From my (limited) experience, cards on which WSS support is provided by a Crystal chip tend to have slightly worse game compatibility than cards where WSS is provided by an Analog Devices chip.

Maybe the posts around Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support will help, it was about improving Sierra game WSS compatibility with the Orpheus card.

I have an orpheus, which is a community sound card that uses a crystal chip. If the game supports WSS, and it was released after 1995, they almost all work. Some exceptions there but generally pretty good. For WSS games released between 1993-1994 compatibility seems to be pretty poor. I don't know what the difference is between early WSS and later WSS but that seems to be the difference.

There were some WSS patches made in the orpheus thread that might fix for you leisure suit larry 6 and Space Quest 5. You can use the same patched driver file with Space Quest IV, and if you modify the resources.cfg to use it, add WSS support to that game which never supported it. There are more Sierra games that support WSS but none of them work right for the orpehus, unfortunately, although many of them can be played in windows and in that environment they sound excellent.

There are also many games that use the "miles sound driver" (.DIG files), most of which already support WSS but some don't. You can add WSS support to these games by taking the DIG file from one game and adding it to the directory of another and modifying the configuration files.

Good point, Oetker. I have been reading that thread (I also own an Orpheus, great card), and was considering trying the fix drivers, but I think it mentions they only effect port 534, leaving the other standard WSS ports to the original driver implementation, and the Sound Galaxy won't let me configure WSS to that specific port. I might try them anyway, not like it could make it worse I suppose.

Great tip about the Miles drivers, mothergoose729, I need to see if those other non-working games are using them.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2021-06-16, 07:16:

Good point, Oetker. I have been reading that thread (I also own an Orpheus, great card), and was considering trying the fix drivers, but I think it mentions they only effect port 534, leaving the other standard WSS ports to the original driver implementation, and the Sound Galaxy won't let me configure WSS to that specific port. I might try them anyway, not like it could make it worse I suppose.

I don't know why port 534 has to be the setting in orphinit, but the games all use port 530. It's worth a shot... the chips are similar.

Oh I forgot to mention, Gabriel Knight will also work with one of the patched drivers. If you go back far enough in the thread I documented what I found in a post there.

Great news, the fix drivers modified by 640K!enough made the Sierra games work!
Thanks to 640K!enough for his work there, and to Keropi & Cloudschatze for supplying the originals. Also thanks for you guys for getting me to try them.

Next step is to find some Miles drivers that will work, as I only have 3 games that use it, and two of those are mentioned here as not working, and the other doesn't have the mssys driver at all.
Any body got a clue where to look for that?.... Didn't have to look far, there is a collection available on vogonsdrivers 😁
I'll test to see if anything in that pack helps, and report back.
...
Unfortunately they didn't help.
There are two relevant driver sets in that collection, and neither could initialize the card in wss mode. Not sure what to try next.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2021-06-16, 14:02:

Great news, the fix drivers created by 640K!enough made the Sierra games work! Thanks to 640K!enough for his work there! And tha […]
Show full quote

Great news, the fix drivers created by 640K!enough made the Sierra games work!
Thanks to 640K!enough for his work there! And thanks for you guys for getting me to try them.

Next step is to find some Miles drivers that will work, as I only have 3 games that use it, and two of those are mentioned here as not working, and the other doesn't have the mssys driver at all.
Any body got a clue where to look for that?.... Didn't have to look far, there is a collection available on vogonsdrivers 😁
I'll test to see if anything in that pack helps, and report back.

That's awesome! I used the WSS driver from warcraft 2 in my Miles games.

I just tried Warcraft 2, but it has the same problem, the setup program just won't initialize it.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2021-06-16, 16:29:

I just tried Warcraft 2, but it has the same problem, the setup program just won't initialize it.

Modify the DIG.ini file manually and point it to the correct driver.

I looked at that, but wasn't sure about the different parameters, and it didn't work, so I either got it wrong or Miles hates something about my setup.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2021-06-16, 16:41:

I looked at that, but wasn't sure about the different parameters, and it didn't work, so I either got it wrong or Miles hates something about my setup.

Which games(s) are you trying to add WSS too? I might have a driver/digi file for it already.

I listed them on the original post, but now it's:
GTA
Broken Sword 1
and now Warcraft 2

They have the drivers, they just don't initialize the card.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2021-06-16, 14:02:

Great news, the fix drivers created by 640K!enough made the Sierra games work!
Thanks to 640K!enough for his work there! And thanks for you guys for getting me to try them.

It's important for me to mention that I did not write those drivers. I merely did the necessary trouble-shooting and found the right place to modify a few bytes so that they would work correctly with the Orpheus card. This applies specifically to use of the digital ("S/PDIF") output. Since you are working with a card that has a CS4231, the original drivers posted by keropi (originally shared by Cloudschatze) a page or so earlier should work just as well.

That driver still does some pretty strange things, so I may try writing a new WSS driver for Sierra games from scratch if I ever feel like I have some time to waste, but I'm not making any promises.

You're quite right, I'm going to modify my post, and thank them too. Unfortunately there are so many posts there about it, and I was focused on testing the drivers, that I didn't see others were involved.

What I meant to say was simply that they are slightly modified versions of an original Sierra-provided driver; none of us is responsible for writing it. The company that now owns the old Sierra On-Line IP still holds the copyright.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-06-16, 07:19:

I don't know why port 534 has to be the setting in orphinit, but the games all use port 530.

While I'm here (again), I might as well address this, too. This isn't specific to ORPHINIT, and that is the value used because it is actually the port that cards based on Crystal controllers use. The original Crystal software does the same thing, and actually trying to configure it as 530H will result in the software being unable to find the card.

The reasoning is actually a little convoluted. The original Microsoft WSS board used an Analog Devices part, which was still at 534H, but other functionality was exposed at the other four I/O addresses (530H-533H). Some controllers reproduce that whole set-up (I think OPTi/MediaChips controllers do), whereas the Crystal controllers are only WSS CODEC compatible. So, software that only ever writes to the CODEC portion of the cards will work fine on all such cards, whereas software that actually tries to detect the presence of a WSS board via 530H will fail on cards with Crystal controllers, because there is simply nothing there. For software that allows it, it may sometimes be worth trying both 530H and 534H, depending on the driver design.

The original CS4231 does not have an integrated controller, and relies on a separate chip to provide that functionality. As such, whether the whole 530H-533H setup is present on a particular card depends on the controller used.

Interesting stuff for sure.
I tried setting port 534 for the Miles games, but no luck. A couple of quick quiet static pops in the left & right channels, followed by an error that the card could not be found.

640K!enough wrote on 2021-06-16, 18:51:

What I meant to say was simply that they are slightly modified versions of an original Sierra-provided driver; none of us is res […]
Show full quote

What I meant to say was simply that they are slightly modified versions of an original Sierra-provided driver; none of us is responsible for writing it. The company that now owns the old Sierra On-Line IP still holds the copyright.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-06-16, 07:19:

I don't know why port 534 has to be the setting in orphinit, but the games all use port 530.

While I'm here (again), I might as well address this, too. This isn't specific to ORPHINIT, and that is the value used because it is actually the port that cards based on Crystal controllers use. The original Crystal software does the same thing, and actually trying to configure it as 530H will result in the software being unable to find the card.

The reasoning is actually a little convoluted. The original Microsoft WSS board used an Analog Devices part, which was still at 534H, but other functionality was exposed at the other four I/O addresses (530H-533H). Some controllers reproduce that whole set-up (I think OPTi/MediaChips controllers do), whereas the Crystal controllers are only WSS CODEC compatible. So, software that only ever writes to the CODEC portion of the cards will work fine on all such cards, whereas software that actually tries to detect the presence of a WSS board via 530H will fail on cards with Crystal controllers, because there is simply nothing there. For software that allows it, it may sometimes be worth trying both 530H and 534H, depending on the driver design.

The original CS4231 does not have an integrated controller, and relies on a separate chip to provide that functionality. As such, whether the whole 530H-533H setup is present on a particular card depends on the controller used.

Thanks for clarifying that!

640K!enough wrote on 2021-06-16, 18:51:

The original Microsoft WSS board used an Analog Devices part, which was still at 534H, but other functionality was exposed at the other four I/O addresses (530H-533H). Some controllers reproduce that whole set-up (I think OPTi/MediaChips controllers do), whereas the Crystal controllers are only WSS CODEC compatible.

That's some very Interesting info. Considering that an Analog Devices chip powered the original Windows Sound System card, it makes sense that other sound cards that have their chips on-board would have the best WSS compatibility.

And yes, OPTi did often use Analog Devices chips on their cards, which is likely why their WSS compatibility tends to be top notch.