Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-12-16, 23:43

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Groundbreaking work, at least in terms of DOS sound emulation. Great job! A few days after coming back from vacation last week, I caught a nasty flu that has kept me under the weather most of this week. If I feel fit enough, I'll take a look at your work this weekend. Sorry I haven't gotten around …

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Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-12-02, 22:12

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

You cought me while on vacation. I'm sitting at a beach bar somewhere in the Caribbean right now, enjoying a drink. :cocktail: I saw your recent posts in the GitHub threads come by in email alerts. Good progress you made! I'll have some free days at home around the Christmas holidays. Maybe I can …

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Re: T-04YBSC-A, new YMF71x based sound card + SETYMF utility

Posted on 2022-11-16, 22:03

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Oh man, moving is always stressful. Even more so when moving to another country! Good luck, and enjoy your new home, Tiido! 🙂

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Re: Games that uses the CM-32L specific sound effects

Posted on 2022-11-02, 22:43

by

by digger

in MT-32 General

in MT-32 General

I wasn't claiming anything, merely speculating. 😅

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Re: NuXT - MicroATX Turbo XT Motherboard - 9.55MHz, UMBs, XT-CF, SVGA, HD Floppy, Serial

Posted on 2022-11-02, 21:03

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Have any NuXT owners here by any chance tried GLaBIOS with it yet? It's an open-source alternative BIOS for IBM PCs and compatible systems with 8088 and V20 CPUs, including "turbo" clones.

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Re: An Athlon 64 X2 4450e system with nForce 430 motherboard. Worth keeping?

Posted on 2022-10-23, 15:24

by

by digger

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Heh, indeed I haven't gotten rid of it yet. And as luck would have it, I suddenly have a use for it. I've been wanting to capture and digitize VHS tapes, but found the available USB-based solutions out there lacking. I want to be a perfectionist about this, and capture the original analog video in …

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Re: Games that uses the CM-32L specific sound effects

Posted on 2022-10-17, 17:24

by

by digger

in MT-32 General

in MT-32 General

I know one (small) example is Quest for Glory IV. At the North side of the Mordavian village (the monastery scene), there is the gravedigger Igor carving a tombstone. His hammer strike sounds proper on a CM-32L, but on an MT-32, it's some other sound (I recall it's something like a horn or a brass …

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Re: Windows XP: is there any theme that looks like Windows ME and 98?

Posted on 2022-09-23, 20:13

by

by digger

in Windows

in Windows

Windows XP has a built-in Windows 2000 theme that you can select, which is basically the same theme as Windows Me. (Even better: the mouse cursor will have a nice subtle shadow that is missing in Windows Me.) Startup and shutdown will be a lot tougher, though. Not sure if there are any patches out …

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An Athlon 64 X2 4450e system with nForce 430 motherboard. Worth keeping?

Posted on 2022-09-18, 16:43

by

by digger

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

So I transplanted the components of a very dirty old discarded Compaq machine to a clean ATX case, tested the rebuilt system, and played around with it a little. See also this post in the dumpster finds thread . The only things I think are really worth noting about this system: The integrated audio …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2022-09-18, 16:09

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So a month ago I found a Compaq Athlon 64 dual core system outside by the "grofvuil" (" Bulky waste "), including a wide-screen monitor. Although I really don't have the room for it in my apartment, I couldn't help myself, and grabbed it. The screen was in reasonable condition, and worked well, with …

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Re: What do you drive?

Posted on 2022-08-12, 10:02

by

by digger

in Milliways

in Milliways

Remember this car ?....Most Desired car of the 80’s. Now wait a minute there! A lot of of Gen-X'ers here will strongly disagree with you . :grin: (Yes, I know, James May is a boomer and the Countach technically was introduced in the '70s, but it continued to reign supreme as an icon throughout the …

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Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-08-09, 13:50

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've been using QEMU VMs for my retro DOS programming projects lately. It's easy to mount a host folder as a virtual ("VVFAT") drive in QEMU. There are also other ways to copy code and artifacts over to the VMs. I like to work from the command-line (and with automated shell scripts!) a lot, so this …

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Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-08-09, 07:49

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've used CWSDPMI and HDPMI in a VirtualBox VM, it seems that HDPMI is much faster and reside in himem with low memory footprint,. CWSDPMI is good(at least for me) in that it's written in C, more readable. lol Although I agree that something written in C would be much easier to comprehend, HDPMI …

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Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-08-08, 21:41

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yamaha and ESS PCI products have a direct hardware 388 and 2x0 port support. So the FM is in hardware, not in software. This doesn't work on more modern PCI Express motherboards, though, even with a PCI-to-PCIe adapter, because the lack of support for "subtractive decode" prevents PCI cards from …

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Re: Possibility to write OPL3 sound driver for protected mode games

Posted on 2022-08-08, 21:22

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This has been something of a holy grail for me as well, these last few years. :sweat_smile: You might find this thread on GitHub particularly interesting. Basically, the advice of some skilled retro DOS developers further down that thread comes down to the same thing that mkarcher recommended here …

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Re: TweakPCI - A DOS utility to view/modify PCI configuration registers

Posted on 2022-08-08, 20:54

by

by digger

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Cool! Thanks for sharing this with the world! :smiley: Another interesting use case, when combined with the (Free)DOS DEBUG tool in a batch file, would be to have TweakPCI obtain the base I/O address of a parallel or serial port on a PCI or PCIe card and then using DOS DEBUG to register it as an …

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Re: List of open-source PC hardware projects

Posted on 2022-08-08, 14:46

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nice! Looking forward to see what other cool new retro projects based on the RP2040 people will be coming up with! ☺️

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Re: Mystery LPT card with no drivers (I just can't learn)

Posted on 2022-08-07, 10:18

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ideally you'd have a utility that pulls the secondary IO range from the card and fills it in the BIOS data area without further user intervention. e.g. you'd use (http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2372.htm) to look up the card by vendor/device ID and (http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2376.htm) to read the …

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Re: Mystery LPT card with no drivers (I just can't learn)

Posted on 2022-08-05, 11:29

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah I'll add fully customizable ports for the Disney Sound Source and the COVOX, didn't know that newer PCI Express based machines cannot use legacy I/O addresses. Maybe interesting to someone create a TSR to remap ports for those kind of systems. Problem is that such a TSR still wouldn't work …

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Re: Mystery LPT card with no drivers (I just can't learn)

Posted on 2022-08-04, 09:22

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It really makes no sense: The only action of the driver is to change Region 4 from c080 to 0378. That should work... but it's not enough. It's my motherboard and that UEFI crap, I can feel it... Modern PCIe motherboards with legacy PCI slots don't allow PCI cards to claim legacy I/O addresses, such …

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