Damn, I have no PAS cards or experience with them so I cannot comment on their resources... But just to make sure, pcmidi alone never has an issue, right?

I have a 486 system with a PAS, Aztech sound blaster clone and a PCMIDI card. This setup has always worked great for me. I don´t have access to this system at the moment to check any specifics in the config or anything like that but at least this should work.

Make sure nothing is using IRQ9. Some older video cards have this option.

keropi wrote on 2022-02-01, 21:28:

Damn, I have no PAS cards or experience with them so I cannot comment on their resources... But just to make sure, pcmidi alone never has an issue, right?

Thanks keropi - yeah, when I remove the PAS16 card from the system, it appears to work fine every time. I did ten power off/power ons in a row to double check 😀

Arvid wrote on 2022-02-01, 21:58:

I have a 486 system with a PAS, Aztech sound blaster clone and a PCMIDI card. This setup has always worked great for me. I don´t have access to this system at the moment to check any specifics in the config or anything like that but at least this should work.

Good to know that someone else was able to get the combo working well. That is encouraging, thanks!

Is your card a PAS16 or the original PAS? If it was a PAS16, do you remember if it had the Trantor SCSI interface?

Plasma wrote on 2022-02-02, 00:28:

Make sure nothing is using IRQ9. Some older video cards have this option.

Yeah I was wondering about IRQ9 as well since 9 and 2 are cascaded. My video card is a VLB Powergraph C33 (Western Digital paradise chip). I don't see any jumpers for IRQ assignment, but since the PC MIDI card works fine without the PAS16 installed, I think that probably rules it out.

lemonlime wrote on 2022-02-02, 18:24:

Good to know that someone else was able to get the combo working well. That is encouraging, thanks!

Is your card a PAS16 or the original PAS? If it was a PAS16, do you remember if it had the Trantor SCSI interface?

It´s a PAS16, pretty sure it has a SCSI interface but I´m not able to check that right now.

I spent a bit more time troubleshooting this morning. I thought the PC MIDI card just wasn't working at bootup, but in actual fact, even when it did work it wouldn't work for very long. I just wasn't testing it for long enough. After about ~10 minutes of MIDI operation, the card would just stop working with some nasty hanging notes. If I run MQDIAG.EXE after this happens, the card isn't found again. The system would also be all laggy until a reboot.

Interestingly, I tried a newer Trantor SCSI and CDROM driver to use with the PAS16 and it seemed to resolve this issue. I still have the issue where it sometimes isn't found after a cold-boot, but at least the card works properly for long periods of time now. Maybe I'm onto something with the SCSI interface on the PAS16. EDIT: Looks like it was just a buggy game causing this, see next post for more detail.

The Trantor driver documentation seems to indicate that there is no IRQ used by the PAS16 for SCSI - only an address range. I'll do some testing without loading the SCSI drivers. There is also a jumper for I/O address range blocks on the PAS16. I may give that a try as well as a troubleshooting step.

I have a Plextor 6x caddy load SCSI CDROM in this system and really love the PAS16, so I'm hoping I can make it work reliably.

Good news! I think I may have fixed it. I thought I was running the latest version of MVSOUND.SYS (3.23) but there is actually a newer 3.26 version floating around. As soon as I swapped the file out, the problem appears to have disappeared. I hard rebooted no fewer than 13 times to test, and MQDIAG.EXE detected the PC MIDI card just fine every time. Prior to this, I'd never get more than 4-5 reboots in before it'd be in the broken state. I don't want to call it yet, but this is a good sign.

Also, ignore my last post about the Trantor CDROM drivers, I was wrong. It looks like the shareware version of Hocus Pocus that I was using to test with has a buggy general midi implementation or something. Doom and other games have reliable MIDI output for long periods of time. It had nothing to do with the SCSI drivers.

If this is indeed fixed, I'm really happy because I can use the PAS16, SCSI CDROM and an awesome MPU-401 card!

Thanks all.

excellent news lemonlime!! enjoy the beeps and bops! 😀