Indeed, wishing you two all the best and happiness in .no!

Yes good luck with it all and enjoy your new home once you're finally settled 👍 A lot of work indeed.

Thänk you very much ~

I will get most of my stuff today in a few hours, unfortunately weather is not on my side so but there may be a way out that won't result in wet people and wet stuff... but overall end is not far ~

Tiido wrote on 2022-10-16, 07:54:

Thänk you very much ~

I will get most of my stuff today in a few hours, unfortunately weather is not on my side so but there may be a way out that won't result in wet people and wet stuff... but overall end is not far ~

Take care and best of luck!

The heaviest part is over finally !

It will take a while to get things settled, the place was not quite ready for this much stuff either 🤣

Server has been set up again, but I need access to the router/modem to forward some ports before it becomes visible to rest of the world but that has to happen tomorrow or whenever the owners (who live upstairs) return. Slowly normal operations will return ~

Oh man, moving is always stressful. Even more so when moving to another country! Good luck, and enjoy your new home, Tiido! 🙂

Yeah, it is. I am finally gonna have work desks in coming days ~

Server is still not visible though, it turns out that the ISP actually has disabled the conf interface of their hardware and you have to log onto their support portal and do stuff you're allowed to there, and then things are communicated to the modem. But the connection is of the place owner's and they're an old couple with minimal computer literacy. I'll have to figure out with the GF exactly what needs to be done and then see if it can be done (all material I found is norwegian and I don't know anywhere near enough of the language yet 🤣). I have been a bit passive with it, but soon it'll get done.

PayPal is another wrench in the motor, I cannot actually change country in it and without that I cannot do my business either as I have no protections when addresses don't match up. I have to close the account and open a new one they say... but there's a good amount of money there that will need to be used up in some way first. There are PCBs to order and parts to buy in future.

Bureaucarcy machine is a bit slow here it turns out. At least I am now registered at police though it didn't actually give me anything useful. I have 5 more months before they can kick me out 🤣. I must get a D-number which will open several doors, such as being able to be self-employed (my sleep condition will preclude normal jobs and especially a job I must keep for a whole year) and get a bank account so that the business can even be started. It is a bit over my head but eventually it'll get sorted out and I won't have to worry about getting kicked out of here. I sort of have no place to go to, and without all the stuff I moved with me, it gets even more difficult 🤣

Hi! Many thanks to Tiido for great work! I'm sorry, but where can I download SETYMF.EXE? Site is temporary (I Hope) down 😀 Thanks!

I'm not sure when the site will return, but the server has been overhauled with new hardware, new OS install and misc other tidying ups. I'll have to bother the owners to get those modem confs done to get the server actually visible to rest of the world...

Anyway I have attached the util to this post.

It has been brought to my attention that there are YMF71x cards with 256 byte EEPROMs and EEPROMs that are much slower than the timings SETYMF uses. This new version tries to detect these 256 byte EEPROM cards and disallow EEPROM updates to them and it also increases timing from ~2.5ms to worst case ~10ms per byte written so that even the slowest EEPROMs should update without corruption. This new version is attached few posts below

Using an older version on a card with 256 byte EEPROM (93C56) instead of one with 512 bytes (93C66) will corrupt the contents of the EEPROM and possibly make the machine unbootable which is what happened to one person. There's still some way to go before total recovery however, EEPROM dump of a card with 93C56 would help right now ~.

YMF718 chip seems to care to some extent about what is in the EEPROM and will not function right when there's garbage in it, although it will start up without the EEPROM. Unfortunately this is all undocumented and I am unsure I will try to explore what goes on in this sort of situation...

Tiido wrote on 2023-08-10, 14:17:

YMF718 chip seems to care to some extent about what is in the EEPROM and will not function right when there's garbage in it, although it will start up without the EEPROM.

Interestingly, the CS4237 exhibits similar behaviour. Sufficiently corrupt or incorrect EEPROM content can cause it to enter a "coma state", as I call it, on reset. Once in that state, it will appear to not respond to bus bus activity of any form. Recovering from that can get interesting. Yes, I discovered that behaviour the hard way. Someone who wasn't expecting it might think the card was dead.

For write timing, couldn't you implement READY/BUSY# polling, rather than just assuming a certain maximum write cycle time? Of course, that assumes that every brand/size of compatible chip that might be found on such a card implements that feature.

I am posting this information to keep it indexed. Hopefully it would help someone else with a "dead" soundcard.
Here is a manually crafted image for an Eline SM718 Rev 3.00 soundcard with a YMF719E-S main chip and an ATMEL916 93C56 PC27 EEPROM chip:

100000000  65 a8 00 20 ff ff ff ff  81 0a 10 00 82 1e 00 59  |e.. ...........Y|
200000010  61 6d 61 68 61 20 59 4d  46 37 31 78 20 62 61 73  |amaha YMF71x bas|
300000020  65 64 20 73 6f 75 6e 64  20 63 61 72 64 16 65 a8  |ed sound card.e.|
400000030  00 21 00 00 31 00 47 01  20 02 20 02 10 10 47 01  |.!..1.G. . ...G.|
500000040  20 0a 20 0a 08 08 47 01  88 03 88 03 08 08 47 01  | . ...G.......G.|
600000050  30 03 30 03 02 02 47 01  28 0a 28 0a 02 02 23 20  |0.0...G.(.(...# |
700000060  00 01 2a 08 68 2a 02 68  31 01 47 01 20 02 80 02  |..*.h*.h1.G. ...|
800000070  10 10 47 01 10 02 f8 0f  08 08 47 01 10 02 f8 0f  |..G.......G.....|
900000080  08 08 47 01 10 02 fe 0f  02 02 47 01 10 02 fe 0f  |..G.......G.....|
1000000090  02 02 23 a8 0e 01 2a 0b  68 2a 0b 68 38 16 65 a8  |..#...*.h*.h8.e.|
11000000a0  00 22 00 00 1c 41 d0 b0  2f 31 00 47 01 01 02 01  |."...A../1.G....|
12000000b0  02 01 01 31 01 47 01 01  02 0f 02 01 01 38 79 00  |...1.G.......8y.|
13000000c0  16 65 a8 00 2f 00 00 31  00 47 01 10 02 f8 0f 08  |.e../..1.G......|
14000000d0  08 38 54 50 54 50 54 50  54 50 54 50 54 50 54 50  |.8TPTPTPTPTPTPTP|
15000000e0  54 50 54 50 54 50 54 50  54 50 54 50 54 50 54 50  |TPTPTPTPTPTPTPTP|
16000000f0  54 50 54 50 54 50 54 50  54 50 54 50 65 a8 00 20  |TPTPTPTPTPTPe.. |

I am using TL866 II+ programmer to flash the DIP8 chip with a Linux version of minipro 0.6 software.
Before flashing every 16-bit word of this image needs to be reversed like this: "65 a8" -> "15 a6".
At offset 8 there is a checksum (0x81) of first 8 bytes.
The layout of this image is described by the Microsoft's ISA PnP spec.
I used Linux's drivers/pnp/isapnp/core.c as a reference implementation.
I am not sure if the 46 last bytes are correct - they were simply copied from a 512 byte image.

The "TP" stuff is all padding and the last 4 bytes were result of an error that is now fixed. I am sorry for all this mess, but now it is taken care of ~
While the EEPROM that was being written was correct, the one I read out prior and used as backup file had some data shifted and that resulted in serial bytes being lost and last 4 bytes containing the first 4 instead of padding pattern.

640K!enough wrote on 2023-08-10, 19:50:

For write timing, couldn't you implement READY/BUSY# polling, rather than just assuming a certain maximum write cycle time? Of course, that assumes that every brand/size of compatible chip that might be found on such a card implements that feature.

There isn't any sort of readback mechanism to use, only a autoincremented read port (with a ready bit) as part of PnP stuff, and auto incremented write port that is added to the PnP mechanism (but that ready bit of reads is not helping here) so I don't get any feedback at all from the EEPROM side for writes and have to assume manual timings and hope for the best.

After too many years of waiting, I'm finally getting to a point where I am baking this one special cookie :

There are still logicstical challenges and I'm not yet all that sure about the flux fumes and what will be done about them but there's gonna be some baking happening tomorrow after meat based pick & place 🤣

I still have to finish (read: start 🤣) the new software for this card and finish the CPLD content, since there are things this card can do that previous one cannot and there is no compatibility between this and old one. Once all the software and gateware are done I'll make the remaining cards and see about liberating all the dorrals that sit in the parts aswell as liberate the physical space that is kinda scarce where I am now 🤣

I will be wanting one of these - the perfect companion for the TB60XG!
sign me up 😀

Nice, I would love one of these.
Are you still planning to do dual opl-2 emulation?

Music to my ears Tiido! Enjoy the process, I'm very interested in one of these when they appear from the oven.

Watching with interest as well. The talent of some of the folks in this forum is truly incredible

fjardest wrote on 2023-10-12, 22:21:

Nice, I would love one of these.
Are you still planning to do dual opl-2 emulation?

Yeah, I have space in the CPLD and will try to implement it, but it will only work if the card has YMF704 or YMF721 on it too and the cards I sell will not provide it unless I am sent a donor beforehand. All cards will be made with readyness for YMF704/721 and it can be soldered on later to give full functionality.

Reason for this is simply the chips being very expensive and/or being fakes, on which I have gotten burned already :

These chips are random relabeled chips that have nothing to do with being YMF721, at worst they will damage the board they get installed on. Absolutely stay away from these !

Real YMF721 and 704 look like this :

Safest places are existing sound cards from back in the day and also some Intel motherboards which used them but they can be quite pricy still.