ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2024-01-31, 10:27:

I had experience once with buying (cheap) a card with a huge Yamaha labled chip, which turned out to be a Crystal. 😀 I understand the that wthout a foto of the fake this response is not so useful, but my impression is that it's quite easy to come by a fake card, and it would look quite legitimate on the first glance. Would sharing a photo of that card be of any help by the way?

Yes, definitely, any confirmed fakes we could maybe add to the thread. I've ordered it anyway, too much of a good price to pass, should it be genuine. I'll update once I've receibed it and tested. Hopefully not a crystal.

Here's a photo of my YMF744, AFAIK there were 2 chip versions in quad and rectangle package, so it shoulnd't be problem... http://rayer.g6.cz/hardware/sbemu/ymf744b.jpg

I have had the card a couple of days now, and I can confirm it is indeed genuine 😀 I got it cheap on Flea Bay, due to them listing it as a Yamaha ISA card, so for £20 I am very happy with this. The photos didn't do it justice, it's very clean, no corrosion, looks brand new.

I have a dual-boot 98/XP setup on a P4PE mobo, have the Yamaha VXD drivers on 98, along with DOS drivers, all working, it did take me a few days to go through trial and error, but read the guide, replaced the setupds with the ICH4 version, but could not get Sound Blaster working, and also DSDMA would cause a restart. So reduced RAM to 512MB from 2GB, watched Phil's vid on the YMF744 overview, created the bat file from the instructions in the vid, and voila, all working, Quake and Monkey Island now have sound, and Duke3D works with Soundblaster sound and effects.

It's a good card, does EAX 1.0 very well when compared to my Audigy 2 ZS and it provides audio occlusion with Baldur's Gate, although the reverb is not as pronounced with the YMF744 compared to my Audigy 2 ZS, it is still there, and that is one of my favourite games, so I'm happy with that. The output is also very clean, no hissing or noise.

I've noticed though, that positional audio seems better with the YMF744 with Unreal Tournament VS the Audigy - the Audigy using VXD drivers as well, so I have now removed my Audigy as they will not work together due to a BSOD when booting 98, but I prefer the Yamaha anyway.

One annoying thing though, I like Sonic and Knuckles, just due the the FM track, but when playing the sound test in 98 with the Yamaha, it plays like a midi and no FM synth, only with DOS, but when booting into XP with WDM drivers, FM synth works fine, but I can't play XG midi in XP at all...strange issue, but at least I have a dual boot so no biggie.

DrLucienSanchez wrote on 2024-02-09, 20:05:

It's a good card, does EAX 1.0 very well when compared to my Audigy 2 ZS and it provides audio occlusion with Baldur's Gate, although the reverb is not as pronounced with the YMF744 compared to my Audigy 2 ZS, it is still there, and that is one of my favourite games, so I'm happy with that.

Audigy cards have occlusion effects in Baldur's Gate as well, but only when using VxD drivers under Win9x.

I've noticed though, that positional audio seems better with the YMF744 with Unreal Tournament VS the Audigy - the Audigy using VXD drivers as well, so I have now removed my Audigy as they will not work together due to a BSOD when booting 98, but I prefer the Yamaha anyway.

That's because of Sensaura. Yamaha YMF 7x4 cards use it for A3D, and the resulting positional audio can sound quite good in Unreal engine games. If you want to play around with that, this thread of mine might interest you: Sensaura on Yamaha YMF 7x4 cards

What an awesome thread! There is so much information on the YMF 7x4 cards here...whew!
Big time credits to @Tertz although he doesn't seem active anymore.

I have had the 724F_V with the STAC 9704 codec for a while, used it in a P4 machine running Windows 98 and handling DOS mode sound pretty good so far.
Always wanted to try out the SB-link, but never had a motherboard with the connector. Until recently that is!
I'm now the proud owner of an Asus P2B (rev. 1.10) with both ISA and an SB-link connector.

At the moment there I have an ISA audician 32 card installed, but the postman delivered an SB-link cable today.
Just wondering how this works: the SB-link forms a bridge to the motherboard, so would it be plug and play?
Or should the setupDS tool be used?
Anyway, going to have some fun with this in the coming days!

Well, that went smoothly. Windows95 autodetects the card and it works straight away (probably the OPL-Sax driver from the audician at work).
Installed the DX-GX for dos drivers and reboot to DOS mode. The SetupDS launches and detects legacy mode via PC/PCI.
Turned down the volume to avoid cracking noise, save and exit SetupDS.
Restart the pc, boot straight to DOS with only a set blaster line.
Launch the setup tool from warcraft 2, use the autodetect: "Your sound card works perfectly". And the music plays nicely.

Ergo: it looks like no extras are needed, it works as if it is an ISA card. Wonderfull.

I'll give some dos versions a try at a later moment to see if there is any difference with real dos.

Apologies if I am asking a dumb thing, but how exactly does Digital CD Audio input work? Is this just one of the available CD Audio inputs the card has, or is there anything special about how it is used (e.g. some special command to the CD-ROM to actually output audio in digital format, or do both analog and digital inputs need to be plugged in at the same time)?

With my CD-ROM drive I am able to hear audio from the front panel jack plug of the drive itself and when plugging the analong sound cable into the sound card. When I unplug the analog sound cable and only leave the 2-pin cable in, I am unable to hear any sound of CD audio, no matter if in DOS or Windows 98 and no matter what I try configuring in the mixer.

If you have a CD-ROM with both outputs then both should send the audio signal when playing without any special setting, it should work out of the box. In the past I had Teac CD-RW with digital out connected to SB-Live CD digital input and it worked fine, SB mixer had separate volume control for digital CD in and analog CD in. Just check if your digital cable polarity is not reversed (the GND pin on CD drive should go to GND pin of CD input on soundcard)

ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2024-04-04, 22:20:

Apologies if I am asking a dumb thing, but how exactly does Digital CD Audio input work? Is this just one of the available CD Audio inputs the card has, or is there anything special about how it is used (e.g. some special command to the CD-ROM to actually output audio in digital format, or do both analog and digital inputs need to be plugged in at the same time)?

In the Windows volume mixer, unmute the slider called "Digital In" or "SPDIF In" depending on the drivers. It's a different slider from regular CD audio.

Also, not all CD/DVD drives are capable of outputting digital CD audio, despite having the pins in that spot. And lastly, make sure that the SPDIF cable is connected the right way, and not reversed.

So either flashing the drive with updated firmware, or rebooting enough times or posting on the forum (or all of this combined) has helped.
In Windows 98 I can hear music when I simply press the hardware play button on the drive front panel, provided the Digital In is unmuted as per @Joseph_Joestar 's advice.
In DOS, however, I have found no way to unmute the same via SETUPDS.EXE, while I still can hear music via the analog cable, if I unmute the CD in.

Does anyone know if that is in principle possible in DOS to use digital in, e.g. by setting the codec up with pcisend or similar and SETUPDS simply does not have that particular item coded in, or does Digital in operation require some form of driver/OS support in the first place?

(One funny - and off topic - thing that came out of reflashing was that the drive started to play mixed mode CD-s, which was the whole purpose of installing it, but it did not do that for some reason before!).

So, eventually I was able to make a utility that unmutes SPDIF in using SBEMU as a basis. The only thing required, it seems, was sending a 1 to a DSXG register's memory address offset 0x34 (SBEMU sent 0 by the way). My being a lazy coder, I simply reused SBEMU YMF initialization code for the purpose of initializing the card, which means the utility does so much more than SPDIF in initialization, it may eventually backfire, but so far just keeping it in AUTOEXEC/FDAUTO seems to do the trick. I am also keeping SETUPDS there as well, although I am not sure that's really necessary anymore. Listening to audio CDs now works as well as playing Hexen. I am tempted to burn a Dungeon Keeper CD but am put off by the ogg format in GoG's distribution version that I own 😀

Now, this YMF driver in SBEMU is quite something - there's a trove of code that @crazii and the team have brought over from Linux to DOS - one could probably build a replacement for SETUPDS using that with much more userfriendliness and scriptability/customization... I am just amazed at the porting effort and that it actually works just fine in the good old DOS.

One final note is with regards to using SBEMU with Yamaha cards - for me this is at least necessary for Dune 2's capricious sound drivers. Since newest builds support YMF cards, and (at least for me) Yamaha comes as number 1 in the list of cards SBEMU scans for, I am using the following arguments to route sound to ICH7 but keep OPL and MPU with the Yamaha card:

/SC2 /SCFM1 /SCMPU1

That said, I still have SETUPDS preceding SBEMU in AUTOEXEC/FDAUTO and am running a modified build of SBEMU that unmutes SPDIF in and uses a slightly different set of values for channel volumes (actually taken from my DS.INI).

Did you try my YMF7XX utility that can dump and set YMF registers? This way you can also set the mixer, it's just not clear what mixer register is for what input, need to try out. Probably various soundcard manuf. might rourted YMF inputs differently...
I'm also preparing new version of YMF7XX that solved wrong register read as some needs to be read as 16/32b instead of 8b read...

Sorry, while I must have downloaded the utility a while ago, I did not realize I could use it to change memory mapped registers.
Here's SBEMU driver code bit that updates the one.
Let me check if I can use YMF7XX for the same purpose - could be much more manageable/scriptable in the end.

EDIT: I have tried, and just /w 34 1 does not enable Digital in, whether or not preceded by SETUPDS. Although if I do this after running stock March 1 build of SMEMU with /SCL option (which inits the card and sends 0 to 34) it actually does. The bottom line: while I was lucky to get desired effect via SBEMU route - and am happily using it for now - doing the same in a more "conventional" way may require further experiments...

Hello all,

First of all thanks for this dedicated YMF mega-thread, super useful.

I have setup a PIII rig with the following specs;

ASUS P3B-F Intel 440BX motherboard Slot 1 rev1.04 [with 2x ISA slots], with latest BIOS version updated / flashed with latest beta BIOS v1008 beta]
Pentium III 500Mhz “Katmai”
512MB SD RAM [2x 256MB sticks] @100Mhz FSB
2x IDE2SD adapters SD35VC0, 1 for pure MS-DOS 6.22 or Win98SE, other for MEDIA stuff [mp3s, games install files, etc]
Voodoo 3 2000 PCI (with active low profile 5V cooler, powered from it’s volt regulator) + flashed
Yamaha YMF-724V-F PCI sound card with SB-Link mod for DOS compatibility mode
NEC ND-2510 DVD dual-layer x8 black Optical drive
Mitsumi D359M3D black floppy drive
NEC AIO PCI 5x USB2.0

I have also set the Yamaha card with IRQ-11 as instructed on this link; https://web.archive.org/web/20120203114300/ht … les/ymf-faq.php

My question is I'm not sure if it is setup correctly, as in regards the IRQ assigning, I have other stuff assigned with IRQ-11, one of them being the USB controller of the Asus motherboard itself. For this I have tried to disable the USB IRQ from BIOS, in which this setting although the IRQ shows N/A seems to have no effect.

As for the NEC 5in1 AIO USB PCI host card, I cannot seem to assign it a different IRQ number, I have tried both from BIOS and also from Win98SE.

System runs fine, USB pen drives are recognized and even using a mouse, but sometimes Win98SE seems a bit sluggish example when right clicking on desktop it takes a few seconds, but not always.

I have no issues in sound in pure DOS 6.22 and DOS under Windows98SE, except for 1x old 1992 game called "Risky Woods" which does not have music at all.

I have also learned that in certain games such as DOOM, Duke Nukem I cannot have GM music when selecting GM [General MIDI music] under DOS environment [I have Phil's lab MS-DOS starter pack both on pure dos 6.22 and on Windows98SE DOS], but can run fine if launched straight from Windows98SE desktop and hence GM driver are loaded within Windows environment.

Attached photos of the IRQ + device list [Yamaha sound card is with Vendor ID 1073] which shows other devices with IRQ-11.

Also attached the SetupDS for Yamaha card, using SB-Link mod, can you please tell me if it's set OK ? All tests plays the test music with success, and what about the MPU IRQ, should I leave it to 5 as the SB PORT also is set to 5 or better change it to another IRQ number ?

Lastly I have attached the autoexec.bat current configuration, again I tried to follow the link mentioned above, is it set correctly ? From my understanding, A220 = address, I5 = IRQ5, D1 = DMA1, but what T4 and P330 mean here ?

Thanks in advance.