VOGONS

Two Soundblaster ISA Soundcards at once?

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First post, by Blades

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Howdy, I have searched and yet haven't found a why or why not.

I have an Sound blaster AWE32 CT3780 and a SB32 CT3930 with 8 meg. (These are the cards i have and will use, as i wont' be buying anything else)

My question is, is that right now I am using the CT3780(awe32). Note :This machine im using is strictly DOS 7, no windows at all or ever for this rig.

It works fine for the most part, but the hanging note bug gets old and seems to happen too often(have to use the aweutil/s way to often to initialize and get rid of hanging notes when exiting games so much to the point of creating batch files with the aweutil/s in it when exiting)
Usually this happens when trying to play GM/Awe32 music for Lost vikings,X-wing floppy version,Hocus pocus/ROTT and other games and lately it seems to happen way to often.(Yes i run AWEUTIL EM:GM select GM when applicable on games(Hocus and Lost vikings), and select AWE32 when the option is presented(Rott and Doom etc...)

According to this website(good read)
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2012/07/s … 64-options.html
it is because of the digitized sound and midi playing at the same time on the same card which can cause at times the hanging note and their recommendation is to use two different sound cards, one for GM and another for FM and other sounds.

-So my question, is there any merit to this?
-What kind of driver nightmare would i be running into, as it seems the SB32 CT3930 has different type of drivers than the CT3780. (of course i would keep the channels,irq and dma separate).
-Can this be done with these two cards? or....
-is there something else i could do to minimize the hanging note issue on the 3780(as it seems to happen more and more than when i first put together the machine)
-or should i run the 3930?
-Which would be the better of the two? the 3930 seems to be an Full AWE32 with ram slots but no bass/treble options in the drivers.

Again, I appreciate any answers you can give. The 3930 looks to be a decent card, and maybe my 3780 is taking a crap on me. I have used the correct drivers so i know its not that. This has been an issue that has slowly gotten worse over time(and only affects the MIDI/AWE32 stuff) the FM/Digitized stuff works great!.

Thanks again!

Reply 1 of 5, by PhilsComputerLab

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You can easily test the first point. Simply select NONE for sound effects, basically music only, and the hanging notes should disappear.

I never had much luck with two machines in the same PC, personally I use an AWE64 Gold together with external MIDI devices. I can live without OPL3 as pretty much all the games I'm interested in supports some sort of MIDI (Roland).

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Reply 2 of 5, by gdjacobs

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Right now I have a CS4232 card taking the place of what eventually will be a dedicated intelligent mode MPU-401. It's installed alongside my CT2800 card and used exclusively as an MPU-401 uart and daughterboard host. The only tricky element of this install is mapping out resources for both cards to avoid contention and juggling BLASTER environment variables during initialization.

I'm confident dual SB cards would be doable, but only if one is fully non-PnP. I haven't tested CTCM with multiple SB cards, nor do I know if DIAGNOSE can address each card in sequence when processing the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. The one definitely insurmountable issue with SB cards is I have yet to discover a way of disabling FM synth independent to the rest of the card (short of hardware mutilation), so you have to use the mixer to enable or disable the MIDI/synth channel as required to avoid both FM outputs being mixed.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 4 of 5, by Stiletto

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Moved.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 5 of 5, by Blades

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Sorry about posting in the wrong area. This had to do with hanging notes in DOS games because of hardware so i thought it belonged there.

Let me ask this question then, my CT3780 is a non-pnp so that should be good. I dug through my boxes and have come across CT1920 with 8 MEG ram which is a AWEUPGRADE card.
Similar to this link below but missing the SPDIF and Line out soldered onto the board. But I can make a cable that goes off of the pins to go to the CD-IN on the CT3780.

http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/i/C-D/53485.htm

So my question is could I turn off the MIDI/AWE32 on the CD3780 AWE32 Card and then pipe GM/AWE32 sounds from the CT1920 into the 3780 card? Since i would be turning off the MIDI on the 3780?(seeing that the CT1920 uses AWEUTIL.exe and not .COM.)?

Would THAT get rid of the Hanging note bug since the MIDI/AWE32 is on another card? Or would I still have the same problem ?

And would turning off the MIDI on the 3780 get rid of my Joystick port or is there a way to just disable the Music part. Or is this hopeless. 🤣.

Thanks for all your advice so far!

;

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