First post, by danieljm
I feel like there must be something I don't understand about MIDI output through the gameport connector specifically from ISA cards, but I can't find any answers. I seem to get hanging/missing/wrong notes on every ISA card I've tried, but PCI cards on the same system seem fine.
I'm using an MT32-Pi and my tests have been Monkey Island for MT-32 mode, and Doom for SC-55 mode.
Here's a list of the cards I've tried:
-Yamaha YMF719B-S
-OPTi 82C931
-ESS ES1868F
-SB AWE64 CT4520
Problems happen both in pure DOS7.1 with Unisound and SoftMPU, and in Windows 98. And it seems like the severity is different depending on the card. The OPTi and the AWE64 seem like they are almost there, and the other two are way worse.
In the same system I've been able to use some PCI sound cards and the problems are gone. DOS drivers are more spotty for some of them, so I only really spent the time to get my Aureal Vortex working in pure DOS, and it seems fine. And in Windows an ALS4000 and Yamaha YMF744B-V also work well.
Up to this point I'd been testing on a few Pentium and Pentium 2 systems, and I know that speed can be a problem for certain games(although that wouldn't explain why they work with the PCI cards), so I finally got my 486 DX2-50 system up and running hoping that this would fix my problem. Sadly they are all still full of hanging/missing/wrong notes.
Are there some possible conflicts or weird settings somewhere that I'm just not thinking about? Does the MIDI-out from an ISA card operate differently than a PCI card, and maybe the MT32-Pi doesn't like it? I get the sense from what I've seen online that it should just work, but maybe there's more to it than I think.