Yea, all the best!

Wow, great news!!!

AWESOME! Glad you're back and doing okay! Please let us, the community, know if there's anything we can do for you. I hope everything works out well for you in your personal life.

Welcome back, glad you're doing fine =)

Good news everyone! 😀

shock__ wrote:

But hey ... I was approached by someone in his late 60s/early 70s from Las Vegas whose first question was what samplerate the card was capable of ... I bet he expected 2600Hz as an answer (can you guess who? Quite a prominent hacker)

Puts me in the mood for breakfast cereal. 😁 ...

I heard he's been travelling over there this summer, one of the MAME guys put him up in Sweden for a few days 😀

Anyhow, good news. 😀

While waiting patiently for the continuation of the most awesome DIY project I've ever seen, I would nevertheless like to share an idea that came to my mind this week.
As you know, two great projects are being finalized now, one of them is the Music Quest MPU clone card by keropi and the other is HardMPU by ab0tj.
Earlier in this thread many of us asked for an additional feature of ARGUS being the Intelligent MPU support - and the chosen solution was to implement the ISA header aimed at those who would want to add additional functions via separate daughterboards.
So, I believe, both designs can be easily adapted to the ARGUS daughterboard format, but what will be lacking is the external MIDI connector. Thus my suggestion will be to add the pins necessary to route the MIDI I/O signals between the daughterboard and joystick port. Also, some jumpers will become needed in order to cut the corresponding signals from the InterWave IC.
Don't consider this post as a call to immediate action - just wanted to share the idea and not to forget it.

Created an account to follow this project's progress. It's very interesting to see what's being done with this capable part. Back in the day I was working to design the Interwave into HP's home PCs, but AMD cancelled the program before (fortunately, long enough before) we were able to get them to commit to a delivery schedule. They had already started work on a PCI-ready follow-on and things looked really good going forward. Oh well. I did another spin of the ADI SoundMax and then (next cycle, I think?) it was off to the Ensoniq 1370.

Sorry, boring stuff. Best of luck on the program, and I'll be donating.

PS - if anyone is looking for new GUS cards, I'm cleaning out my garage and will be posting stuff on that auction site.

sluggo, nice to see you here, welcome aboard!
Quite on the contrary, things you tell are interesting indeed. Maybe you could share some additional details about both the HP development (was any prototype produced?) and the PCI version (was it simply a PCI-ISA bridge or a completely new chip?)
Maybe you even have some software and/or documentation that you could share with us? I guess, any possible NDA that you might have signed back in the days should have expired loooooong ago 😀

Thanks for the welcome! I was surprised to find a site dedicated to old gear like this. Surprised and pleased, as the 90's were great times for the PC business. So many players, so much competition for the Next New Thing. Those of us who weren't working for or directly with Intel/Microsoft got to do a lot of interesting work.

We did produce prototypes (6 boards) with 1MB of ROM (loaded with a patch set from an outfit in colorado whose name escapes me atm). We had pads for expansion RAM, but I don't think we ever got around to loading any. It wasn't clear that we were ever going to be releasing a two-tiered soundcard solution, and wavetable itself was considered pretty "who the f wants it" by Marketing at the time, so the idea of expensive expansion RAM was like asking to throw in a hand-tooled Gucci leather mouse pad with each system.

These cards were all hand soldered and took some time to put together, so we only built one panel's worth of PCBs. Three stayed in the lab, two went to procurement, and one was dedicated to the compatibility testers. They had a joystick port, line in/out, and mic in. The line out was dedicated to an amp that was located in (and powered by) the monitor, attached to which were the speakers. Marketing asked to configure the systems this way in an attempt to drive monitor sales, which at the time were more profitable than most of the systems we sold. It was a horrible audio design, though, and I made it my first priority when assuming responsibility to redesign the backend, otherwise there was no point to improving the line stage. Sorry, off-topic.

AMD's PCI version of the InterWave was a new design, and pretty ambitious. Native PCI interface, much greater processing capability (24-bit capability and better SRC's, in particular) and, consequently, a much larger die. They put together a pretty good dev package and supplied us with a couple of sample cards just about a month before letting us know the program was de-funded and would not be revived. I was really surprised - they had working parts, a professional set of development documentation, and their VP of sales actually knew what it was (not always the case). I was disappointed, too, as this was a part that solved a lot of problems for me. I had to worry primarily about SB compatibility and PCI migration, but I also wanted a platform that would allow me to spec a basic system and tier it up for the high-end systems where we actually made a few dollars in profit.

In the end, the PCI bus was actually the chip's undoing. Putting a lot of processing power on the end of a bus that provided a high-speed path to the CPU didn't make a lot of sense for the bulk of the market. AMD had been sniffing at prices around $10-11 for the chip when an ISA SoundPort part from ADI was about $5.50 and an entire AudioPCI card from Ensoniq would (about 9 months later) cost $17.50 delivered. I know these prices seem like pennies for an enthusiast, but the margins on most of our products were incredibly thin.

I didn't hang on to a lot of hardware from that time. There may be some docs in the garage, and if I find any I'll certainly make it available somehow.

Shock - if you're reading this and you need anything, send me a note.

Any docs, source code, etc I would be interested in if you find it. I do have the GUS driver sources and some documentation but would be nice to have the rest of it online. Very little stuff exists for the InterWave cards; by that point SB clone cards were so cheap and everyone was way past fed up with GUS' hit or miss emulation.

Most cards I ever see for sale are Classics, very rarely a Max, and every now and again I see a PnP for sale.

I do have a few PnPs, they are nice; but I prefer the original GF1 as it has better compatibility with demos. The IW chip has some issue with extended loops; I've also noticed they're noisier compared to a GUS classic.

welcome sluggo!!! thanks so much for all the history, really really interesting stuff!
please post some pics of the stuff you find in the garage, it will be great to see where it all started 😀

Welcome Sluggo. Yes, thanks for the information! It always interesting to hear the backside of things of the computing industry back then.

Found an mWave dev kit. The horror.

sluggo wrote:

Found an mWave dev kit. The horror.

Normally I'm in a "preserve everything" mood but... 😁

So you worked for HP? Very interesting stories, thanks for joining. 😀

Heck yeah, when we founded this forum like 13-14 years ago it was mainly about all the workarounds, or even emulators, you needed to do to get old games (for DOS, Win 3.1, Win9x/Me) working with modern operating systems (Windows 2000, Windows XP). The fact that a 90's-era hardware enthusiast community later found the forum and made a home here isn't all that surprising. (As for me in the late 90's, I was doing grunt work in the retail/PC sales+service supply chain.)

I actually tracked down a guy who worked for Integrated Circuit Systems (ICS) and worked on a lot of these chips in this "family" a few years before AMD got their hands on them. I've yet to really conclude that conversation tho...

Hi Shock,

very great News 😀 Glad you're back and doing all fine!

Greetings

Time for another update:
Having put the project virtually at a full stop almost 6 months ago it's about time I get/got back onto it which so far meant the following:
- setting up 3 boxes for testing (DX2-66, P120, MMX233)
- There's actually an additional paycheck coming in for me in january which will allow me to buy some additional tools, most likely a scope for better testing/debugging. Which will also be the point of time I'll get prototypes produced.
- The prototype design hasn't been changed since, as it's absolutely suitable as it is. Only thing missing on the schematic are the values for the capacitors, which might partially be too small to measure with my already quite good multimeter (pF range) on the PCA card.

So ... with a longer delay than I had hoped, this project will be back on track soon-ish 😀

Glad to hear that.
Looking forward to those first prototypes.

excellent news! welcome back shock__ !!!!

Great news! 😀