Tiido wrote on 2021-01-30, 02:16:

I'll make fuzz about it when there actually is something tangible, and it'll take a while longer to achieve 🤣

Wherever your ideas take you, I am certain there will be people interested . I wish you the best of luck in both the design phase and eventual production . I hope to be among those lucky enough to acquire one of your sound cards, though I am running out of potential PCs to install them in (I should be able to fix that easily enough in the next few months).

Cheers!

This is probably neither here nor there but I've noticed that SETYMF doesn't configure the MPU401 on my Labway YMF718 (Audician) card in a way that some games can use it. It works with a most games, but Nascar and Descent 2 claim that they can't find it. I've tried different ports (300, 330) and different IRQ / DMA configs, they just won't find it for some reason.

If I use SETUPSA or unisound with the same card then those games work fine - I also tried another generic YMF719 based card and it was the same deal.

I'm not complaining, just thought it might be of interest!

Thänk you for the report, I will have to investigate.

The FPGA card will take year(s) to materialize, there will be plenty of time to get new computers 🤣. I don't have any intention of having limited amount of stuff available but sometimes life and/or wallet set limits. Lack of ancient parts will help a lot because i won't need to dig some chinese sources to get anything but just place an order at some big distributor and not have to worry one more bit, and everything necessary arrives a week later, ready for assembly.

Just stumbled upon this, can I buy this card? And how much? Building a Socket 4 Overdrive soon and need something to go with the Aureal Vortex I plan on using.

The card cannot be bought yet, there are some unrelated things still in the way of things. Cost will be something near 100€

Tiido wrote on 2021-04-14, 05:45:

The card cannot be bought yet, there are some unrelated things still in the way of things. Cost will be something near 100€

At least that's more affordable than Orpheus. It'll be up to a month anyway

I have probably overlooked this somewhere in the thread, but does this require a joystick breakout cable if I wanted to connect an MT-32 as well as a Joystick?

Yes, just like with almost every other sound card that has gameport that has no extra MIDI connectors. I have a gameport MIDI cable that has extra DB15 connector for connecting a gamepad/joystick in addition to two DINs.

I wasn't sure if you'd done something like the Orpheus with a separate jack.

The reason I ask is I have MIDI breakout cables with a joystick pass through and they've not bothered soldering them. So if I'm going to buy your wonderful card for my 386, and it had a separate MIDI out I could be lazy and not do it!

Tiido wrote on 2021-04-14, 05:45:

The card cannot be bought yet, there are some unrelated things still in the way of things. Cost will be something near 100€

Sounds an interesting piece of hardware for some retro builds. Hope that you'll manage to release it!

Hi , i have a toshiba satellite 4015CDT laptop which has a opl3sa3 chip.
When i execute setymf /forcepnp i get the error: "YMF control register is inaccessible... Possible IO conflict".
The control register in my chip is in port 538H and cannot be changed, maybe setymf is looking for it in 370h and cannot find it, could this be the problem?
If so, how can i fix it to detect my card?

SETYMF sets the control register to what it thinks it should be, overriding whatever it was set to before. What it does not check is if the port appears used or not, at least on first run where new configuration is created. I am unsure if I can do anything about it though, SETYMF is not really meant to handle EEPROMless configuration mode that a laptop can make use of and no dedicated sound card ever does so it is difficult for me to test and try to figure out what can I do to make it work. Testing for it would require many tens of back and forth passes of tests and programs. Doesn't original SETUPSA function on the laptop and is sound present in Windows ?

Tiido wrote on 2022-05-27, 14:18:

SETYMF sets the control register to what it thinks it should be, overriding whatever it was set to before. What it does not check is if the port appears used or not, at least on first run where new configuration is created. I am unsure if I can do anything about it though, SETYMF is not really meant to handle EEPROMless configuration mode that a laptop can make use of and no dedicated sound card ever does so it is difficult for me to test and try to figure out what can I do to make it work. Testing for it would require many tens of back and forth passes of tests and programs. Doesn't original SETUPSA function on the laptop and is sound present in Windows ?

I set the port manualy inside setymf to 538 and now it doesnt show any errors with forcepnp.

So you say that laptops dont have eeprom for ymf chips? That means that i have to use setymf everytime i boot?

I couldnt make sound blaster sound fx to work properly with soundsa and sound in windows is present but not in dos games.

Laptops can utilize the EEPROMless mode to save on cost, as BIOS can set up things prior, bypassing PnP process etc. When /FORCEPNP is used, SETYMF ignores that nothing on PnP responded (indicating no EEPROM to read conf out of) and the program then blindly assumes that card responds to a magic sequence to bypass PnP and then sets up resources manually to some sensible defaults. It could be this process can only be done once, and because BIOS did it, I no longer can. It could be why SETUPSA only does things when right ports are selected, as it should be setting the port and then using it instead of erroring out.

Setup utils still have to be ran every boot, as settings are not permanent and BIOS doesn't set up the mixer etc. either.

Do you use VXD or WDM driver in Windows ? WDM driver does not support DOS sound properly, only VXD does. You can download latest Yamaha VXD driver here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/TKAYBSC/Win9x/Win9x.ZIP
It should set up the final VXD driver and also set up DOS mode support too (both pure and in windows).

Tiido wrote on 2022-05-27, 14:36:

Laptops can utilize the EEPROMless mode to save on cost, as BIOS can set up things prior, bypassing PnP process etc. When /FORCE […]
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Laptops can utilize the EEPROMless mode to save on cost, as BIOS can set up things prior, bypassing PnP process etc. When /FORCEPNP is used, SETYMF ignores that nothing on PnP responded (indicating no EEPROM to read conf out of) and the program then blindly assumes that card responds to a magic sequence to bypass PnP and then sets up resources manually to some sensible defaults. It could be this process can only be done once, and because BIOS did it, I no longer can. It could be why SETUPSA only does things when right ports are selected, as it should be setting the port and then using it instead of erroring out.

Setup utils still have to be ran every boot, as settings are not permanent and BIOS doesn't set up the mixer etc. either.

Do you use VXD or WDM driver in Windows ? WDM driver does not support DOS sound properly, only VXD does. You can download latest Yamaha VXD driver here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/TKAYBSC/Win9x/Win9x.ZIP
It should set up the final VXD driver and also set up DOS mode support too (both pure and in windows).

After setting the control register address, the following times the program detects and configures the card fine.

It working fine in wondows too, i had to manually change the dma to be equal to the one set in the bios/setymf, otherwise it wouldn't work fine under windows.

Is it possible to use soundfonts for the software synth that comes with this card?

The laptop is P II 266 MHz and it seems it is too fast for some games, for example, The incredible machine does not work with sound blaster enabled if i leave caches enabled, i guess it is because the writes to port 220 are too fast for this card. Is there any other solution other than disabling caches?

For soundfonts you need a software solution of some sort or some Creative sound card based solution (AWE32, 64, Live, Audigy) where Sound Fonts were one of the selling points.

For speed sensitive games there is not much to do, disabling caches is one of the most effective measures, but you may have luck with some software based solutions too (I recall names Throttle and Moslo).

Tried setymf.exe on my laptop today and found a bug. I can't disable the GamePort option. It will always save the default or custom port but never none. If I go to none it will redraw the screen and puts the text under the AdLib section but saving that will save the custom port and not Disabled. I don't have a joystick port so it would be nice if I could disable it.

Everything else seems to work fine so far on my Toshiba Satellite 310CDT laptop which has an OPL-SA3 chipset without a PnP EEPROM (see my previous posts in the unisound topic).

What should you select for the SB DSP option btw? All options seem to work fine but what is recommended?

I will investigate the gameport setting, though it will take time as I am in the process of preparing for a big move to Norway which I expect to complete in October. So much sorting and packing etc. to do...
As is, the gameport, even unavailable shouldn't impact anything. Games are not erroneously going to detect a joystick/gamepad and the hardware address gameport uses is not used by anything else in the laptop either.

SB DSP option allows to make the card appear as original SB or SB 2.0 instead of SB Pro 2.0 (3.01) to games, which may improve compatibility. It just is a feature of the chipset and I exposed it, maybe it has some usefulness. (0.0 is nothing that actually exists but the card has such an option so I have exposed it too).

My website is now offline and stays so until the move to Norway completes. Today I loaded up majority of my stuff to a van which got packed full, and the server was along them. With luck the site returns on sunday when my stuff is available to me again in Norway ~
Sadly I have no photos, I had no time for it, but my friend who was helping took this at some point :

It is funny to be in the mostly empty space, everything echoes 🤣. Tomorrow there will be more cleanups, a family event and saturday noon I have my flight to Norway. *is really exhausted*

GL with the move Tiido! 😀