You won’t have any trouble with only 2 sound cards. You should have plenty of I/O, DMA, and IRQ addresses. Worst case is disabling one or both COM and Parallel ports. You don’t even need to disable one card in Windows, in fact I discourage it. And for some games like Age of Empires, You need both to maximize your sound capabilities if you don’t want to use CQM (Believe me, AoE needs quality MIDI playback to be fully enjoyed). You can configure which to use for sound, cd audio, and which to use for MIDI/OPL. Loop one sound card through the other I think is what many people around here do, but I buy speakers which have an A and B line in, and I connect both cards to the speakers.

When I used a Sound Blaster Live for Windows and an ESS 1688 w/Dream Blaster X2 attached for MIDI in my last system, this is what I did.

AFAIK unisound allows to move CQM to some irrelevant address so you can have your real opl3 at 388h - meaning no compatibility issues whatsoever

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-02, 11:08:

I bought a new system designed for late DOS games and Windows 98 games (a Pentium 2-333). I like the SB 32 included since it's one of the better models but it has CQM instead of OPL3. Since I want to make this system a kind of "DOS system for everything except speed-sensitive games" I really want OPL3 support as well.

I have multiple OPL3 capable cards including SB16 cards, a Yamaha Audician 32 Plus (PCI) and an Aztech 2320 (ISA).

The question is: what would be the easiest way to go about this? I'd only need OPL3 under DOS - in Windows I'd simply disable the second sound card - but of course I don't want the drivers to overlap.

Hang on, the Audician 32 Plus is an ISA card with Yamaha 719, not a PCI card. Can you confirm what you have there?

If it's the Audician, that would be the obvious choice, if it's a PCI Yamaha, the question is whether you have PC/PCI (SBLink) on the motherboard. If not, the Aztech would be a better option. Either would give you a real OPL3 core as well as SBPro2 support, bug-free MIDI (the 3670 doesn't have hanging notes, but does suffer from slowdowns when MIDI and 16b DA are played at same time) and WSS.

Set one to main DOS resources, the other to alternative. How I have my AZT2320 and AWE64Gold (basically identical to the CT3670) configured:
- AZT A220 I5 D1 P330 T4 U2
- AWE A240 I7 (or 3) D3 H5 P300 T6
Works fine and I can select any feature of either in my software.

Meatball wrote on 2022-02-02, 13:33:

You won’t have any trouble with only 2 sound cards. You should have plenty of I/O, DMA, and IRQ addresses. Worst case is disabling one or both COM and Parallel ports. You don’t even need to disable one card in Windows, in fact I discourage it. And for some games like Age of Empires, You need both to maximize your sound capabilities if you don’t want to use CQM (Believe me, AoE needs quality MIDI playback to be fully enjoyed). You can configure which to use for sound, cd audio, and which to use for MIDI/OPL. Loop one sound card through the other I think is what many people around here do, but I buy speakers which have an A and B line in, and I connect both cards to the speakers.

When I used a Sound Blaster Live for Windows and an ESS 1688 w/Dream Blaster X2 attached for MIDI in my last system, this is what I did.

Yeah that's the idea - but I needed more practical help on how to do it without the least headaches 😀.

keropi wrote on 2022-02-02, 14:04:

AFAIK unisound allows to move CQM to some irrelevant address so you can have your real opl3 at 388h - meaning no compatibility issues whatsoever

Well it's Unisound I've been using so far in my attempt to figure it out.

Here's what I've done:

- set Audician 32 to A240 I7 D3/H4 P0 F388 using the SET BLASTER LINE
- set AWE32 to A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 F0 using the SET BLASTER LINE (Basically, disable OPL3 on AWE32 and enable it on Audician)
- SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 F388

The idea was for the Audician card to not get used by any game except for OPL3 music but in reality it's different. I notice that quite a few games look at the address of the FX card and then use the card it finds there. I've looked at OPL3 lists and about a third or even half the games still insist on playing music through the SB32. I also believe that some games don't even play OPL3 but just regular Adlib (OPL2) instead.

Still, it mostly works - I think the problem is mainly that games use different methods to chose which music to play.

dionb wrote on 2022-02-02, 15:16:

Hang on, the Audician 32 Plus is an ISA card with Yamaha 719, not a PCI card. Can you confirm what you have there? […]
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Hang on, the Audician 32 Plus is an ISA card with Yamaha 719, not a PCI card. Can you confirm what you have there?

If it's the Audician, that would be the obvious choice, if it's a PCI Yamaha, the question is whether you have PC/PCI (SBLink) on the motherboard. If not, the Aztech would be a better option. Either would give you a real OPL3 core as well as SBPro2 support, bug-free MIDI (the 3670 doesn't have hanging notes, but does suffer from slowdowns when MIDI and 16b DA are played at same time) and WSS.

Set one to main DOS resources, the other to alternative. How I have my AZT2320 and AWE64Gold (basically identical to the CT3670) configured:
- AZT A220 I5 D1 P330 T4 U2
- AWE A240 I7 (or 3) D3 H5 P300 T6
Works fine and I can select any feature of either in my software.

Yeah my mistake - it's indeed ISA. The Yamaha is very compatible with the SB Pro so it's a T5 but some games such as Hocus Pocus REALLY don't like it for sound despite chosing Sound Blaster Pro. This is why I dumped the card in the past in the first place but it does make for a good OPL3 card.

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-02, 19:25:

[...]

Yeah my mistake - it's indeed ISA. The Yamaha is very compatible with the SB Pro so it's a T5 but some games such as Hocus Pocus REALLY don't like it for sound despite chosing Sound Blaster Pro. This is why I dumped the card in the past in the first place but it does make for a good OPL3 card.

T5 is for the SB Pro MCV (so IBM MCA, not ISA), T4 is the correct setting for SBPro2 (i.e. ISA card with OPL3). That might explain the issues... Hocus Pocus is known to misbehave with T5.

If that doesn't fix it, by all means try the AZT2320 instead. I find it to be very compatible and trouble-free.

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-02, 19:24:

The idea was for the Audician card to not get used by any game except for OPL3 music but in reality it's different. I notice that quite a few games look at the address of the FX card and then use the card it finds there. I've looked at OPL3 lists and about a third or even half the games still insist on playing music through the SB32. I also believe that some games don't even play OPL3 but just regular Adlib (OPL2) instead.

Still, it mostly works - I think the problem is mainly that games use different methods to chose which music to play.

Yes, that is what I found back then as well.
FM music interfacing is not only about the Adlib defined IO port 388, but also about the Sound Blaster range of IO ports, the ones typically starting at 220. In that range Creative labs defined their own FM ports. Though the Sound Blaster still responds to 388 as well, as some sort of backward compatibility. Now on the software side: A game can be hardcoded to use the creative defined port whenever Sound Blaster FX was enabled, and then refuse to output FM to port 388. It is actually pretty much by the book (Creative labs specs), only becoming an annoyance when trying to use two sound cards like you intend.

dionb wrote on 2022-02-02, 21:52:

T5 is for the SB Pro MCV (so IBM MCA, not ISA), T4 is the correct setting for SBPro2 (i.e. ISA card with OPL3). That might explain the issues... Hocus Pocus is known to misbehave with T5.

If that doesn't fix it, by all means try the AZT2320 instead. I find it to be very compatible and trouble-free.

Ahah! That indeed fixed it.

I think I'll just use two settings - one where the Yamaha card is ONLY used for OPL3 and one where it is COMPLETELY used for everything and the SB32 is only used as a pass-through. The Yamaha card is a crappy card by itself because of the amount of games that don't like it (Duke Nukem 3D for example doesn't) but this way I can pick & chose by using a BATCH file. Unisound is a godsend for this.

gerwin wrote on 2022-02-02, 23:47:

Yes, that is what I found back then as well.
FM music interfacing is not only about the Adlib defined IO port 388, but also about the Sound Blaster range of IO ports, the ones typically starting at 220. In that range Creative labs defined their own FM ports. Though the Sound Blaster still responds to 388 as well, as some sort of backward compatibility. Now on the software side: A game can be hardcoded to use the creative defined port whenever Sound Blaster FX was enabled, and then refuse to output FM to port 388. It is actually pretty much by the book (Creative labs specs), only becoming an annoyance when trying to use two sound cards like you intend.

With the method I employ now (see my post above) it should work - let's hope.