squareguy wrote:

falloutboy, wow! […]
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falloutboy, wow!

I fnally got around to trying out Power YMF and loading the 4MB sound bank. I admit I don't know much about MIDI but this thing sounds awesome! I cannot tell the difference between it and the Yamaha S-YXG100 software synth.

I have a lot more testing to do but I get DirectX 7, Sensaura and Yamaha synth all in one package. I may not get the synth in pure DOS mode but who cares, it works flawlessly in Windows MS-DOS Mode window (ok, so it's a full-screen only window 🤣)

EDIT: forgot to mention, real OPL3 too

I finally got around to playing around with a YMF724 on my Intel SE440BX-2 using the default drivers from Yamaha's site. I have to say that the GM music sounds better than almost every other solution I have used. I guess I have to chalk it up to the superior Yamaha instrument set. If you're going to do your DOS gaming in a Windows DOS box, it would be hard to beat this card for GM. You could pay a lot more for a DB or an expensive standalone board and not be as happy. I think I like the default patch set even better than much larger soundfonts loaded on the SB Live!.

DOS compatibility with the SB-Link seems to work great too. Shame that there's no way to access GM from DOS as you can with the Live!

Power YMF seems really cool too. Am I right in assuming that the "default" 2.31MB bank is the one the card would use if Power YMF were not installed? The extended 4.61 bank produces a little distortion with Duke3D, but I'll test it with other games.

My Abit KT7-Raid doesn't have Sblink but I got my YMF724F-V working in pure Dos mode with Dsdma running after setupds in autoexec.bat.
It's not perfect though, at least in my system, as Dune 2 didn't have speech, and Pinball fantasies has static coming out the right speaker added
to the music/effects, followed by the game crashing. Other games work well though, such as Whiplash(Fatal racing), Doom, X-wing, SimCity 2000,
that was all I tried.

I have to agree the 4mB sound bank sounded very good in Doom in a Dos window, X-wing for some reason had graphics glitches in a Win98 Dos window,
but otherwise the Midi and effects were good.
I'm going to keep the Yamaha card in the computer and mainly use it for Windows games and the occasional Dos game that has Midi but uses Dos4gw
which is incompatible in pure Dos, not that there is any way to access midi in Dos anyway. I have put my non-pnp sb16 in the Isa slot and will keep that
for Dos usage only, Win98 doesn't even know it's there. I'll post my Autoexec YMF724 information here a bit later as it may help someone else trying to set one of
these cards up.

EDIT.. My Pinball fantasies install is corrupt, it also crashes on the sb16. Also I found out that there may be a reason Dune2 doesn't have speech, something to do with
there being 3 selections for audio, will give this another go at a later time, in Windows and Dos. Another thing I noticed is the Line out doesn't work in Dos, only the
amplified speaker output.

One interesting glitch using Power YMF. With a PCI Voodoo 3 and 44.1kHz audio enabled in Power YMF, I didn't see some textures while demoing Descent 2. The documentation said that you might experiences problems with other PCI cards when selecting 44.1kHz.

ZanQuance wrote:

I use this one

it's older than 4.12.1.2008 in SensauraVxd2203.zip

Tertz wrote:

ZanQuance wrote:

I use this one

it's older than 4.12.1.2008 in SensauraVxd2203.zip

The older version tends to initialize properly where as the later version does not.
I suspect that just because the file is newer doesn't mean it's automatically better, but there could be cases where a newer dll is required for certain features to work properly, but I have yet to see a case for this.

ZanQuance wrote:

The older version tends to initialize properly where as the later version does not.

Concrete examples of games where 2006 works better than 2008 ?

but there could be cases where a newer dll is required for certain features to work properly, but I have yet to see a case for this.

I saw 2008 recommended for Thief 2, but there was not said compared to wich older version.

Tertz wrote:

Concrete examples of games where 2006 works better than 2008 ? […]
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ZanQuance wrote:

The older version tends to initialize properly where as the later version does not.

Concrete examples of games where 2006 works better than 2008 ?

but there could be cases where a newer dll is required for certain features to work properly, but I have yet to see a case for this.

I saw 2008 recommended for Thief 2, but there was not said compared to wich older version.

Using my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz under XP with their last XP drivers, none of the A3D 2.0 games would init properly with the latest Sensaura dll, but the older 2006 version inits on every game I tried. But this is limited and subjective testing on my PC. As they say YMMV, but in my case the older version ran flawless in all DS3D, EAX2 and A3D 2.0 titles I have on hand.

ZanQuance wrote:

Using my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz under XP with their last XP drivers, none of the A3D 2.0 games would init properly

Santa Cruz is made on other chip - CS4630. The behavior on YMF7x4, wich are discussed here, may differ.
Also the situation of using YMF for A3D 2.0 or in XP is not typical for old gaming, including because 2.0 is not officially supported and XP drivers are limited.

Tertz wrote:

ZanQuance wrote:

Using my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz under XP with their last XP drivers, none of the A3D 2.0 games would init properly

Santa Cruz is made on other chip - CS4630. The behavior on YMF7x4, wich are discussed here, may differ.
Also the situation of using YMF for A3D 2.0 or in XP is not typical for old gaming, including because 2.0 is not officially supported and XP drivers are limited.

Very true, just try out both if you have one of the YMF cards and see which one works best for you.

ZanQuance wrote:

Very true, just try out both if you have one of the YMF cards and see which one works best for you.

Based on what you've said there is no sense to try on YMF version older than latest 2008. A3D 2.0 support is out of YMF official possibilities.

Tertz wrote:

ZanQuance wrote:

Very true, just try out both if you have one of the YMF cards and see which one works best for you.

Based on what you've said there is no sense to try on YMF version older than latest 2008. A3D 2.0 support is out of YMF official possibilities.

Based on what? I'm not sure I understand what purpose you've bumped this thread over now.
Sensaura supports A3D 2.0 to a degree in all versions, and will offer occlusions, doppler and HRTF, just not wavetracing. If you want A3D 2.0 you should just use a Vortex2. Sensaura is mostly a software solution anyways but will have DSP acceleration if used on a Sensaura compatible card like the Santa Cruz.

Use either DLL version, its not hard to switch between them.

The YMF is a Jack of all trades, master of none : good DOS compatibility, good General MIDI sound sets, good 3D audio functionality. As Phil pointed out, one issue with the YMF-724 is that the boards on which it is officially most compatible, the 430TX, 440LX and 440BX, are boards which always come with ISA slots (except for odd BX boards like the ASUS P3B-1394). If you throw in a cheap ISA card you can often get nearly-perfect compatibility without having to wrestle with drivers or making PC/PCI cables. Dedicated modules and daughterboards may give better audio than the built-in MIDI. The Vortex 2 has better 3D sound capabilities.

^^ I'll humbly disagree.

It's home is on a 440BX chipset with SB-link. Taking a PCI slot automatically releases an ISA slot for other cards. It's easy to setup when you know how. And it sounds better than my SB Pro 2. They were dirt cheap, too. Besides, it has SPIDIF, which I'll investigate with external DSPs, without having to pay a fortune for something like an Adlib Gold. BTW, cables are easy to source ; you can find 6 pin IDC cables online.

SPDIF could be interesting. One of my Vortex 2 cards has optical out, still got to test it in DOS, but works great in Windows.

Could someone link me to a cheap 724 card on eBay? I only found one for around $40 and wouldn't mind checking one out for myself.

j^aws wrote:

^^ I'll humbly disagree.

It's home is on a 440BX chipset with SB-link. Taking a PCI slot automatically releases an ISA slot for other cards. It's easy to setup when you know how. And it sounds better than my SB Pro 2. They were dirt cheap, too. Besides, it has SPIDIF, which I'll investigate with external DSPs, without having to pay a fortune for something like an Adlib Gold. BTW, cables are easy to source ; you can find 6 pin IDC cables online.

I can see the value if you have only one ISA slot in your BX. Gravis, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach all made good ISA sound cards, but you have to own one first 😉 The YMF can take care of the Sound Blaster and Roland MPU-401 duties (through softmpu).

^^ Well, you haven't seen my forthcoming 440BX build!

I have Ensoniq, Turtle Beach and Gravis cards, however, this build is around the YMF724 taking centre stage. This leaves me with 3 ISA slots for other treats. And built around a VIA C3 Ezra-T, I get smooth scaling speeds from a 286 to a Pentium 2. Just this covers an enormous scope for DOS games.

Adding a CT3980 and a GUS PnP covers 2 ISA slots, and the last ISA slot will be taken by an ET4000 VGA card. Which leaves 2 PCI slots and an AGP slot free for something that can run demoscene stuff... So very flexible.

Great Hierophant wrote:

one issue with the YMF-724 is that the boards on which it is officially most compatible, the 430TX, 440LX and 440BX, are boards which always come with ISA slots

And there is no data YMF's SB-Link has less compatibility on i8xx boards, while they support it. Not many boards had the connector, unfortunally.

Now about "master of none". Try to find another PCI card with genuine OPL to use with DOSBox in WinXP. While PCM part is emulated excellently, the quality of OPL has problems there.
The other interesting thing is the combo with popular AWE64, what gives best SB PCM + real OPL. For Coppermine MBs with a single ISA (as 2 ISA boards are rare) there is no alternative, besides using noiser SB16. I plan to test this combination later.

j^aws wrote:

^^ Well, you haven't seen my forthcoming 440BX build!

I have Ensoniq, Turtle Beach and Gravis cards, however, this build is around the YMF724 taking centre stage. This leaves me with 3 ISA slots for other treats. And built around a VIA C3 Ezra-T, I get smooth scaling speeds from a 286 to a Pentium 2. Just this covers an enormous scope for DOS games.

Adding a CT3980 and a GUS PnP covers 2 ISA slots, and the last ISA slot will be taken by an ET4000 VGA card. Which leaves 2 PCI slots and an AGP slot free for something that can run demoscene stuff... So very flexible.

Have you documented your C3 build anywhere? I'm very interested bc of the deeper scaling than K6-2.

Tertz, have you figured out how to get digital TOSLINK output working on YMF7x4 in real MS-DOS? I can only get the optical digital to work in Windows 98SE.

I am, like everyone here, in search for the perfect retro-gaming machine. So far I have narrowed my focus on 2 possible holy grails: i815 and/or KT133A. I do have a BX board, and it works fine as far as DOS compatibility goes, even has 2 ISA slots so no need for any SB-link cable etc. But it has one problem (as all BX boards do): AGP is only 1x/2x (3.3V) and I want to use a AGP 4x card (1.5V) so I'm searching further.

KT133A DDMA support seems to be hit-or-miss, and as far as I know it doesn't support PC/PCI. But i815 does support PC/PCI; however, were any i815 boards ever made with a SB-link header? I've gone over the documentation of the i815 southbridge chips and I know which ball the signals come out at but I'm not about to go soldering connectors to the BGA chip if they weren't connected by the manufacturer.

So does anyone know of i815 boards with SB-link headers? Better yet, is there somewhere a list of all known motherboards with SB-link headers?

(because I'd like to use a YMF744 card on a i815 board, if I can find one with SB-link)