to everyone all around, lol.

BTW, fun fact, but for some reason I can't even begin to guess at, VMWare sets its virtual soundcard to be a Creative Labs Ensoniq device and will not provide a driver for it. You have to grab one from Creative themselves. Why wouldn't they just set it up as a more generic device? Especially in Windows mode it doesn't matter if legacy support is more lacking (a lot of non-Creative cards tended to only do SB Pro emulation in DOS mode and you'd only get 8-bit sound which sucked, but they all gave you 16-bit in Windows, so there wouldn't have been a problem with a generic there. Speaking of which, the aforementioned Yamaha YMF series including the YMF724 which I once had did SB Pro in DOS mode. Though it kind of doubly sucked because without built in RAM for the wavetable synthesizer's instruments you get silence from the wavetable synthesizer. In Windows 9x it would give you a legacy mode with 16-bit support and a working synthesizer though. It was actually a pretty cool bang for the buck card if you didn't need pure DOS mode. I loved that thing to death back in the day.)

PerryRhodan wrote:

I apologise if this is off topic, I have a X-FI sound card Fatality Pro and onboard Realtek sound chip, both working, but is there any software sound synthesiser that works under windows 7 X64?

I am so sorry I didn't see this sooner! I've had the solution for this since my XP days. All you need to do in grab the VST version of the S-YXG50 synthesizer and use a VSTi MIDI driver set to use it. This page has everything all together already (at least at this time): http://veg.by/en/projects/syxg50/ You can get the plain unmodified VST driver, but their modified version has the 4MB table built in and the registration is built in rather than looking for a registry entry and is already pre-set to enable everything including 128-channel polyphony (I forget if it actually used more "channels" than the standard for anything outside of explicit XG-oriented MIDI, but I thought I had read the reverb or something used polyphony? Regardless, if you're on a Pentium 3 or better I seriously doubt it hurts anything.) This gives you a proper actual MIDI device you can use in anything, though in Windows 8/8.1 it gets a lot harder and in 10 only a rare few things will allow you to have any control at all. (Supposedly the CoolSoft MIDI driver can help, but I've had extremely limited results with it and it likes to keep asking me every time I run anything that uses MIDI.) Works beautifully in Windows 7 and lower (I think it goes back to Win2k?) and it doesn't care if it's 64-bit or not due to the way it works.

Glad you got the game working without that, but if you want a nicer synthesizer for older games, there you go. Also, it seemed like it could be handy for anyone else needing this. Though I'm sure there's a separate thread and others already know of it elsewhere, perhaps those here do not.

Reply 33 of 68, by zapbuzz

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Hello everyone. I have some interesting information. I am running Windows 98 Second Edition with Yamaha's XG100 Plus with VL.
I have run it on oracle virtualbox and vmware but if you don't own an intel I don't recommend that.
For the sake of sanity I recommend true retro hardware. I have run it on windows Millennium it sounds good through coax digital speakers that it supports
but 98SE still can record 48,000 hz quality.
My PC running 98SE recorded it at 48,000 Hz 16bit WAV format being patched to run 2gigs of ram it was easy to record in the built in sound recorder.
So here is my offering to the broad community: 686 Legacy by ZapbuzZ https://archive.org/details/686-legacy
A true sample of the top performace of tones; ideal compliment to that 80 minute music cd (just not for profit)
The sheer size of the wav quality archive made smaller samples like mp3 that can be chosen instead.
A screenshot of the desktop enviroment is included.

Last edited by zapbuzz on 2021-06-22, 16:48. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 35 of 68, by Nazo

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Oh this is a blast from the past. I haven't messed with that one in ages, but I think I recall that it was the earliest form of VXD driver pretty much only good for Windows 9x. I don't think Yamaha ever really upgraded it any and pretty much just let that one die out. I think you'll pretty much only ever get that one to work with Windows 9x. I think the only way you can possibly use it outside of that would be 9x within a VM.

I don't recall the exact specifics to the 70, but I don't think it particularly offered anything major beyond the 50. The 100 was designed with creators in mind so does stuff like offering more channels, but the 70 was intended for basically the same sort of use as the 50 so didn't particularly go out of its way for extras.

Speaking of this topic though, has anyone had any real luck dealing with using anything else at all but the awful MS MIDI synth in Windows 10? I'm still holding out on 10 for a lot of reasons anyway, but even on 8/8.1 it's ridiculously hard to use the MIDI device you actually want... Windows 7 is the last version of Windows that lets you have full control over your MIDI devices (provided you use a third party tool to do it.) While I can understand that MIDI is going the way of the dodo (and not entirely without good reason) for retro gaming and music it still has a purpose. I wish it could be integrated as a form of device to emulate in various things like DOSBox, ScummVM, and etc, though sadly the fact that it has been ignored for this long pretty much means it probably won't ever (plus I think DOSBox is dead now which is truly depressing.) That is a much more realistic longterm solution. Sad thing is, if those things all integrated something like that VSTi MIDI device does it actually is fairly universal and other plugins could be used as well. (Maybe that's architecture independent too? We definitely need something that can act independently of architecture eventually with increased usage of ARM in particular for various things.)

Reply 36 of 68, by cyclone3d

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Why do you think DOSBox is dead? It is currently being developed and some official version releases have happened pretty recently.

As far as the soft synths, take a look at my XG repository in my sig.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 37 of 68, by Nazo

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cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-13, 00:52:

Why do you think DOSBox is dead? It is currently being developed and some official version releases have happened pretty recently.

We'll have to agree to disagree I guess. I'm seeing only minor changes and nothing major put in even after years and the only recent update is actually more just another relatively minor bugfix update to the last version from years and years ago.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see a lot of updates. There are some pretty basic things that I really feel should have been integrated into the baseline software ages ago anyway (like GPU acceleration for image resizing algorithms other than just "accelerated" versus "not accelerated." Aka shaders) since most of us don't have the benefits of a really old CRT anymore) and I had held out on hopes they'd start to show up in a new version all those years ago, but here we are in 2020 and we're still not even really on a new version yet.

As far as the soft synths, take a look at my XG repository in my sig.

I don't think you fully read over what I was saying about that. It's getting harder and harder to fight with external synthesizer methods when dealing with these things. The host OS has to properly support MIDI (already can be tricky in many setups) and the actual MIDI driver has to be compatible with the host OS. Which is to say, for example, that you can't run any of those x86 soft-synths on an ARM system because an ARM CPU doesn't know what the heck that crazy x86 code even means (especially the backwards parts.) And you can't even run an x86 synth on a x86-64 system normally -- the trick I mentioned before via a VSTi plugin is a roundabout way that implements a 64-bit driver that can then use 32-bit code. Even if doesn't work for things where there isn't a VSTi plugin you can use. This particular driver is only available to Windows though. No Linux equivalent. And now Windows 10 seems to be an uphill battle even to get it to use any MIDI device that isn't the standard Microsoft one. I think it's very realistic to say that the next Windows may not have MIDI support at all. MIDI is officially dead and really, outside of retro gaming, I don't really think that's necessarily wrong. Even music producers don't use it anymore.

A much more ideal long-term solution for maximum ability to handle retro gaming would be for the emulator (eg DOSBox) or interpreter (eg ScummVM) to implement some sort of plugin system for MIDI handling. This allows for handling MIDI devices where licensing is actually a huge issue by making it possible to externalize dealing with that sort of thing a lot more. I don't know if VSTi is the right system for that (I don't know enough about how it works but I suspect that those plugins are still binaries that require the host system be compatible) but it's the sort of thing I'm talking about at least.

Also, I fail to see what current politics and conspiracy theories even have to do with retro gaming. That seems rather inappropriate here right now.

Reply 38 of 68, by cyclone3d

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Windows 10 not supporting MIDI? Really? At least KORG and Yamaha still support Windows 10. I haven't looked at any other brands so far.

And according to Microsoft, they have improved MIDI stuff in Windows 10.. have they actually removed anything relating to MIDI in the newer releases?:
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/20 … -in-windows-10/

And yeah, the old softsynths that were meant for stuff older than XP are probably not going to install in Windows 10... if you run 32-bit Windows 10 you may get lucky.

But that is any software, not just MIDI and softsynth software.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 39 of 68, by HunterZ

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Windows 10 MCI MIDI support seems the same as it has been since Windows 3.1, except that they removed the MIDI Mapper applet for choosing the default device.

CoolSoft MIDI Mapper works well as a replacement. DOSBox and I think ScummVM also let you specifically pick a device number to use.

Microsoft also now has reference drivers for USB-MIDI interfaces, which allows many models to be used without special drivers. Unfortunately they didn't implement SysEx support correctly, so good luck using a Roland LA synth (MT-32/CM-32L/CM-64/etc.) with games that use SysEx. I have a Creative E-mu interface that never worked right because of this, and an older MIDISport Uno with specific drivers that works just fine in Windows 10.

Munt and CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth also work just fine in Windows 10 as decent software synthesizer options. Other people use drivers that plug into VSTs on the back end, but I haven't tried this myself.