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

Posted on 2024-01-05, 20:14

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I did quite some testing but I am worried about the results… My Slot-A motherboard does indeed make the PicoGUS do a reset when I press CTRL-ALT-DEL or use a software reset command (REBOOT.COM) On my Slot-A motherboard, whenever the PicoGUS resets, it blinks 3 times (consistently)! I did a lot of …

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

Posted on 2024-01-05, 09:52

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yes, I read there were some improvements in the last update to improve the boot process. If I could help troubleshoot in any way I would gladly hear what could be done. I’m running the latest firmware, 1.0.1.

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

Posted on 2024-01-04, 18:22

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have a question or issue… I just received my PicoGUS from the Tindie store. The software compatibility is great until now. Even things like Impulse Tracker with it's weird channel allocation schemes seems to work just fine. But I have one annoying issue: Whenever I reset my computer - whether it …

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Re: Mini LED

Posted on 2023-12-24, 08:05

by

by digistorm

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

As a matter of fact, most CRT’s also exhibit blooming. And I don’t mean just the phosphorus, but also the light of the phosphorus reflects against the glass layer and back to the phosphorus layer. So miniLED displays are quite nostalgic😉

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Re: VLB Clock & Wait State - Safe to experiment?

Posted on 2023-12-09, 08:36

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It wouldn’t hurt to quickly try if it boots with 40 MHz bus, my Cyrix DX/2 66 had no problem running at 80 MHz. It may also depend on your memory and cache chips, because as was said they will also run faster. Cheap RAM and cache chips may be too slow for more than 33 MHz.

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Re: Slow disk in DOS only

Posted on 2023-11-27, 09:11

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes… these are the results of my CF card with and without XHDD.SYS. The IDE controller is the onboard controller of the AMD 750 chipset, the card is a Transcend Industrial CF card. Without XHDD.SYS (just BIOS routines): BIOS.png With XHDD.SYS loaded: XHDD.png I used the following CONFIG.SYS line: …

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Re: Slow disk in DOS only

Posted on 2023-11-25, 09:02

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes, and I think they were developed by J.R. Ellis, who released them in his own website as XHDD.SYS. You can still download them here, latest version is from last here: http://optimizr.no-ip.org/dos/drivers.html For my DOS systems they work really well, they are both IDE driver and disk cache and …

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Re: Minimum hardware specs to enjoy Doom and Doom2

Posted on 2023-11-14, 06:23

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think we are nowadays used to much higher refresh rates. Also, DOOM used v sync so your frame rate drops quite a bit when you don’t make it to 35 (next value is 23.3). No 486 dx2 66 can keep up with 35 fps during the game, so it can be quite a different experience then the current 120+ Hz modern …

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Re: List of DOS games with OPL3 stereo music

Posted on 2023-10-27, 08:40

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yes I also think it is a shame that the sound hardware was rarely used directly. But using a tracker (I assume one would use that to make optimal use of OPL, like Adlib Tracker) is quite different than what “normal” musicians are used to. In the days of the 8 bit consoles / home computers it was …

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Re: List of DOS games with OPL3 stereo music

Posted on 2023-10-26, 18:01

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I was clearly talking about making stereo music, not about using other OPL3 features. But if you are so eager to impose that topic, the lack of the use of additional waveforms and features is not because of the lack of talent, but because studios for the most part used generic tools based on MIDI. …

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Re: List of DOS games with OPL3 stereo music

Posted on 2023-10-26, 09:36

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

OPL3 only supports hard panning for a synthesizer voice, that is why it is (seemingly) rarely used by musicians, because it doesn't sound nice. A musician would rarely pan an instrument hard left or right, and the middleware that translates the MIDI data performs some rounding that places almost all …

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Re: Could you help me set up: Floppy, Zip, Ethernet on a 386?

Posted on 2023-10-17, 05:11

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There is a benefit for networking if the drive on you target machine is not so large. You can install Microsoft Office from network for example instead of fiddling with a lot of floppies or having the space for the installer. I have even run DOOM entirely from network (in DOS) to test different …

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Re: Orpheus II soundcard thread *** LT board now available ***

Posted on 2023-10-14, 07:03

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

There has been tracker software or players in the past that supported “dual gus” to have 3D positional audio, but it will be a nightmare setting everything up with the required resources.

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Re: Manually Installing DOS

Posted on 2023-09-23, 08:05

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by digistorm

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No. They are compressed versions of those files and if I recall correctly you can decompress them with the EXPAND utility.

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

Posted on 2023-09-16, 08:35

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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