Awesome, thanks for the help James-F! Very much appreciated!

More than happy to test the card on every ISA capable system I have by the way. Just make the things already :lol

🤣
yeah marmes and me are just busy with holiday stuff - personally I have not been in my office for a week or so , too many family stuff and visiting relatives because of xmas time
work on this will resume soon though, it's just real life getting in the way 😀
Really appreciate all your patience of everyone interested, there might not be hardware related news atm but I can say that there will be bundle packages with some other great addon hardware for the card - but more on that later 😉

^^ Take your time; considering it's being developed in your free time, don't burn yourself out!

mmmmm
the smell of fresh pcb in the first days of a fresh year 😁😎

Just needs some chips on it and it will be perfect! 👍

keropi wrote on 2019-12-08, 20:59:

it is possible to switch from external to internal FM , we can provide a small script to flash the card's eeprom , on next reboot the change is active
Both at the same is not possible when the external synth need to do FM work

Here's a weird thought; can you flash the card's EEPROM to disable FM entirely and rely on another card for FM audio? The use case would be Orpheus for the Sound Blaster Pro sound effects, but FMonster in either OPL3 or dual OPL2 mode with the Blaster variable set to BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T4 for Sound Blaster Pro 2 and BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T2 for Sound Blaster Pro mode. In each case FMonster would have the correct addresses set. Is this possible? Or would there be address conflicts? Or is this just wishful thinking?

It already has a discrete OPl3 on it... you can remove it and disable it completely with some tinkering but what would be the point of having an "as much digital output card as possible" when you only keep the SB/WSS DAC? You might as well go a real SBPRO route and use and external ADC?

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-03, 20:07:

Just needs some chips on it and it will be perfect! 👍

And here it is 😀
Connector colors are not final, we just used blue for telling us what's midi out.
This is basically the last version of board, that doesn't mean that we're stopping here, maybe there will be some tweaks, in some positions of design.
FPaudio is working perfectly.
Todo is only in software now.
1- Disabling Crystal FM in Windows 3.x/9x.
2- Finishing software for activating SPDIF in MSDOS , we can enable it with Debug command and a small script.

Out of interest, was it very common for sound card to have PCSPK inputs? I use that on my AWE32 and it's actually quite useful for lots of pre-1990 games. I guess this Crystal did not have such an input correct?

It has speaker in, we just don't use it. Since PCs usually have internal speakers.

I guess it's too late to request that as a feature...none of my PCs have speakers and it's simply convenient to have the sound come out through the same mixer. Maybe in the next version 😀

PC-speaker input is something I have become quite fond of myself.

SPK_IN was common around the release of first few generations of SB16 but geadually got depreciated as a feature as the PC Speaker itself became more and more useless.

I never use the feature or PC Speaker sound itself personally. If its a game that relies on PC Speaker for sound I will probably play it on my accelerated A500 instead.

Hey Keropi, is it also possible to connect the Cirrus Logic Soundchip to 8Bit ISA only ?
i`m not familar with the Crystal Chipset 😀

^ I think it will work BUT the drivers need 386+ so it kinda defeats the purpose...

To add some detail to the discussion of 8-bit-only use, the CS4237B only has 8 data lines. The part also has a number of ways to go through the configuration without a Plug-and-Play BIOS or configuration manager. This seems to indicate that their design should be usable even on an XT, provided the necessary configuration software is available.

keropi wrote on 2020-01-10, 19:50:

^ I think it will work BUT the drivers need 386+ so it kinda defeats the purpose...

Hm the crystal init setup launches on my nec v20, are you sure ?
but it freezes because i have no card inside or other reason.
Maybe i should try it. Anyway it makes no sense to use a CS Chip inside XT.
But it would be interesting to use those 8Bit Slots on 386+ Mainboards 😉

I tried on 286 and it froze too so I assumed the driver is using 386 instructions - which is not surprising considering the original release date of the CS4235/36/37 chips - never really tried it again on another system lower than a 386 tbh
Will check it again on my V20 XT once I get it out of storage

This is awesome. 😎 I'll almost certainly buy one when they are available.

BTW, add me to the few others who request a PC Speaker input header. It's really nice to have (sounds so much better piped through the card than out of the dinky speaker inside the case).

Great job fellas!