Re: Does anyone know what OPL2 "composite sine mode" even is, or what used it?

Posted on 2014-08-12, 17:08

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's pretty easy to see/hear why the CSM mode was excluded from the OPL3, given the pre-processing requirement of the samples, and rather lackluster playback quality. The PWM method, which works equally well on both the OPL2 and OPL3, is arguably the better means of digital-audio playback from the …

---

Re: SCB-55 No sound

Posted on 2014-08-12, 17:06

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, at this point. I replaced FL3 on an SCB-55 a few years back, which is the -12V line, as Jepael mentioned. Bridging the connection has been discussed before as well, for cases where the filter is entirely missing. It sounds like you may just have a …

---

Re: Dune recordings by alex.schroedsen

Posted on 2014-08-08, 19:17

by

by Cloudschatze

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Now we...just need to hound Cloudschatze for lossless copies of the Dune... Digital captures would be ideal, and outside of this particular title, I'd simply grab the S/PDIF output from a CT1747-bearing AWE32 card and present that. The problem with Dune, however, is that faithful reproduction of …

---

Re: Adlib Gold 1000 Overview (and other OPL stuff)

Posted on 2014-08-03, 21:12

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

keropi wrote: ^ so what's the use of the companion YMZ263 ?? It provides the digital-audio sampling and playback, MIDI I/O, and gameport functionality.

---

Re: Adlib Gold 1000 Overview (and other OPL stuff)

Posted on 2014-08-03, 20:03

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I haven't figured out what the takamisawa relay is for... This relay is used to prevent the electrical "speaker pop" when powering-on the system. The Adlib Gold is actually one of [the] best OPL3 cards in that it has YMZ oversampling... You've mentioned oversampling a few times now, and while …

---

Re: IBM PS/2 Model 33 aka PS/2E pizzabox 486

Posted on 2014-08-01, 02:04

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

UNFORTUNATELY no one on the entire internet documented the adlib gold's jumpers... I do plan to scan the manual eventually, but for future reference, here's a transcription at least: To make it easier to configure the Ad Lib Gold card, we have made the Interrupt lines (IRQ) and DMA channels …

---

An Advanced SB Live! Configuration

Posted on 2014-07-30, 19:56

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Creative's Live! Drive, introduced in 1999, does a lot of things right. The front-and-center accessibility of analog input(s) and MIDI I/O adds a certain amount of convenience for music production, and the digitally-fed headphone jack alone is arguably worth the price of installing a Live! Drive. …

---

Re: SB Live! and DirectSound Secondary Buffers (EAX)

Posted on 2014-07-29, 03:58

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sound blaster live can address up to two gigabytes of ram. You bring up a good point. The EMU10K1 can only physically address 32 MB Sound blaster Live has 31-bit dma access to the PCI bus. Okay, and...? :) The EMU10K1 is documented as only being able to address 32MB of memory at any given time. It …

---

Re: SB Live! and DirectSound Secondary Buffers (EAX)

Posted on 2014-07-28, 19:24

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sound blaster live can address up to two gigabytes of ram. You bring up a good point. The EMU10K1 can only physically address 32 MB, and relies on a later driver to provide address translation and paging above that amount. I imagine there must be some amount of system overhead involved in those …

---

Re: SB Live! and DirectSound Secondary Buffers (EAX)

Posted on 2014-07-27, 23:14

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thank-you for the suggestion, swaaye. I'll have to check it out.

---

Re: SB Live! and DirectSound Secondary Buffers (EAX)

Posted on 2014-07-25, 19:55

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

From what I understand it the "soundfont cache" is just your system memory. The SB Live! does not have any onboard memory and has to store the soundfont in reserved system memory. Exactly, which is the reason this is even a question. DirectSound can apparently allocate as much memory for software …

---

SB Live! and DirectSound Secondary Buffers (EAX)

Posted on 2014-07-22, 21:44

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not sure if anyone can answer this, but is there any correlation between the SB Live!'s adjustable "Soundfont Cache" limit, and the amount of hardware-controlled memory available to DirectSound for secondary buffers? It seems like DXDiag should be able to help answer this, but alas, no... A …

---

Re: Dialing into a BBS in 2014: What do you think?

Posted on 2014-07-22, 15:37

by

by Cloudschatze

in Milliways

in Milliways

I went through a similar exercise about a year ago. As far as active, dial-up-capable BBSes go, the TelnetBBSGuide maintained an updated list up until a few months ago. I'm not sure if they've discontinued it for good, but here is a capture as of April, 2014: …

---

Re: The Last of the True Tandys

Posted on 2014-07-21, 17:03

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

awesome setup! IMHO a setup like this has value for being itself: once you upgrade it to 486ish/vga then it has no reason to exist IMHO , the point is to have tandy gfx/sound for all these old games :) The addition of a VGA card can be very complementary to a second-gen (> 1988) Tandy 1000 system, …

---

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2014-06-18, 15:44

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

jwt27 wrote: Was IMFC manufactured by Yamaha? Yes, it's a Yamaha product. (Hence my use of Yamaha's logo for the photo in my QuestStudios thread.) Similarly, you'll notice that the NEC XR385 that everyone mistakenly refers to as a "clone," is also an OEM Yamaha product.

---

Re: F19 key disk

Posted on 2014-06-17, 22:05

by

by Cloudschatze

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

MicroProse released a set of "nokey" loaders for their older, key-disk-requiring titles, including F-19. http://cd.textfiles.com/swextrav1993/disk1/fi … mes5/mpskey.zip

---

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2014-06-17, 15:23

by

by Cloudschatze

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If only I had a programming guide for it, I might try and give birth to a General MIDI compatible driver, provided there are enough technical capabilities and someone makes a set of GM patches. "lchiocca" originally posted a scan of the IMFC Technical Reference back in 2008. His link is dead, but …

---

Re: SoftMPU 1.8 - Software Intelligent MPU-401 Emulator

Posted on 2014-06-14, 23:55

by

by Cloudschatze

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

I'm not sure what these messages do, but they're probably some kind of init or reset. I've attached a modified driver file that should correctly send the preceding messages on any system. The modified driver works. Bravo! F0 43 75 00 10 21 00 F7 - Turns memory-protect off F0 43 75 00 10 20 00 F7 - …

---

Re: SoftMPU 1.8 - Software Intelligent MPU-401 Emulator

Posted on 2014-06-14, 20:10

by

by Cloudschatze

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

What does the "current configuration buffer" message actually do? Understanding that may help to figure out why the driver decides it needs to send this message. The FB-01 has a number of configuration memory presets, each comprised of settings for voice allocation, MIDI channel mappings, note …

---

Re: SoftMPU 1.8 - Software Intelligent MPU-401 Emulator

Posted on 2014-06-14, 18:36

by

by Cloudschatze

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

The "F0 43 75 00 00 01 00 F7" message corresponds to the FB-01's, "current configuration buffer." It looks like Sierra simply dumped the parameters/banks from whatever FB-01 they were working with, and the games simply re-send some of that data via the FB-01 driver and respective patch files. As …

---