Re: FM synth - native/direct vs. through MIDI?

Posted on 2023-09-16, 08:35

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It seems like most musicians at the time originally used a midi module when writing the music, but they very clearly targeted it towards playback on a sound blaster or compatible. The Tyrian sound track is a classic example where it sounds much better when played back on a sound blaster than an …

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Re: 486 restoration with mystery IDE HDD issues; help?

Posted on 2023-09-14, 09:37

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I would try using a smaller HDD. A lot of older BIOSes don't like drives larger then 528 MB. Others don't like going above 2 GB. Autodetect can go all kinds of wrong if you exceed that size. Some drives support a jumper setting to limit it's size to 2GB, sometimes that helps. Or you can manually …

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Re: VLB with newer chipsets

Posted on 2023-09-10, 07:08

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm a bit concerned about the I/O card, I suppose I'll have to add its drivers on one of the DOS install floppies. The other thing about I/O is that I plan to overclock to 40MHz, and I know that PCI IDE controllers don't like overclocked buses, I expect even more issues on a VLB I/O controller. …

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Re: Questions on running/testing a Japanese 100v sound module (Roland SC-D70) on a North American 120V power grid .

Posted on 2023-08-26, 23:28

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Because those switching power supplies use a high voltage buffer capacitor at line voltage before the switching part. In 220-240V regions they are rated for 400V (typically) but in 100-120V they might have a lower rating to save costs. The same may be true for other components on the incoming side …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-26, 08:18

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

SBpro requires catching the stereo bit from mixer and I don't think the DSP can know when this is being done. The rest should be doable though. I don't know if it can be fixed at DSP side, but this TSR seems to work with my SB16's. I don't know the inner workings but it does some on the fly …

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Re: PCem emulation speed is terrible

Posted on 2023-08-19, 08:29

by

by digistorm

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

It is all about single core performance for CPU emulation and modern architectures are just much better at that and are higher clocked too. Also, "good" isn't always enough when you want to emulate a faster computer, and when your emulator tries to run at a "fixed" speed it is even harder because …

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Re: EtherDFS - a network drive for DOS

Posted on 2023-08-17, 07:25

by

by digistorm

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Yeah, for me the server is the show stopper. I also understand the reason why, but I don’t have the space for a (second) server besides the (Linux, but closed) NAS that I use. A Synology plug-in for EtherDFS (or NetWare) would be great, but I guess such a thing is infeasible.

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Re: CRT experience

Posted on 2023-08-16, 08:42

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I often find the monitors that support 70 HZ are often the lower resolution ones because they just have less pixels to push around. For anything above 1024x768 it becomes less likely to support more than 60 Hz (but they do exist). For me the most annoying thing about digital screens is that they …

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Re: Inability to use PCI and AGP graphics cards at the same time - a quirk with AGP-PCI motherboards?

Posted on 2023-08-07, 07:38

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a GeForce 2 MX and a ET6000 card working together in Windows 98 (if I want to). I do not use it like that unless I want to compare monitors. I can just boot normally with AGP but I think you do have to connect a monitor before you boot or Windows will not correctly detect the output. Back in …

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Re: CRT experience

Posted on 2023-08-04, 08:22

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

To my eyes the response curves of most CRTs are different than modern displays that are all tuned to give benchmark perfect results. Also the primary colors on CRTs look different then modern calibrated displays. Not always for the better, but a good CRT with (still) good phosphors has a particular, …

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Re: CT1740 Potentiometer Problem

Posted on 2023-07-26, 08:53

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

What gives, I wonder? People echoing each other, anecdotal evidence, among others? I have used quite a lot of hardware in my life, and the CT1740 that I own now is among the less noisier of what I have experienced. Are there more quite Sound Blasters? Yeah. Probably. But if I set the volume of my …

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Re: SB16 + GUS Classic + PCMIDI/MT-32 for DOS/Win3.11 - should this "just work"?

Posted on 2023-06-16, 05:59

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The problem with IRQ 11 is that some DOS extenders don’t like those high IRQs. Also, some audio libraries don’t play nice with IRQs > 7. For the GUSpnp there was a tool to patch games to play nice with IRQs > 7 but I don’t know if it also works for other GUSes.

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Re: NVPatch - making UniVBE work on NVidia cards

Posted on 2023-06-15, 05:17

by

by digistorm

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I am also very glad with this patch. I use a GeForce 2 MX and it can’t do 15 bit video modes and lacks the low res modes 400x300 and 512x384. Now I don’t have to swap video cards when I want to use those resolutions. The only minor thing (but it was probably assumed) is that you have to register the …

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Re: What are music trackers? Are they just PCM samples? (re: confused about PCM and sound cards)

Posted on 2023-06-13, 05:19

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

To add a little to the great explanation of Tiido: you asked if a tracker just outputs PCM to the soundcard. Well, that is entirely up to the software and popular software from the early 90’s used the hardware of the GUS (and later AWE) to reproduce the music. That was in the early 90’s much higher …

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Re: Jazz Jackrabbit DOS 6.22 Trident TGUI9440 486

Posted on 2023-06-11, 17:54

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those black bars on Jazz Jackrabbit are normal. It uses square pixels because that video mode is based on a 320x240 video mode.

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Re: SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97

Posted on 2023-06-04, 12:36

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

You need to create EMS memory, a lot of it, and free as much low memory as possible. So only load drivers that are needed for Impulse Tracker, because once you enable EMS the page frame will consume a lot of upper memory.

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Re: Revised IT WSS Driver

Posted on 2023-05-31, 13:14

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have no need for this myself, because I have an original GUSpnp card, but are you aware that there is also a .mmx driver for the codec? If you CPU supports MMX it provides much higher quality mixing (the default mixer is not very good) and it supports the resonant filters of the .IT format.

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Re: Did early sound cards actually process all the sound effects?

Posted on 2023-05-26, 05:02

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Not 100% either. There were a few games that supported GUS natively and that card used PCM samples that are processed (pitch, volume, position) on the card. It did this together with MIDI playback. The AWE 32 was capable of the same, but I don’t know of any game that uses it to process sound effects …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-17, 09:38

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Adlibtracker 2 doesn't even work with only the sound blaster in. It must need some fancy memory settings or something. I'll figure that out another time. Every other opl program works and everything to do with the gus works so the hardware on both cards is good :) Adlib Tracker 2 is very speed …

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Re: Modern retro-comptible monitor?

Posted on 2023-03-16, 17:56

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I grew up in analog PAL territory. Every brain cell that was sensitive for this flicker has already died off years ago 🤣 But I tend to use my CRT mostly for the 70 Hz low-res stuff as most 60 Hz modes display okay on my LCD monitor.

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