Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-11-12, 08:36:

Pretty much. Everything is in a single chip on the 930. Functionally, it appears to be identical to the 929 card with an Analog Devices chip, meaning that WSS compatibility is superb.

This is interesting, am I to assume from this reply that 929&ADI is superior to 929&Crystal?

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-12, 14:04:

This is interesting, am I to assume from this reply that 929&ADI is superior to 929&Crystal?

I don't have enough data to claim that with certainty.

At the moment, all we have are anecdotal recounts of people who ran into trouble with Crystal chips in some WSS games, mostly from Sierra. There's also the fact that the original WSS card used an Analog Devices chip.

I have one Sager notebook with this card, it sounds great.

I recently noticed some interesting things while re-testing this card:

1. It has a proper low pass filter when running in SBPro mode. This is nice for older DOS games which use 11 KHz sound samples, as it makes the output smoother, just like a real SBPro
2. The card's DSP identifies as version 3.02 which matches Creative's Sound Blaster Pro 2 model CT1600
3. Stereo is reversed in certain games like Doom and Quake. You can see my full stereo test results in this thread

Note that the aforementioned stereo reversal only applies to digital sound. FM synth music in games which make proper use of OPL3 does have correct stereo.

i have tried to love this card, but the lack of directsound compliant drivers (snd930p.vxd/snd93x.sys) is killing me in windows. i need that ntkernel mixer to play simultaneous audio streams that everyone else is running away from when they swap wdm for vxd drivers to avoid forced resampling/latency.

as it stands now i can't use dosbox with an external munt synthesizer or even standalone timidity (twsynth) since it attempts multiple connections to the audio device and the vxd/nt drivers are forcing exclusive mode and i can't find any workaround.

dos performance is on par (or slightly behind) with the ess688 i use in my other system plus the wss on top.

stanwebber wrote on 2023-01-07, 13:11:

i have tried to love this card, but the lack of directsound compliant drivers (snd930p.vxd/snd93x.sys) is killing me in windows.

Indeed, the Win9x drivers are very basic. This card came out in the early months of 1995, and the latest Win9x drivers that I found were from 1996. It's no big surprise that DirectSound support is lacking, since DirectX was still in its infancy back then.

But yeah, I view the OPTi 82C930 as a DOS/Win3.1 device, and usually pair it with some other sound card under Win9x.

ok, so this card's ranking has been resurrected. i found this awesome virtual audio cable driver:

https://software.muzychenko.net/en/virtual-audio-cable-3/

it operates on the identical principal as midiyoke, but instead of looping midi-out > midi-in, it routes wave-out > wave-in. in essence i can create a virtual mme device that can accept unlimited connections and then use the included audio repeater tool to connect it to the opti930 vxd driver which is limited to 1 connection. as suspected, when i start the timidity synthesizer (twsynth) it shows 2 connections to the virtual mme device in the control panel dialog and starting dosbox adds a 3rd...something impossible with the opti930 mme device.

the developer claims very low signal latency and so far i'm inclined to believe. the win9x version is now freeware.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-01-07, 13:45:

Indeed, the Win9x drivers are very basic. This card came out in the early months of 1995, and the latest Win9x drivers that I found were from 1996. It's no big surprise that DirectSound support is lacking, since DirectX was still in its infancy back then.

Did you ever try to manually force the original Microsoft Win98 drivers for Windows Sound System compatible cards on it, and initialize the card in autoexec.bat using the Opti setup utility? This is worth a shot, although the original WSS hardware (but nearly none of the clones) used a proprietary soft setup method to select IRQ and DMA channels, and possibly the MS driver depends on using it.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-01-11, 18:57:

Did you ever try to manually force the original Microsoft Win98 drivers for Windows Sound System compatible cards on it, and initialize the card in autoexec.bat using the Opti setup utility? This is worth a shot, although the original WSS hardware (but nearly none of the clones) used a proprietary soft setup method to select IRQ and DMA channels, and possibly the MS driver depends on using it.

Interesting idea.

I never attempted this myself since I primarily use my OPTi card for DOS/Win3.1. Currently, I have it paired with an AWE64 which takes over all Win9x duties, so I don't really have a use case for this. But if someone else wants to try it, feel free to report your findings here.

I remember there is such a thing done for one of the GUS cards, but I am unsure if it involved hacking the driver or some INF magic only. It should definitely be doable.

I'm wondering about this idea too. It would solve some annoying issues that I had with my Aztech sound card in Windows 9x where in certain scenarios, the samples tend to get cut off.

Once upon a time I did that with a Mozart card, ie. Oak OTI601 + Yamaha OPL3.
There were problems with the native drivers for Windows 9x, eg. MP3 playback in Winamp stuttering.

The solution was to switch the card to WSS mode before starting Windows (MZTMODE WSS), and use the WSS driver provided with Windows.

There was one problem, though - apparently the WSS driver only supports the DAC part, so no MIDI playback via OPL3.
I guess it's possible to solve that problem by installing some other driver for the OPL3 only, but I've never bothered...