Re: DSS / Covox Speech Thing exclusive games

Posted on 2018-04-07, 12:39

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Well, ok. Alongside with Adlib would be fine, since Adlib is for music, not for digital effects. But if all games that support the DSS and/or Covox also support Sound Blaster, I wonder why Aztech bothered supporting it in their early cards at all..? I mean, why would someone select DSS or Covox …

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Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-24, 15:48

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Alternatively, we could also just flat-out ask Creative if they would be willing to release the source code to their original Sound Blaster firmware under a permissive open source license, for the sake of historic preservation and to score some nice publicity and nerd cred. They haven't sold any …

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Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-24, 15:41

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Please don't take this the wrong way, but extracting the copyrighted microcontroller firmware from original Sound Blaster Pro and/or 16 cards and using them to create a bootleg repro card wasn't really what I had in mind. I agree that basing the DSP of a Sound Blaster clone on the same MCS-51 …

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Re: Virtualbox, PCI passthrough and Voodoo2

Posted on 2018-03-24, 01:34

by

by digger

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

What a cool thing to try! Kudos for your creativity. :happy: I was initially surprised that you even got it to work at all without an IOMMU. However, according to the VirtualBox documentation , PCI passthrough on IOMMU-less systems is indeed possible for certain devices that do not perform DMA bus …

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Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-18, 16:26

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The FPGA option indeed seems the most flexible. But newold86, your STM32-based design sounds intriguing as well. Although in both cases, it kind of feels a little bit like cheating, since employing technologies like these to recreate such a Sound Blaster clone is not exactly appropriate to the era. …

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Re: Questions for Tandy owners..

Posted on 2018-03-18, 00:12

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sound: Yes. You're either going to get better 3-voice sound (and maybe sound effects too?) when the game supported Tandy or you're going to get the same PC Speaker sound that everyone else would have if the game did not. Was it even possible to drive both the Tandy 3-voice synthesizer and the PC …

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Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-18, 00:04

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

PC speaker via bus sniffing sounds interesting, though. But when you want speaker output to run out of your sound card, wouldn't you want the actual internal speaker to be disabled as well? And would a mixable line-in connector not be much simpler to implement than a such a sniffing solution? If …

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Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-17, 23:55

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Joking aside, the reason why I left out Covox/DSS support, as well as CMS / Game Blaster support, is because I didn't believe it would really add anything useful. As far as I know (and please do correct me if I'm wrong), there isn't a single game out there that supports Covox/DSS without also …

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Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?

Posted on 2018-03-17, 22:41

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

With all these cool and neat retro sound hardware recreation projects going on and being mentioned here lately (OPL2LPT, Resound OPL3, TNDLPT and even an Ultrasound clone), I'm frankly surprised that I'm not seeing anyone proposing to recreate a Sound Blaster clone. There is even a debate going on …

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Re: Multiplexing multiple sound devices on a single parallel port? (OPL2LPT, DSS, etc)

Posted on 2018-03-17, 21:43

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

That seems practical. And given the fact that a Disney Sound Source works with a buffer, if there is a line on the parallel port that is not used by the DSS, that line could be used to select the address latch, use the address bus to switch to the data OPL2/OPL3 output, write whatever bytes you need …

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Re: Multiplexing multiple sound devices on a single parallel port? (OPL2LPT, DSS, etc)

Posted on 2018-03-06, 01:20

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Could you please post links to those suggestions of Scali's that you referred to, 640K!enough? I'm interested in reading them, but I couldn't easily find them with the forum search option. Thanks.

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Re: Multiplexing multiple sound devices on a single parallel port? (OPL2LPT, DSS, etc)

Posted on 2018-03-05, 22:57

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

@matze79 You might be right about an older 386/486 machine being too slow to both emulate a Sound Blaster and reroute Adlib signals to the LPT port through emulation at the same time. But what I had in mind was providing native DSS compatibility for games that support them, while at the same time …

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Multiplexing multiple sound devices on a single parallel port? (OPL2LPT, DSS, etc)

Posted on 2018-03-05, 01:07

by

by digger

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

With all the wonderful new parallel audio devices that @dreamblaster has been conjuring up and cranking out lately, to what extent would it be possible to share a single parallel port among some of them? The reason I'm asking this is because many computer models that these devices would be perfect …

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Re: post up pics of your "computing area"

Posted on 2010-05-10, 23:07

by

by digger

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Fun to read how others are store and display their computers :) Heres a couple pictures what my attic currently looks like. It looks a bit messy hehe :P And sorry about the big pics, dunno how I can make them smaller and clickable :oops: My friends tell me I should start my own computer store lol …

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Re: Weeds General MIDI SoundFont v3.0

Posted on 2010-03-22, 09:10

by

by digger

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Impressive work, rfnagel. 😀 Have you considered joining forces with the Freepats project? They surely could use your help, methinks. http://freepats.zenvoid.org/

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Re: Cubase 5 and Sierra Tunes

Posted on 2010-03-17, 11:47

by

by digger

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ah, memories. Thank you for sharing this with us. :) I do have to say that the realism of the instruments somehow takes away a bit of the nostalgia of the game. I recall recently being in an argument on the Vintage Computer Forum with someone about this very subject. Turns out I have to agree with …

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Re: Thunderbird e-mail client 3.0

Posted on 2010-02-21, 23:08

by

by digger

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Zup wrote: Stuck in 2.0 (waiting for Lightning update)... Lightning 1.0 beta1 is out, which works fine with Thunderbird 3.0.x: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/

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Re: Here's an idea: why not develop new AIL2/3 and DIGPAK drivers?

Posted on 2010-02-14, 23:33

by

by digger

in DOS

in DOS

It would indeed be a way to test driver code, but like you said no (commercial) games make use of Allegro (yet), and most action in the Allegro community seems to be focused on platforms other than DOS. What's interesting is that someone in the Allegro forums had already mentioned the idea of …

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Re: Here's an idea: why not develop new AIL2/3 and DIGPAK drivers?

Posted on 2010-02-14, 16:24

by

by digger

in DOS

in DOS

Yeah, I was just about to post that bttr-software link myself. You just beat me to it, aqrit. ;) (But the link to the DIGPAK/MIDPAK SDK is very interesting! More on that further below.) The driver announced in that topic's OP is somewhat disappointing (closed source and reinventing the wheel with a …

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Re: Here's an idea: why not develop new AIL2/3 and DIGPAK drivers?

Posted on 2010-02-14, 14:11

by

by digger

in DOS

in DOS

Since most music devices back in the DOS era didn't require DMA, they can still be supported well on normal hardware today, for instance through Yamaha PCI cards. It's mostly the DAC support that is so problematic these days, since in most games only DMA-enabled DACs (and therefore mostly only sound …

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