Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-07-05, 18:19

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Given our results with the ROMMAKER that I built, I was curious to find out if the version that shock__ (and others?) compiled many pages ago might produce better results. The answer is that it produces files that are, with a few exceptions, identical to the version that I originally built (before …

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Re: ESS Audiodrive wavetable soundcard help

Posted on 2017-06-30, 18:38

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Is it possible to get GM compatibility with a GUS card some way? The included patch set includes a full GM instrument set, and the instruments are mapped to the correct program numbers by default, so it is GM compatible in that way. If you are referring to MPU-401 compatibility, there is MegaEM and …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-27, 23:39

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have a Working GUS MAX in a P150 and all necessary Soldering/Desoldering equipment and skills available for any testing. Just tell me what to do. The GF1-based boards are not capable of testing any of the ROM images we're working on at the moment. My request was simply for someone with a GUS PnP …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-27, 18:10

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have tried collecting a list of instruments needed by the first few areas in Doom 2; intro, title and map 1, I think. I can't post the ROM file publicly, but the MIDI files I used for testing are attached. This way, anyone interested in comparing will be able to do so. It will also let us compare …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-26, 04:16

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've generated a revised version of the same ROM, since I've finally found which patch file was corrupt. I found a new copy and fixed the instrument maps a little. To save a little upload time, we could probably hear what we need with just MELLOW55.MID and STRIVING.MID. If we can get these to …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-24, 03:23

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Well, it's certainly better than it was, but it sounds like there is still some work to be done. Is it just my cheap earbuds, or did anyone else hear a bit of noise/distortion in a few places? How about the bass in STRIVING.MID, for example? For easy reference, start times for each of the files are …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-22, 05:27

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have generated what should be a workable ROM that will at least give us better sound than we were getting before. There are likely a few adjustments that still need to be made, but we won't know that until we hear the results. There is a ROM file, with no patches that weren't intended to be freely …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-21, 23:21

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It took some debugging and a good bit of staring at both a hex editor and the output from the FFF parser, but I think I've finally found the source of the problem I was having with the ROMMAKER. I should have time within the next few hours to produce another new test ROM. If I can avoid including …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-10, 03:01

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Great news 640K!enough ... you're really earning your name on the frontside of the PCB here :) Pretty excited for what you come up with. The first thing I looked at was the patch parameters in the official FFF files. I didn't really take a detailed look at the 4 MiB set beyond that, but it was …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-09, 15:12

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Although it may not be useful to anyone else, I have spent my free time the last few days working on an FFF parser to see if it can offer a few hints about what is going on. The results turned out to be quite interesting, even though the software isn't complete yet. I should have a new test ROM that …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-06, 04:55

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I mean I don't mind reworking the SOP44 chips anymore since yesterday, but once you desoldered them cleaning up the pins to re-use them with my programmer is a major pain (it's a ZIF socket which needs the pins almost perfectly clean of solder - basically looks like this http://www.icunlock- …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-03, 03:24

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I do highly suspect a timing problem, after changing the ST 29F800-90 to an AMD 29F800-55 things work reliably. I guess anything below 80ns might go, as that's the recommendation for RAMs on the GUSPnP I was told. I read the 80 ns requirement for the RAM too. It was mentioned in the Gravis PDF …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-02, 20:18

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

EDIT4: ROM reliably checks out good ... I'll upload new recordings soon. While SBOS sounds a bit more complete now, Windows MIDIs sound pretty much the same to my judgement. What did you find? I was suspicious of a timing problem somewhere in the memory sub-system, just because of the …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 16:56

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It took quite a bit of fiddling with the instrument list just to get a few instruments and (most of) the standard drum kit to fit. I added a few MIDI files, too. With the exception of some of the drums, all of the instruments needed should be available.

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 15:36

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If the FFF bank I uploaded a few days ago produces decent MIDI quality, then it may have something to do with the ROMMaker's down-sampling feature. What do you think of producing a ROM file with just enough instruments to play a few MIDI files, without converting to 8-bit , and giving that a try …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 15:25

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

That's bad! I knew before I suggested it that the "bow glass" is not in the ROM, but was hoping the piano might at least be sane. There also seems to be (too much) of some sort of echo (or bad reverb) effect. If you load the 16-bit, 2 MiB FFF version of the bank into RAM, is MIDI at least half sane? …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 14:49

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Bad news: Sounds quite broken ... this is canyon.mid played back under windows https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9WAZV_Pqo7gcnMzNFBUZzg0MjA ... General MIDI via SBOS/MegaEM sounds similarly wrong. That's sounds so bad it's almost comical, except that we have to figure out how to fix it. I can …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-06-01, 04:43

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

There is a certain amount of old cruft in the code, and some other general sloppiness. The global variable rom_size is set to 2 initially, then it even looks like the size can be set using a command-line argument. The only problem is that it is never used; the line that used to refer to it in WPATCH …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-31, 20:56

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This is somewhat peculiar. All of the important files were included in the archive I uploaded. IWSBOS.INI is the ROM configuration file I used, and rom_size is set to 1048576. There were no splits; just a single ROM file generated. If you have a hex editor handy, can you post just the first 172 …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2017-05-31, 20:03

by

by 640K!enough

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

At least that tells us that we can produce usable ROMs. Now that we're sure of that, we can put some effort into tweaking the results. I'm not quite sure where the 2 came from, but I intentionally used obvious values in the ROM configuration file to see how they were treated. If you wanted to see …

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