So what would cause the card to stop existing on a warm reboot (just ctrl-alt-delete in DOS)? For whatever reason I can’t get the card to show up unless I’m starting from a very cold boot

I’m gearing up to give the board (GA-6BXC) the full(er) recap it deserves since I last replaced some bloated ones but I’d like to be sure it isn’t something screwy with my card (or maybe the custom bios that’s floating around here for the Powerleap adapter that also frees up IRQ2 I think)

Thanks in advance

This is probably a mobo issue, it would worth to try a new bios
And just to mention again, pnp/detection issues are not really possible to solve as the CS4237 connects directly to ISA bus and handles these functions internally...

I hope this is the right place to ask, I'm having trouble getting the Orpheus I to cooperate with Monkey Island 1 and 2 (Ultimate Talkie Edition) with "FMMode=OPL3" enabled. With the Crystal chip enabled instead it works fine, and every other game I've tried the OPL3 works perfectly. In the Monkey Island games however with OPL3 enabled the sounds are screeching atonal glitch noises that persist even after a CTRL-ALT-DEL reboot and wont stop until the actual power button is used to reboot the Computer.

The PC is an IBM PC-300GL with a Pentium I MMX 200MHz, calling ORPHEUS.bat in autoexec.bat

The only thing I've changed in ORPHEUS.ini is to set the card type to ORPHEUS I

This is a sign of too fast CPU speed, the writes to OPL3 happen too fast and data gets corrupt and result is all the weird noises. You may be able to get some positive results by increasing ISA wait states in BIOS (8bit recovery time etc.), disabling cache or reducing CPU speed multiplier.

Monkey Island appears to be a particularly speed sensitive game. Here are some of the problems I experienced while trying to make it work on a fast system:

Monkey Island DRM is corrupted but cracked game plays fine

Thank you for the info! It also might be something specific to the Ultimate Talkie Edition, a copy of the normal version of MONKEY 1 isn't glitched sounding. I should have checked that first.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-01-14, 22:00:

Altering the system bus speed also alters the divider used on the ISA bus. Because it runs at such a lower clock, even minor adjustments are magnified. Some cards simply don't work properly if the bus speed has been altered.

Does anyone know if it's possible for an ISA bus to have its own clock chip, so to be unaffected by overclocking? Or must it be tied to the system bus? It may be due to cost or a technical limitation.

Iirc if you have a separate clock, then synchronization becomes an issue. It isn't when the same clock is divided and reads/writes can happen "as expected" but as you've seen that comes with issues when certain sound cards or games don't play nice with the resulting ISA clock.

Disabling the L1 cache with SetMul fixed my Ultimate Talkie Monkey Island OPL3 issue. Thanks for the advice!

For some reason the MT-32 music sounds wrong, like different instruments or something. Every other game I've tried sounds totally fine, even vanilla Monkey Island, so I'm sure it's not a card issue.

Been really enjoying the Orpheus, thanks everybody who worked on it!

Maybe the Talkie version was updated for General MIDI. That would be very interesting to hear.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-08-20, 23:57:

Maybe the Talkie version was updated for General MIDI. That would be very interesting to hear.

It is.

as per readme you need to use r1 for MT-32 tracks

13.2 Playing it in DOS
2=====================
3- Run "monkey r1" for playing with Roland MT-32 music.
4- Run "monkey r" for playing with General MIDI music.
5- Run "monkey a" for playing with AdLib music.
6- The game can be played either from a harddisk or directly off CD.
7- Hit '[' and ']' to adjust the music volume.

Amazing. I'm embarrassed that it didn't occur to me to check for that. Thanks again.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-05-03, 04:58:

Ok, I think I am beginning to understand this a bit better. There looks to be three distinct generation of WSS drivers used in sierra games.
-King's Quest VI (officially supported but busted)

I experienced the same "ear rape" you described after replacing AUDMSSYS.DRV. But it only happens during speech, the other sound effects play fine. I wonder if this will get fixed. Can someone with an OPTI or CMI8330 or other WSS-compatible card please test with the DOS KQ6 CD version?

EDIT: Space Quest VI didn't work for me either. Tried the newly modded AUDMSSYS, tried the updated Sierra version from 1994, tried the newly patched DACMSSYS (forced), tried disabling L1, tried setting IRQ to 7, nothing worked. If you want WSS support, avoid the CS4237.

EDIT 2: I tested King's Quest VI on an Aztech AZT2316A with a CS4248 WSS codec on-board. I tried the original AUDMSSYS.DRV, Sierra's in-house patched version, and the one posted here... It doesn't work, all I hear is silence (after running Lion King which is glitchy with WSS but works, I get the same ear rape after exiting and running KQ6 with WSS). I'm not sure if setting the SB IRQ also changes the WSS IRQ, but I set it to 7, that didn't help. Not relevant to the Orpheus per se, but just thought I'd post it here. WSS is important for me in KQ6 because of several reasons: 1) SB crashes the computer -- this is a known issue; 2) Thunderboard works for SB but the quality is not that great at all; 3) The character face portraits in the Windows version are quite dissatisfactory to say the least compared to the DOS version. The people who worked on the DOS portraits were real artists (Before Sierra went downhill). The people who did the Windows version portraits were complete amateurs. More pixel density doesn't make a better picture -- they had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

Hello Keropi, just wanted to post thanks for the Orpheus II soundcard and also thanks to the team that worked to produce this amazing hardware! Had to rack my brain a bit to power up the ol' 486DX4-100 again and install Orpheus. In the end managed to get everything working, SB, Ultrasound, Dreamblaster (which is really amazing), and I used the gameport to connect my MT-32. Same old issue exists with more than one MPU-401 devices - I just assigned Port 300/ IRQ 3 to Wavetable (Crystal controlled MPU) and Port 330/IRQ 2 to the Gameport (PCMIDI controlled). Had to patch Sierra games which do not allow changing MIDI port in the install program too.

Has anyone here successfully used and init the Orpheus II soundcard in their system where there is a CF-SD card in use? It failed to init in mine, unless I go back to an actual CF card.

This is the error:
Hostload/SLAM
WSS:538
CTRL: 534
284 bytes sent
Unidentified chip found/quitting

What does that mean exactly? You have an IDE-CF or SD adapter for a hard drive installed?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-09-21, 23:34:

What does that mean exactly? You have an IDE-CF or SD adapter for a hard drive installed?

I have CF-IDE adapter installed yes - the issue is with the CF card that is used. There are CF-SD cards that allows you to slot microSD card into a CF card - an adapter if you will.

It seems that Orpheus has trouble initialising if you use these CF-SD cards instead of an actual CF card itself.

primetime wrote on 2023-09-21, 23:00:

Has anyone here successfully used and init the Orpheus II soundcard in their system where there is a CF-SD card in use? It faile […]
Show full quote

Has anyone here successfully used and init the Orpheus II soundcard in their system where there is a CF-SD card in use? It failed to init in mine, unless I go back to an actual CF card.

This is the error:
Hostload/SLAM
WSS:538
CTRL: 534
284 bytes sent
Unidentified chip found/quitting

I don't see the connection between the 2, unless you CF to SD adapter or the SDCARD used is flaky or its content gets corrupted (or got corrupted). Or there is a weird interaction, like that CF to SD adapter is shooting noise into the ISA bus through the CF connector (or somthing like that).

Or there is another variable at play.

That's very strange. I've never heard of anything like this before. It should be completely transparent.

I have however experienced issues with IDE-CF adapters being incompatible with some BIOSes or some other weird interaction.

primetime wrote on 2023-09-22, 00:28:

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-09-21, 23:34:

What does that mean exactly? You have an IDE-CF or SD adapter for a hard drive installed?

I have CF-IDE adapter installed yes - the issue is with the CF card that is used. There are CF-SD cards that allows you to slot microSD card into a CF card - an adapter if you will.

It seems that Orpheus has trouble initialising if you use these CF-SD cards instead of an actual CF card itself.

I doubt it it is a direct incompatibility . I suspect something is wrong or out of spec with your CF to SD adapter. Some of those are quite cheaply made (at least the ones I have seen).