VOGONS


First post, by dreamblaster

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DreamBlaster S2P : General MIDI Wavetable/FM Synthesis on parallel port
The prototypes work fine 😀
This is a parallel port version of DreamBlaster S2
Adding support for this to SoftMPU is planned.

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Reply 1 of 127, by matze79

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You are crazy 😉

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Reply 3 of 127, by dreamblaster

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Here's a first demo : DreamBlaster S2P + SoftMPU (modified version, thanks pdr !!) :
https://youtu.be/tPb4DqWJkA8

Visit http://www.serdashop.com for retro sound cards, video converters, ...
DreamBlaster X2, S2, S2P, HDD Clicker, ... many projects !
New X2GS SE & X16GS sound card : https://www.serdashop.com/X2GS-SE ,
Thanks for your support !

Reply 5 of 127, by derSammler

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Wouldn't it make more sense to use the serial port in this case instead of the parallel port? The chip uses serial input anyway and it would leave the parallel port free for another device. Imagine to have a notebook with no soundcard, but a Dreamblaster on COM2 and a Covox on LPT. 😁 😁

Reply 6 of 127, by Scali

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derSammler wrote:

Wouldn't it make more sense to use the serial port in this case instead of the parallel port? The chip uses serial input anyway and it would leave the parallel port free for another device. Imagine to have a notebook with no soundcard, but a Dreamblaster on COM2 and a Covox on LPT. 😁 😁

The chip has both a serial and a parallel interface. The parallel interface is much simpler to use.

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Reply 7 of 127, by mrau

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doesn't it take more cpu grunt to feed this with data over serial rather than paralytic? i remember trying a very small real time transfer on a k6-2 iirc over serial/paral - it was a disastrous slowdown

what chip is that anyway?

Reply 8 of 127, by Scali

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mrau wrote:

doesn't it take more cpu grunt to feed this with data over serial rather than paralytic? i remember trying a very small real time transfer on a k6-2 iirc over serial/paral - it was a disastrous slowdown

In theory it doesn't, because you have a UART FIFO buffer. So you can just send bytes to the interface, and the UART will clock out the bits at the correct speed.
In practice however, a normal serial port cannot operate at the speed required for MIDI, so you'd need to manually bang out the bits.
With the parallel port, there's some simple handshaking for transferring one byte at a time.

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Reply 9 of 127, by gdjacobs

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Scali wrote:

In practice however, a normal serial port cannot operate at the speed required for MIDI, so you'd need to manually bang out the bits.

Sort of. The primary limitation is with the base clock frequency and that's down to backwards compatibility. A UART driven with a 4 mhz crystal, for instance, would work like a treat. I believe some more modern serial modules have onboard PLL capabilities that can be programmed via LPC bus.

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Reply 10 of 127, by matze79

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i connect my SC-7 to RS232 and it works very well even on 386SX-16.
But the SC-7 has Support for RS232.

I really like this, but it will also not work with 286's 😒
Are there some plan to offer something like adpatch ?

Will this work with Windows 3.x some day ?

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Reply 11 of 127, by appiah4

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You, sir, are amazing. If you can combine this with an OPL3 chip on the same board and build it as a fully working parallel port sound card/wave table the internet will honor your name for centuries to come.

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Reply 12 of 127, by Scali

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Thanks for the work on SoftMPU, pdw!
I tried to use my MIDI player as a test tool, and I got some sound out of it, but it was not correct.
Now it seems that my main issue was that I really need to leave the USB power off the chip for a couple of seconds before it resets. So during my testing I often had 'garbage' stuck in the chip.
Now I have it working!

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Reply 13 of 127, by matze79

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When can i buy one ?

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Reply 14 of 127, by Scali

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I've done a quick-and-dirty MT-32 compatibility mode for my MIDI player, testing it with the Monkey Island soundtrack:
https://youtu.be/3CXgt-tLod0

It shouldn't be too difficult to add this to SoftMPU.
The DreamBlaster wants a CC 0 127 as a prefix for every PC command, to select an MT-32 instrument.
So my MIDI player scans the MIDI data, and adds the CC 0 127 everytime it encounters a PC command (on the correct MIDI channel of course).
This can be built into SoftMPU easily. Just needs a way to enable/disable it.

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Reply 15 of 127, by keropi

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^ nice! is it the video or the experimental software/tsr to blame for notes that seem to play slower / out of sync?
This midi player, have you made it available freely?

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 16 of 127, by Scali

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keropi wrote:

^ nice! is it the video or the experimental software/tsr to blame for notes that seem to play slower / out of sync?

It's my quick hack MIDI player. I originally made it for the IMFC. I put in support for the DreamBlaster S2P, but it requires 3.5 microseconds of delay between commands. This is done the quick-and-dirty way, like on AdLib: perform a bunch of dummy reads. This throws off the timing in the player.
I haven't tried it with SoftMPU yet, because my test-machine is a 286. I'll need to set up a 386+ machine for testing.

keropi wrote:

This midi player, have you made it available freely?

Not yet. The idea is that it preprocesses MIDI tracks to an optimized command stream, similar to my VGM player.
Then it can run with very low CPU usage, mainly relying on timer interrupts. So even suitable for an 8088 at 4.77 MHz, in the background (the main reason why early games used Intelligent MPU is probably to avoid the CPU overhead).

Last edited by Scali on 2018-01-15, 19:12. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 17 of 127, by keropi

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oh I see - I'll grab the player when/if you make it available , for now I use the midplay player (along with dump for sysex data) for simple command line playback. It will be great when it's done 😀

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 19 of 127, by Scali

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Just tested my SoftMPU patch, it seems to work fine. I added a new switch /MT32 to enable MT-32 mode for the S2P.
You can get the binary here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9tssu8k1samlf4/sof … p_mt32.zip?dl=0
I will see if I can make a pull request on Github to include the patch.

Edit: pull request seems to have worked: https://github.com/pdewacht/softmpu/pull/1

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