If you can find a board with Super I/O chip and a parallel port there is always that hope that you could use that Parallel port OPL3 thing. Thats probs the best bet.
Warlord wrote on 2020-12-18, 03:14:If you can find a board with Super I/O chip and a parallel port there is always that hope that you could use that Parallel port OPL3 thing. Thats probs the best bet.
Those aren't generally going to worn in DOS though are they?
You could use it for DOSBox though. At that point a USB to Parallel port adapter should work just as well.
Warlord wrote on 2020-12-18, 03:34:Theres some PCI to 8 Bit ISA adaters on aliexpress. Not sure the last intel chipset that supported PCI/ISA bridges tho. Could […]
Theres some PCI to 8 Bit ISA adaters on aliexpress. Not sure the last intel chipset that supported PCI/ISA bridges tho. Could work with a riser + Ribbon.
I doubt any of those would support ISA DMA without some kind of modification (if at all possible). They could be a nice way to add OPL2 or OPL3 to a board without ISA slots, however .
EDIT: Then again, a YMF7x4 based PCI card would probably be a simpler option .
There's a really strong chance that these adapters won't support ISA-style DMA. If they're cheap, it wouldn't hurt to try, but just keep that in mind.
Error 0x7CF wrote on 2020-12-18, 02:16:PCMCIA FPGA soundcard would be really cool. Dongle is pretty much guaranteed required for MIDI, though you could probably fit 3.5mm jacks on it.
My idea would be this - the dongle would be for using MIDI and the gameport - but the sound - when not connected to a dongle, could be sent through either the internal speaker, or have one of those flat piezo speakers inside with a strong amp that turns the card itself into a speaker.
If I can get more acquainted with things like SMDs and find a good board printing house (and get better at designing my own circuit boards), I could probably use designs on here as a guide to develop such a device - but that would be a (very) long term goal since my skillset currently is guitar pedals that use pint-through-hole electronic components and home-etched PCB.
Another idea would be a midi/gameport-less version with 3.5" jacks on it for headphones and the same speaker setup for when not using headphones.
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LightStruk wrote on 2020-12-03, 14:53:Almost every motherboard still has those signals somewhere, since the LPC bus is still a thing, and LPC is just a fancy serialized ISA bus. A few motherboards have LPC bus headers, others have solder points or test points with the LPC bus, and others would require soldering wires to a Super I/O chip or something else tied to the LPC bus.
Yep, these are often labelled as a TPM header. I was quite surprised, that LPC is with us for a really, really long time. Though this is probably the reason, why Intel is planning to "finally" remove it from the boards with arrival of 500 series chipset (next gen coming in just a few months).
Warlord wrote on 2020-12-18, 03:14:If you can find a board with Super I/O chip and a parallel port there is always that hope that you could use that Parallel port OPL3 thing. Thats probs the best bet.
This is good option even for modern PCs (I know, that it works at least with Sandy Bridge), and I planed to try that one day on my previous Skylake PC (yes, it still have LPT header on board), but it won't solve the whole problem. That's because, you can only get music from that sound card. You most likely would be able to get some sounds via PC speaker, but let's be honest, that's far from ideal.
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Srandista wrote on 2021-01-04, 21:05:This is good option even for modern PCs (I know, that it works at least with Sandy Bridge), and I planed to try that one day on my previous Skylake PC (yes, it still have LPT header on board), but it won't solve the whole problem. That's because, you can only get music from that sound card. You most likely would be able to get some sounds via PC speaker, but let's be honest, that's far from ideal.
One sound device with digital audio output that would still work in such a newer post-ISA PC and have some support in games would be a Disney Sound Source (not a Covox Speech Thing, that's a more primitive device with less support).
There is a fair number of games that support the Disney Sound Source out of the box (including many later Sierra games), and using the DIGPAK driver you can (probably) patch (almost) any DOS game that uses either Miles Design AIL2 drivers or DIGPAK drivers, to add support for it, if they don't ship with it. That increases the number of supported games considerably. It would still only be a fraction of the games that supported Sound Blaster, but it would still be a fairly extensive list of games.
The Disney Sound Source has gotten rare to come by, but it shouldn't be too hard to develop a clone of it, since it's mostly a FIFO buffer with a fixed frequency DAC. That would make it only slightly more complicated than a Covox Speech Thing. The same guy who's developing the ARGUS sound card (new GUS clone based on the AMD Interwave chip) has been working on a Disney Sound Source clone.
So if you add a second parallel port to a modern PC, and then connect a Disney Sound Source (or clone) to the primary parallel port and plug a OPL3LPT into the second parallel port, then you'll have both digital sound effects and FM music with quite a few games. 🙂
Alternatively, if you can't get an add-in PCI(e) parallel port to be detected as LPT2 in DOS, you can also connect a General MIDI device to the serial port with a DIY conversion cable, use SoftMPU to emulate an MPU-401 interface going through the serial port, and then use the single parallel port for the Disney Sound Source. And then you'll still have both music and digital effects, at least in games that you can get them both to work on.
However, anything requiring emulation TSRs such as SoftMPU or ADLIPT will not work with protected mode games.
Of course, once SuperIO is removed from future chipsets, motherboards will likely also no longer have a CSM as part of their UEFI BIOS, meaning they will no longer have legacy BIOS support and will thus no longer be able to boot DOS natively. At that point, emulation and virtualization will be the only remaining options.
Error 0x7CF wrote on 2020-12-18, 02:16:PCMCIA FPGA soundcard would be really cool. Dongle is pretty much guaranteed required for MIDI, though you could probably fit 3.5mm jacks on it.
The WAVjammer is a PCMCIA sound card that actually has native support in a number of later games. It might even be the only such card that was supported without requiring some kind of Sound Blaster emulator.
If anybody is going to develop an FPGA PCMCIA sound card, (s)he would do well to clone the WAVJammer, if only for that reason. I believe the WAVJammer also has Sound Blaster emulation software available for older (real mode) games that didn't support it natively.
