Impulse Tracker is a tough one to work with.

Let me run a couple tests and get back to you quickly. We need to get this straightened out once-and-for-all.

The documentation on "V1" says, BTW:

1V1 Override VGA detection routine.. in case you DO have a
2   VGA and the program doesn't recognise it. If characters
3   look weird, you may need to use this switch to override
4   the Matrox mode autodetect.

Okay. This should work quite well for all intents and purposes. waveOut is supposed to give lower latencies but I found that it really just scuffed up the sound a lot.

The buffer is reallllly low, 30ms, so the timing should be pretty much right on (30ms fast), but you might notice an occasional click or pop. From the preliminary tests I did it was no problem, although there was this REALLY intense MOD I had once, I can't remember the name of it, it was like candles or clouds or something, it played 64 channels. That would be an EXCELLENT test candidate. If you know of it I'd be very grateful if you could tell me what it is and where the heck to get it (or hey, upload it.)

Anyway, just save the attached VLP and use it. Hopefully it's reverse-compatible since I'm using a secret l33t new version of VDMSound 😉

Thanks Snover.

I did need to change the working dir, but that was just too expectable 😉
Alright - I tested this .VLP with a 12-channel .IT of my own (unfortunately I don't have this 64-channel monster you speak of, nor know of it)... I am getting a real abundance of clicks and pops actually, to the point where the sound is also slowing down considerably. No good for me, obviously... probably the buffer, I'll play around with it. It's been helpful though, in that I think I'm beginning to understand how the various settings seem to affect things.. at least vaguely.

Heh, there should probably be a sticky post on top of this forum regarding Impulse Tracker, with some FAQs and stuff. (I'd probably help if I can, too)

For me it helped to use waveOut instead of DirectSound, but sometimes IT freezes on me (well, the menu commands still work, but it won't play music until I restart it). Tweaking the buffer size and DMA polling periods helped as well, although finding a balance between latency and popping/choppiniess was difficult and tedious.

Starting in a window with the v1 switch helped immensely as well, as starting full-screen resulted in even more chopping (unless I held down, say, the Alt key while playing a song; I think that when Windows tries to steal unused CPU time away from DOS programs, it somehow steals more when the program starts full-screen than when it starts in a window - I have no idea why)

Umm...You may want to fiddle around with the driver settings inside of IT also. The documentation tells you how to do some command-line stuff as well I think.

I noticed there's a Windows .VXD driver in IT 2.14, but it's only supposed to work in Win9x 🙁

As you have found out by now, IT's performance really depends on your sound card driver's performance. Increasing buffers ize helps, but adds latency.

Or, ahem, use DosBox.
(Qbix, where are you?)

V.

Which brings to mind another question... which IT sound driver seems to work best for you guys under VDMSound? I'm currently using IT's SB16 MMX driver (can't remember the filename... at work right now).

Using DosBox could have been a good idea... except that IT doesn't seem to work under DosBox (and I don't think it would have handled all the peculiar 'graphics'... well, text-mode charset mainpulation actually). Besides, DosBox sound is mono and 22KHz, if I remember correctly (I might be mistaken on this one).

I don't know about that win9x .VXD driver for IT... I have been using Win98 for years (until I got this new machine... I chose to abandon 98 because it was exactly what caused the death of my old one), and IT worked fine with its normal SB16 driver. Well, I did have to press Ctrl-I (to reinitialize soundcard) when every few minutes the sound would get all crappy, but other than that it worked wonderfully.

Use the standard SB16 driver, NOT the MMX one!
Standard SB16 driver with IT2.14 has worked beutifully with virtually every version of Windows I have tried (NT, 2k and XP) and on both 100MHz and 1.8GHz computers. In my case MMX drivers never ever worked at all.
Cheers,
V.

Unregistered wrote:

Which brings to mind another question... which IT sound driver seems to work best for you guys under VDMSound? I'm currently using IT's SB16 MMX driver (can't remember the filename... at work right now).

I'm pretty sure the MMX driver works fine on my PIII-550 and WinXP, but I haven't played with it for a while so I'm forgetting the specifics.

DOSbox would be a very bad platform for IT because it only does 8-bit mono sound (yucky yucky yucky for complex sound mixing). I thought maybe IT was protected-mode, but I guess it isn't? So it would run (if you have a faster computer than mine) but it would sound like crap.

Well, I keep trying to get the DOSBox kids to implement more character-mode functions, but they're reluctant to do so.

Need some good docs to do so actually.

character generations functions are just weird.
they let you create your own font which is in a weird weird format.

I thought there was just a table somewhere in memory that holds the fonts...I think I remember them talking about it in an old book I had... Maybe it was "Inside the IBM PC: Access to advanced features and programming" by Peter Norton. That book was a treasure trove - too bad I didn't know assembly programming at the time I last read it. I need to see if my dad still has it.

Yeah, I-forget-what-interrupt-vector actually points to a dumb table of character definitions in an equally dumb format (i.e. monochrmoe, one byte per character scanline, in ASCII order, etc). Then there are a few BIOS functions that let you program start and end scanline for the blinking cursor, whether you wnat blicnking foregrounds or high-intensity backgrounds for a certain bit in the background colour, as well as some bit that lets you ask for a "padding" 9th column for characters IIRC (or was that automatic?). That's about it.

Only "voodoo" stuff left with VGA DAC's was that the BIOS functions could still print text when in graphics mode (by rendering the character in the frame-buffer), whereas other boards (Hercules) could not do that.

V.

That sounds like a sensible format for the data that needs to be stored. Text-mode character bitmaps are monochrome because you can select the colour of the entire character independent of what it looks like in terms of pixels. Such a simple scheme shouldn't be too hard to emulate either I would hope 😉

On the other hand, I don't know if it can be emulated in full-screen mode or not under NT/2K/XP.

Uhh, since I get Impulse Tracker to do all that fancy stuff with the text mode characters in fullscreen under XP, I'm guessing that it can.
Anyhow, PC Magazine used, in old times, to have this column where they would give you the source code of a program written by the staff, explain how it works, and encourage you to compile it yourself. One of those was a program called 'FontEdit', which did the exact same thing we're talking about here - modifying the text-mode ASCII character font. That was in, like, 1988 I think - funny thing is I STILL have the compiled .exe on this computer. I cannot for the life of me explain how it works (I was a little kid then, I think my dad actually did it himself) but I MIGHT still have the issue lying around somewhere in my dad's stuff. Which means full assembly (I think!) source code for these very functions. If anyone is really interested I could try and look for it. 😁

Alright... caved in and registered. 😉

(I'm the guy who made all those 'Unregistered' posts in this specific thread)

Hmmm, maybe you guys wouldn't even need the source code? I'm no programmer but if I give you the .exe then you might be able to debug it or reverse-engineer it somehow..? It still works on modern systems, as far as I can tell.

If it's a .exe instead of .com then it might be a bit tricky, but just loading it in Microsoft debug (included with every version of DOS and Windows that I've ever used) would allow you to easily generate an assembly listing.

Snover wrote:

Well, I keep trying to get the DOSBox kids to implement more character-mode functions, but they're reluctant to do so.

Actually working on it a bit, can load up fonts now to videomemory. Still doesn't seem to fix megazeux though, oh well let's hope that never gets fixed anyway.
But it supports 80x50 text modes now which ain't so bad, and after some more testing i came across scream tracker 3 which thinks it's useful to use 512 character mode, which will make the whole character generation even slower, wraaah.

Okay, here it is (and it turned out to be a .COM and not an .EXE after all) - fontedit.com, zipped for her pleasure.
Maybe it can help you guys.

Whoa that program is super-fancy... Good luck to whoever tries to tear it apart 😮

I'm sure there's info floating around on the Internet...I'd be willing to dig something up if noone else is.