appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-23, 12:25:

Darmok wrote on 2023-01-23, 12:23:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-01-23, 12:13:

This is still working as intended. There is a bug (or feature, your pick of poison) in a genuine SB Pro that reverses the channels. In essence, when FDoom sees T4 it switches channels to accomodate a genuine SB Pro, which plays reversed on a compatible card. You need to see if your card's mixer has a way of reversing the channels. This is one of many pitfalls of using a non-genuine SB card. This is why many games have an option to reverse stereo in their audio setup, but not all. I guess Fdoom could benefint from a -reverseStereo switch or something to deal with this.

Therefore, I would like Viti95 to add the possibility of reversing channels through a parameter to the doom code. If the alternation of T4 - T6 reverses the channels, then in my opinion such a feature is quite simple to implement.

Have you tried setting your SB Pro compatible card as T2? That will make it appear as a SB Pro 1.0, which AFAICR does not have the reversed channels issue.

I tested with OPTI930 and T2 - there is no sound, neither FM nor SFX and the fdoom crashes when i exit the game.

Then we need Viti to add a -reverseStereo switch to Fdoom 😀

The whole story regarding reverse stereo channels on real SBPro cards is a software issue and it didn't help that there wasn't initially an official low-level documentation from Creative. Additional information here: SBPro1 CT1330A, lets solve the Reversed Stereo myth!

But yeah, an option to flip the stereo channels must be added since clones are prone to this than the real thing.

I guess the issue with -reverseStereo is that it forces to reverse the stereo setup, but SBpro code also forces it, so it's basically doing nothing. I'll modify the -reverseStereo option so it disables stereo reverse on SBpro cards.

Viti95, I have one more offer for you. When using OPTI930, there is a strong imbalance in the sound volume between FM and SFX. I have to set the FM level to the maximum in the game, while the SFX level is only for one count. The FM volume level is too low. Can't this be fixed? When OPTI930 is configured by the utility, all levels in the mixer are set to maximum. In other games, this imbalance is not observed.
Thank you.

That's an OPTi problem. I've had that issue with an OPTi MAD16 card ages ago with several other games (pretty fun with Cannon Fodder just blasting the FM music interludes after had adjusting volume to hear the vital sounds)

@Darmok can you try this dev build? The "-reverseStereo" option should be working fine now

ViTi95 wrote on 2023-01-24, 22:12:

@Darmok can you try this dev build? The "-reverseStereo" option should be working fine now

FastDoom_0.9.4a.zip

Just tested with OPTI930, everything is ok, -reverseStereo option reverses the channels correctly.
I admire how quickly you solve problems. Thank you.

leileilol wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:24:

That's an OPTi problem. I've had that issue with an OPTi MAD16 card ages ago with several other games (pretty fun with Cannon Fodder just blasting the FM music interludes after had adjusting volume to hear the vital sounds)

Yes, it seems that this is indeed a problem with the OPTI930, perhaps only with my sample. I found that if I initialize sndinit /b twice in a row, the problem goes away.

ViTi95 wrote on 2023-01-24, 22:12:

@Darmok can you try this dev build? The "-reverseStereo" option should be working fine now

FastDoom_0.9.4a.zip

Thanks a lot ViTi95 😀

Darmok wrote on 2023-01-25, 06:56:

Just tested with OPTI930, everything is ok, -reverseStereo option reverses the channels correctly.
I admire how quickly you solve problems. Thank you.

Great to hear it's working now. I've been developing this project for so long that even on vacation without my laptop I already knew how to solve the issue (please visit Seville, is a wonderful city). When I arrived to my house it was basically a 5 minute fix.

Is someone currently using fdoom successfully with an Interwave based card (GUS pnp, ARGUS, etc.)?

I think it was working at some point (not completely sure, though), but I'm currently unable to get it to work at all. Everytime I choose the Gravis ultrasound for FX and music, it doesn't play anything (no error on startup) and throws an exception after quitting:

I've tried running it with a standard config and without anything loading on startup (Shift during bootup).
I've tried flipping almost all BIOS settings.
I've swapped this clone card to an ARGUS and a real Gravis PnP.
I've changed to another system (486DX2-66 to PII-400).
I've also gone back to releases in the 0.8 and 0.7 range.

Every time it won't play anything and give the above exception on quitting. Changing to a Soundblaster or using Midi music works - even them being on the same physical card as the not working Interwave.

A regular Doom II and all other trackers / demos I quickly tried are working nicely, though.

What instantly does work:
starting fdoom with a GUS setting in DosBox.
the PicoGUS also does play, but always crashes after a while (but that may be a picoGUS thing).

What I haven't tried, yet: testing with a GF1 based card.

Apart from the above (and maybe not using enough retro coal energy and other magic), I'm currently out of good ideas where to look next.
So, if someone could confirm it's working for them, it'd at least help me to point the finger at myself more convincingly again 😉

What IRQ is your GUS on? My GUSpnp has always been on 11 and FastDOOM doesn’t like that. If you have UNISOUND on your system, you can try set your GUSpnp to IRQ 7 by doing the following:

SET ULTRASND=port,dma,dma,7,7 (the first 3 values you should copy from your AUTOEXEC.BAT)
UNISOUND

On my system IRQ 7 is free (in DOS, when I don’t use the parallel port) and then it works.

digistorm wrote on 2023-01-27, 17:39:

What IRQ is your GUS on? My GUSpnp has always been on 11 and FastDOOM doesn’t like that. If you have UNISOUND on your system, you can try set your GUSpnp to IRQ 7 by doing the following:

This is a limitation of the Apogee Sound System (FastDOOM uses it) which doesn't allow using IRQ higher than 7 no matter which DOS extender is used to run. Additionally, versions of DOS/32A after 7.35 tend to crash when a device attempts to use such higher IRQs on a real computer.

digistorm and Gmbl256, I bow to you both and want to thank you for this quick and perfectly directed pointer! Of course, the IRQ was set to 11 and changing it did help instantly.
For some reason, since it's always been set to that known free IRQ in my systems since the stone age, I didn't even consider looking there, even though it also directly explains why the PicoGUS does work (since it's only an 8bit slot card).

So, again, thank you!

Yeah there is a limitation with the Apogee Sound System, it doesn't like GUS devices with IRQ higher than 7. I've never looked into why exists this limitation, but the developers did it anyway:

1GetUltraCfg(&os);
2
3if (os.forced_gf1_irq > 7)
4    {
5        return (GUS_Error);
6    }

Even more they disabled the hardware mixing for the GUS, which is faster compared to software mixing. One of the ideas for the project is to revert back this and re-enable hardware mixing for the GUS, but the code is complex and I don't really have much time to understand/modify this code. I hope someone finds the Apogee Sound System source code before this date:

1
2    7/24/95
3
4        Changed GUS code to use software mixing instead of hardware mixing.
5        GUS purists will hate me (if they found out), but it makes a lot more
6        sense this way since I only have to maintain one playback method, plus
7        it allows GUS owners to hear reverb and gives better control over panning.
8        There may be other benefits, but I can't think of them right now.
9

BTW I'm adding more error checking for sound cards, to avoid random crashes on FastDoom initialization process.

Is maybe this an earlier version? -> https://github.com/videogamepreservation/rott … master/audiolib
I'm not sure which (version) date it relates to (and couldn't find a changelog in that ROTT source code release), but at least the GUS.c and other files seem to have dates from 1994

The above limit to IRQs <=7 can be found in there, too.

ROTT source release (which never preserved dates and marked them all as December 2002) is still the post-GUS software ASS.

The released source code of the Apogee Sound System is from 1996, take a look at the readme:

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/rott … UBLIC/NOTES.TXT

ViTi95 wrote on 2023-01-27, 21:36:

Yeah there is a limitation with the Apogee Sound System, it doesn't like GUS devices with IRQ higher than 7. I've never looked into why exists this limitation, but the developers did it anyway:

There seems to be a small hint in the notes you linked:
- GUS only supports IRQs below 8. At higher IRQs, the dos extender seems to be too slow.

edit: just for the fun of it, I took out the IRQ-check and tried it with an IRQ of 11 again. The music then actually plays, but the sound effects (when activated in the config) make it glitch quite badly - maybe that's what Jim Dos(e) was referring to (being too slow for the SFX) 😁

Making them work correctly with DMA also seems to be the challenge polpo is dealing with on the picogus currently.