hello
I have issues with my orpheus + pcmidi soundcard.

The pcmidi part does not work at all, I have left all jumpers by default. When I install any midi board on the WTC connector, it does not work (tested with McCake and X2).
This means no music is being output. Digital audio works fine. I tried both Unisound / Orphinit with the recommended settings - no luck.

The same midi boards (X2, McCake) work perfectly with other sound cards or with Orpheus but only when I move the jumper to CS (from I). However, I have then horrible hanging notes bugs, ie the midi music continues to play after I quit the respective game.

Am I missing something? What do I have to do get PCMIDI working? Thanks for any ideas.

Hi, please give us more details, like system config, cards installed etc. Also test with MQDiag

mihai wrote on 2021-07-28, 18:02:

hello
I have issues with my orpheus + pcmidi soundcard.
[...]

have you read the PCMIDI help section for potential solution? http://pcmidi.eu/help.html
this sounds like resources conflict, either IRQ2 is not free or you have something else on port330
like marmes wrote above detailed info are needed 😀
getting pcmidi to work is nothing hard, it just need a port and irq to be free for it

Hi. Thanks for the reply.

the system is a Pentium III 600 MHz + ECS P6BAP (440 BX) mobo, 512 MB ram.

- cards installed: video card (MX400) + NEC USB Card + Orpheus; there is nothing nothing on P330, as far as I know.

- config.sys - only himem.sys, autoexec.bat - nothing there.

Will test with MQDiag and check resource conflicts. The soundcard works (digital audio), MIDI with CS works(moving the jumper from I to CS), PCMIDI - no sound heard (no errors given).

such a system will not have IRQ2 free - it will be tied to ACPI.
I do not think there will be a BIOS option to disable ACPI on a 440BX system but you can check if APM is an option on it
so 3 things to do:
- use another IRQ than the default 2 (this will be most likely something that cannot be avoided for your system)
- make sure that CSMPU is not activated on port330
- try without the USB card

How do I make sure to disable CSMPU - disable it using the EEPROM flasher? Thanks.

you can disable the CSMPU in ORPHEUS.INI - and you can also go one step further and disable it with the flasher
the default ORPHEUS.INI has CSMPU disabled

1; This controls the on-chip Crystal MPU-401-compatible UART.
2; This tool has NO control over the PCMIDI device, which is configured
3; with on-board jumpers.
4MPUBase=disabled
5MPUIRQ=disabled

Can you try 2 things?
1-Remove NEC USB Card. Test.
2-If previous still not working, try to put IRQ3 on PCMIDI part.

Will do that and report tomorrow. Many thanks for the assistance.

update: it was the IRQ 2 issue. MQDIAG was not able to detect the IRQ when set on default. ACPI appears to be on IRQ 9 on my system, but IRQ 2 is definitely reserved.

Moved the jumpers to use IRQ 3 and it works great. Thanks for the help! 😁

Orpheus + McCake is the absolute best in DOS sound / music.

yeah it is as expected from such an ACPI system - IRQ2 is almost never free and it cascades to IRQ9
enjoy the setup and thanks for your support!!! 😀

Got my soundcard a while back and finally got around to installing it. It works great, though I'm encountering an annoying issue in Windows 3.11, where everything stalls for a but under a second second right before any PCM sample is played. This does not happen in plain old DOS, and didn't happen with the previous soundcard (a YMF71x). Is there some setting in system.ini that could be causing this? Everything works, so it doesn't seem like anything's conflicting.

I'm running a 486 DX2-66 with 64MB RAM.

FortMax wrote on 2021-07-31, 01:42:

Got my soundcard a while back and finally got around to installing it. It works great, though I'm encountering an annoying issue in Windows 3.11, where everything stalls for a but under a second second right before any PCM sample is played. This does not happen in plain old DOS, and didn't happen with the previous soundcard (a YMF71x). Is there some setting in system.ini that could be causing this? Everything works, so it doesn't seem like anything's conflicting.

I'm running a 486 DX2-66 with 64MB RAM.

I am away atm and do not remember to give you exact names but there is an obvious section in SYSTEM.INI that states the resources used by the windows CS4237 driver.
These values must correspond to the ones that you used during DOS initialization - as the win3x driver needs the cards initialized from DOS in order to function.
One other suggestion is to start with a fresh win3x installation as changing driver in 3x can become problematic with weird issues... you can do a test install in some other directory to test

yep, relevant section is in SYSTEM.lNI at the end of it:

those values must match with the ones you initialized the card under DOS

Fresh install and still the same problem. Stuff still works, but there's a pause before PCM samples play, and successive sounds are spaces apart because of it.

I have not experienced a similar problem elsewhere, maybe when there was a conflict the sound cut off early but pause before playback never
what other hardware is in the system? other drivers installed? did you try switching to different IRQ/DMA settings for testing? it could reveal a potential conflict under win3x when some other driver passes it's own settings or something
I have tried looking for other CS4237 win3.x drivers but as far as I can see this is the only version that got released for it

I'm a bit confused on setting up Orpheus for use in DOS. The website refences both ORPHINIT and UNISOUND. Both seem to work fine.

In what situations would I want to choose one over the other?

Hi Kahenraz, I'll try to answer your question, but you are right, both do a fine job at initializing your soundcard. The way I see it, UNISOUND would work best if you have other PNP cards in the system that you want to init at the same time, especially if your resources get messed up by win9x afterward. On another hand, I believe ORPHINIT would only take care of the Orpheus but you will have greater control over it.

I believe the website state that ORPHINIT is the official first listed init tool, and if I had only one to keep it would be this one. But UNISOUND has proven to be so useful in the past for me, I couldn't imagine a reason to discard it!

:EDIT: It was a pretty bold statement that I wanted to double check. Maybe it was removed or changed over time (chances are that I misread), but the web site does not state that orphinit is the official init tool.

like ElBrunzy said both tools work with Oprheus but ORPHINIT is made specifically for it by 640k!enough and it uses optimized mixer/routing settings that UNISOUND does not implement yet
so if you want that +5% of extra performance then ORPHINIT is recommended (number is random, it's all subjective when it comes to sound 🤣 )

thanks to both 640k!enough and jazefox there are choices for users because the stock Crystal DOS driver is HORRIBLE 🤣 🤣 🤣

Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do I disable the wavetable synth so I can use an external MIDI device to mix with Digital audio? Is it just a matter of reducing the FM volume to 0?