VOGONS


First post, by ElBrunzy

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I have a problem with inertia player I don't remember experimenting before. When I use a GUS Classic on 240,7,7,7,7 intertia player play alright one song but I cannot change screen (F2,F3,F5 key screen mode). As soon as I do, it stall the display and keyboard but the music continue to play (although it wont loop or play next file), I have to reset the computer. What's working is play with options (F9-F12 and volue -+ []), F1 help, F8 shell and F4 for more samples. If I start with the 3 problematic mode, it stall quickly. Since this card also have a AWE32 on 220, irq5 dma 1/5 I tested it and it work alright, of course on sb16 software mixing. The video card is a CL-5446 if that matter. I also reserved soundcard resources on pnp/isa bios as legacy devices. The computer is a 430TX with a p1-120mmx (downclocked). I tested on another TX motherboard from another manufacturer, same problem.

Of course the visuals from inertia player, while being awesome and having a great retro value to me, are secondary to that soundcard setup since I find them ideal and easy to remember. But is this the sign of underlying configuration error ? Maybe someone is aware of that problem and know how to fix it, could be a simple bios setting to change.

Reply 1 of 3, by Vallenrod

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Hi, I have somewhat similar audio setup more info see here:
Re: Retro Rig Photo Thread

First thing I would recommend doing is to swap the playback irq for GUS and SB, irq 7 for SB is the most compatible setting:

SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET ULTRASND=240,7,7,5,5

I have struggled to get my setup as compatible as possible.
Have gone through various mouse driver versions (settled on ctmouse 2.0 alpha 4). Newer versions were causing hangups in certain games (Monkey Island).
Hours of tweaking the bios, notable compatibility settings:

  • disabled parallel, serial ports (if not needed)
  • set 8 bit I/O recovery time to 8 busclk
  • disabled memory hole at 15-16M
  • reserved dma 1,5 and irq 5,7 for isa cards
  • disabled USB legacy support

Even swapping PCI and isa slots helped at some point.
Your issue could be literally anywhere but I would start with clean boot and take it from there. Removing cards can help to narrow down the issue.

V.

Reply 2 of 3, by ElBrunzy

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Thanks for your support Vallenrod. Your idea gave me the willing to try them and I could actually figure out what was the problem. Testing some other bios and video card made me realize the problem was not here. I noticed that some of the chipset feature (mainly the IO recovery time) had some incidence on the time iplay.exe would hold before stalling. I was a bit careless about my chipset feature setup. So I degraded that 64mb dimm pc100 sdram to two 32mb simm 60ns edo and used the safe setting recommendation for that shuttle hot-569, I already try to downclock that pentium mmx to minimum (120mhz) so I was glad to make it a bit slower and safer!

dram leadoff: 10/6/4
dram read burst edo/fp: x222/x333
dram write burst: x222
fast edo lead off: disabled
refresh ras# assertion: 4clks
fast ras to cas delay: 3
dram page idle timer: 2clks
dram enhanced paging: enabled
fast ma to ras delay: 2clks
sdram cas lat/ras-to-cas): 3/3
sdram speculative read: disabled
system bios cacheable: enabled
video bios cacheable: enabled
8bit io recovery: 2
16bit io recovery: 2
memory hole 15-16: disable
pci 2.1: disabled

These are the safe setting from anandtech.com review of the mobo, but I noted them here for convenience.