Oh yeah...

I'm glad you're documenting your progress in such detail. It's not only interesting to read, but maybe it will give the "too expensive" crowd some idea of the amount of effort and financial investment that are involved in these undertakings.

Sure, that would be nice!

Meanwhile we've just ordered the next patched prototype:

We expect it to be cooked next week, maybe on Tuesday or Thursday.

If anyone has ideas regarding the silkscreen design, we're all ears.

Hello everyone!

GOOD NEWS:
1. Second prototype PCBs have arrived:

2. This time PCI-PCI bridge has started without problems:

3. YMF744 has also started without problems.

BAD NEWS:
1. AU8830 was not detected, however the oscillator is working:

We have several theories about what can prevent Vortex from starting, ordered some additional components to test, more news to come next week, stay tuned.

P.S. Blue PCB looked better than green... So green won't be considered when we reach production batch.

would there be a way to add a sound blaster x-fi chip into the mix so the card pretty much could do everything. a3d opl and eax all the way upto 5

progress!

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 05:11:

would there be a way to add a sound blaster x-fi chip into the mix so the card pretty much could do everything. a3d opl and eax all the way upto 5

Unfortunately, that is not possible due to various reasons:
1. X-Fi requires a bit more complex design than those two chips we've chosen. Just look at the boards. Even if we had done that, the whole concept would have changed, making our small neat accelerator board a behemoth.
2. Fortex is aimed at DOS/Win9x, and X-Fi doesn't support those.
3. A3D is too great by itself. Who needs EAX anyway?..
4. Aureal and Yamaha are cool and Creative sucks 😀

hard1k wrote on 2022-04-22, 09:56:

Unfortunately, that is not possible due to various reasons: 1. X-Fi requires a bit more complex design than those two chips we'v […]
Show full quote

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 05:11:

would there be a way to add a sound blaster x-fi chip into the mix so the card pretty much could do everything. a3d opl and eax all the way upto 5

Unfortunately, that is not possible due to various reasons:
1. X-Fi requires a bit more complex design than those two chips we've chosen. Just look at the boards. Even if we had done that, the whole concept would have changed, making our small neat accelerator board a behemoth.
2. Fortex is aimed at DOS/Win9x, and X-Fi doesn't support those.
3. A3D is too great by itself. Who needs EAX anyway?..
4. Aureal and Yamaha are cool and Creative sucks 😀

alot more games support eax then A3D

Sure, and EAX cards are readily available. If you calculate the R&D+production costs for any EAX-enabled newly made card, they will never be anywhere near the current prices for the original Creative cards, at least in the next decade. Beside that, Creative has never made any datasheets public. So, the aim is unclear, the costs are unreasonable, the technical side is too complicated.
The answer is no, we won't touch anything Creative anymore, leaving this promising niche for other teams 😁

will it at least support eax 1 and 2 witch i believe the official aureal cards could do although might be software eax not sure on that.

what about for drivers will it just use the drivers for the official cards or will u be making a custom driver. the official drivers aren't really all that great like the last one released has reversed audio. also some people complain of the drivers being buggy if u use any directx version after 7.

also will the cards have digital optical or coax output or just the standard 3.5mm analog. what about plug in for the cd audio cable.

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:04:

will it at least support eax 1 and 2 witch i believe the official aureal cards could do although might be software eax not sure on that.

AU8830 supports A3D 2.0 and also A3D 3.0. It also supports the EAX 1.0 presets when using the 2048 and 2050 drivers.

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:04:

what about for drivers will it just use the drivers for the official cards or will u be making a custom driver. the official drivers aren't really all that great like the last one released has reversed audio. also some people complain of the drivers being buggy if u use any directx version after 7.

It will use official drivers. Unfortunately we don't have any source code to build anything custom (and even if we had, we still lack a coder in our team, so that would take much longer anyways).

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:04:

also will the cards have digital optical or coax output or just the standard 3.5mm analog. what about plug in for the cd audio cable.

The main card (the one we're testing and showing in the thread) will have MPC-style stereo out (like CD/DVD drives do), also MPC-style SPDIF-out, header for front panel audio jacks, PC/PCI 6-pin header, Waveblaster-compatible 26-pin header to be used with an IDC cable, and a proprietary header for expansion. This proprietary header will be used to transform the main (basic) card into a regular soundcard in its own right, with the bracket and stuff. As far as the ports on this expansion card(s) are concerned, we haven't yet made any decision what we want to see there. So, when the main/basic card is confirmed as fully working, we'll proceed with the design of this expansion card(s), and that's when we'll need the input from the community, what you actually want on it. The possibilities are virtually endless - in theory we can put nice DAC, high grade amplifier (even a tube based haha), or some MIDI synth, for example.

2048 i believe is the version with reversed stereo. 2050 i believe was never officially released u can find it but was really badly broken i know when i tired to install that version it broke windows 98 it wouldn't boot anymore had to go in safe mode and uninstall it.

2041 works good for the most part.

🤣 a tube sound card that would def be interesting

A Sound Blaster X-Fi rebuild card isn't possible without a massive pile of the high-end cards for harvesting the chips, significant time/labor/R&D, and a pile of money to make it all happen. It's just not economical to do anything EAX-related in the hardware realm, when it can easily be recreated in software. The audio DSPs built into the GPUs of today have the capability to do what Creative's DSPs did ages ago and they can do it better, by using the 3D data to process and render sound as Aureal did for A3D back in the day.

Someone has to ask the question and nobody has, so it's gonna be me....

Any chance of fitting a wavetable header on that card?

It could be a dangerous audio beast, if it was packing OPL, XG, and GS/Sound-bank MIDI.

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:47:

2048 i believe is the version with reversed stereo.

Actually I don't recall any problem with reversed stereo, Google doesn't help either. Are you sure it was an AU8830 that you've experienced this problem with?

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-04-23, 14:17:

Any chance of fitting a wavetable header on that card?

It's already there!
Seems that I should have explained our concept better. Now I've tried to visualize it using my PowerPoint madskillz, so have a look:

hard1k wrote on 2022-04-23, 15:11:

Actually I don't recall any problem with reversed stereo, Google doesn't help either. Are you sure it was an AU8830 that you've […]
Show full quote

aaron158 wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:47:

2048 i believe is the version with reversed stereo.

Actually I don't recall any problem with reversed stereo, Google doesn't help either. Are you sure it was an AU8830 that you've experienced this problem with?

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-04-23, 14:17:

Any chance of fitting a wavetable header on that card?

It's already there!
Seems that I should have explained our concept better. Now I've tried to visualize it using my PowerPoint madskillz, so have a look:
Layout 0.2a.png

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Aureal_Semiconductor

its noted on the wiki also there is some post on the forum where people complained about it.

Thanks for pointing that out! Nice to know!

This will be an awesome soundcard. I've been searching for a Vortex 2 card on eBay last months, but luckily I didn't buy one. I hope I can get this card. Will it be possible to choose optical or coaxial spdif, or will you offer only coaxial?

Sure, you'll be able to get one.
Didn't think about SPDIF connector yet, but most probably it will be coaxial. When we approach the design of the expansion board, we'll launch a questionnaire for people to decide on what should it be.

Placed the waveblaster header in a wrong place on my expansion board bitmap layout, so here is a somewhat corrected version:

Ironically, I just bought an HP thin client recently and have been thinking about how to cram a sound card inside, since I don't have the PCI expansion housing.

With something like this, I can fit it inside and solder the stereo connector to the one already present on the board, after severing the existing traces.