No, it is all custom FPGA business, no existing part gets used as it is the case with this sound card. There wouldn't be any downscaling happening for the low res modes and the high res modes could all be done via interlacing such as text modes and the high res GFX modes. Only stuff beyond 480 lines needs actual scaling but there's not many games that will use such modes and 386/486 machines the card would target cannot do any game action anyway at such resolutions. For PCI there's no point, there's plenty decent cards out there that are not bottlenecked by anything meaningful and at least some of the Radeons can be hacked to output 15KHz modes too.

ah that's another approach then - even better especially for the 15k stuff. I would love to use something like a 1084 for VGA gaming 😀

*hates through hole parts*
Soldering all the capacitors and other bits has taken longer than all the other stuff prior... I'm resting my back for a little, after that I'll be soldering all the connectors and then I can start the testing process ~

EDIT:

They're pretty much done now ! YMF721 cards will need a small fix to be applied and then I can start testing but that will happen after I get some sleep ~

That is astounding work!
I'd very much like to try it out sometime.

Thänk you ~

I have finished testing and fixing the faults of the cards built and updated PnP EEPROM with necessary settings, serial number and other tidbits. I will have to update SETYMF to use the new things and do little more testing to make sure things are all ok.
I also cut the TRS connectors a little so that normal sound card brackets will fit on them, note that I don't have many brackets to give, you'll have to steal them from some other card if you can.

I will start working on T-04YBSC-B version soon, it will incorporate all the fixes I had to do manually. There will not be any limits on how many I can make of that version, whoever wants will get one as long as their wallet won't cry 🤣. I won't be setting any limits to how many cards can someone get.

Just curious, what PCB color are you planning for the released batch? Any possibility for some cool looking design like yamaha / opl3 / opl4 / etc. logos (in copper would be even more cool)?

I don't really have any desire to order boards with different colors, though if I ordered 100+ boards at once there wouldn't be any extra cost due to color. If there were any different colors it would only be yellow and green as tracks are most visible on those and I still have to do lot of visual checks when building the boards. Blue, red and purple still have fairly visible tracks but black and especially white have them near invisible and those are definitely not going to happen. Green is also the most durable and exposed gold plated copper (I use it for the TµEE logo for example) looks distinct on it while on yellow it wouldn't so I'm pretty settled on green color. I lack realestate for more of such logos (no more suitable copper fills on top layer), only other option is the white silkscreen layer. Revision will have few slighly smaller parts on it, we'll see how much extra space there ends up being ~

I'm currently updating SETYMF to be more friendly with other YMF71x based sound cards.
EDIT: SETYMF is now much more friendly to random YMF71x cards. Things specific to my card are hidden away and PnP EEPROM handling is updated to preserve IDs and whatnot and also give a clear warning when the operation is attempted.

Also, SETYMF should work even on a 8086. I have no machine with such a CPU but it certainly works on a 286, whereas Yamaha's SETUPSA does not seem to (all I got was a black screen and complete freeze).

I am really impressed with your sound card. Great work!!! I definitely want 2 of your cards from second fixed batch. Please count with me.
Could you add on your card these a 4-pin header on Line OUT or a 4-pin PCB connector (like for CD-ROM input) for internal connecting between the sound cards? It will very suitable for Ruslan's SBLive! DOS mixer project.

Haven't run a Yamaha card in any of my builds before. What kind of compatibility does the gameport have on these things; anything to worry about in fast systems, or with digital interfaces like the SideWinders'?

why not using a DAC IC instead of a R2R ladder ?

7524 is avaible in SOIC and you can omit the R2R Ladder. Less soldering fun 😁, better sound.

Very nice project 😳

The R2R Ladder is simply mapped to LPT Adress ? does it implent full lpt ? or only the 8bit register ?

Rabanik wrote:

I am really impressed with your sound card. Great work!!! I definitely want 2 of your cards from second fixed batch. Please count with me.
Could you add on your card these a 4-pin header on Line OUT or a 4-pin PCB connector (like for CD-ROM input) for internal connecting between the sound cards? It will very suitable for Ruslan's SBLive! DOS mixer project.

Yeah, that's a good idea and I'll add spots for the headers.

firage wrote:

Haven't run a Yamaha card in any of my builds before. What kind of compatibility does the gameport have on these things; anything to worry about in fast systems, or with digital interfaces like the SideWinders'?

The gameport behaves same as any other, any complications should be same as on stuff like Sound Blaster 16s, Aztechs and whatnot.

matze79 wrote:

why not using a DAC IC instead of a R2R ladder ? […]
Show full quote

why not using a DAC IC instead of a R2R ladder ?

7524 is avaible in SOIC and you can omit the R2R Ladder. Less soldering fun 😁, better sound.

Very nice project 😳

The R2R Ladder is simply mapped to LPT Adress ? does it implent full lpt ? or only the 8bit register ?

I wanted to use a DAC chip but they were all several times more expensive than the resistors and a FF chip and quality difference will be very minor anyway, FFT of an 8bit sine is as close to perfection as 8bits allows 🤣. Besides I'm not hand soldering, though I am being a pick and place machine and it does get tedious hahaha.
The DAC listens only to the data port, there's no room in CPLD for anything more elaborate. 278, 378 and 3BC are supported addresses. With a much bigger CPLD it could be possible to implement DSS with its FIFO and whatnot but I pretty much used parts in my drawer.

I'm impressed. This is going to be a popular card in these parts.
Definitely watching this thread.

How do we take part in supporting you and buying one of these puppies Tiido ?

So only 8bit Port is implented in CPLD ? are there any combatiblity issues with that ? 😀

Yes, only the 8bit dataport. I have tried couple MOD playback programs and Pinball Fantasies and they work fine. Anything supporting LPTDAC/Covox Speech Thing should work fine. Stuff like DSS, Covox Sound Master and ohers that are more than just a dumb DAC on LPT are not emulated/simulated.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I'm impressed. This is going to be a popular card in these parts.
Definitely watching this thread.

How do we take part in supporting you and buying one of these puppies Tiido ?

I am hoping so too haha.
Right now there's the decreasing amount of prototypes, out of 9 available, 2 are gone. Money from the prototypes will fund creating a batch of the revision of which I'll make as many as possible. PayPal doesn't like the idea of preorders and for the time being I cannot guarantee 20 days from order to delivery that they require. But in future when I have enough capital to actually order a bunch of parts in bulk I can start doing that, as it only takes hours to build one card and I can make at most 10ish cards per day if I'm really at it. For people within SEPA, I would highly appreciate that over PP.

The price is now settled too, 100€ for full featured card and 80€ for card without YMF721. Shipping cost depends on where you live and can be found from this document : https://www.omniva.ee/public/files/failid/hin … est-en-2018.pdf
Scroll down to "INTERNATIONAL STANDARD AND MAXI PARCEL" and find your country, then add the number in two columns together, this will be the exact shipping cost. I will then mail out the board in a few days and give you the tracking number. If you're in Europe it shouldn't take more than a week, if outside it can take 2ish weeks for North America, more for rest of the world.

There's currently 4x cards with YMF721 available and 3x cards without YMF721.

Slightly offtopic. An idea has just come to my mind. Is it possible to make hardware and/or software support of independent/individual stereo inversion for specific inputs/outputs? For example, some unpatched rev.00 Roland SCB-55 have their L/R channels reversed, it would be cool to be able to correct it in some smart way.

I don't have realestate for a relay (or GPIO to control that relay) to do it in a software controlled fashion. If anything it would need to be via jumpers you manually control. I personally would just modify the WB module but I can understand how some people want their hardware to be pristine. I'll have to see if I can find a place to put such a thing.

TODO list for the revision :
*Move TRS connectors to more standard locations (done, connectors cut a bit on prototypes)
*Fix missing GND on IDE (done, manually patched on prototypes)
*Fix VREF for MIDI+WB mixer (done, manually patched on prototypes)
*Add support for both active high and active low reset for YMF704/721 (not yet done, manually patched on prototypes)
*Add 4 pin headers for line-out (and while at it, line in)
*Find room for WB channel reverse jumpers.
*Use smaller bus transceiver and FF (smaller parts aru usually cheaper and realestate gains matter).
*Add provisions to allow DIY effect routing via WB connector like the MediaTrix card.
*See if a larger CPLD with more IO or logic resource is viable

Nice to know 😁

No IRQ required also ?

Subbed. I might be interested in one of these cards.

matze79 wrote:

Nice to know 😁

No IRQ required also ?

Things using Covox rely on system timer IRQ to function so things will work. I'm not sure if DSS can fire LPT IRQs, it makes sense for it to do when the FIFO empties so it can be refilled, tremendously reducing IRQ overhead compared to one IRQ every sample.

except for build engine games/protectmode games, most stuff should work on your covox with temu 😉 (DSS)