Nevermine, found it.

Those things are great - I soldered in a headphone jack for mine, easier than making a cable and finding a compatible sound card. You can just pipe the output into the CD in on your sound card but obviously then you can't have your CD drive audio connected.

I've had mine working with multiple different sound cards - not just creative - but not all of them get along, and to make the goldfinch really handy in Win9X you need sounds fonts a virtual MPU-401 to use them in a DOSbox:

Re: Pentium 166MMX tower of power

badmojo wrote on 2022-03-03, 01:12:

I soldered in a headphone jack for mine

Could I ask the PN and where did you find the jack that fits? All the ones I see the pins are off set and don't seem to line up?

RobDos wrote on 2022-03-03, 12:23:

Could I ask the PN and where did you find the jack that fits? All the ones I see the pins are off set and don't seem to line up?

I'm working on doing this same mod. I ordered some SJ1-3553NG which seem like they will work but I've been busy and haven't gotten around to pulling out the soldering iron yet.

RobDos wrote on 2022-03-03, 12:23:

Could I ask the PN and where did you find the jack that fits? All the ones I see the pins are off set and don't seem to line up?

From memory I just snagged a jack off an old dead ISA ESS sound cards but it was years ago so don't remember details I'm sorry.

I finally got around to adding the audio jack and the SJ1-3553NG worked perfectly.

I got one recently, paired it with a YMF-724 PCI sound card and it worked fine (I wired 2.54mm header jumper wires from its goldfinch header to one of the CD inputs on the Yamaha card). The only issue I encountered was it requires the -5v power line on the ISA bus, which the picopsu (junk) that I was using did not supply.

Does the Goldfinch card provide any benefits over a wavetable card like Dreamblaster X2? If I already have a good SB16 or combatible card with wavetable header.

janih wrote on 2022-03-25, 06:56:

Does the Goldfinch card provide any benefits over a wavetable card like Dreamblaster X2? If I already have a good SB16 or combatible card with wavetable header.

The use of soundfonts.

furan wrote on 2022-03-30, 21:58:

janih wrote on 2022-03-25, 06:56:

Does the Goldfinch card provide any benefits over a wavetable card like Dreamblaster X2? If I already have a good SB16 or combatible card with wavetable header.

The use of soundfonts.

That is true of course. I thought you could load soundfonts into Dreamblaster but it uses its own soundbank format. Also SB16+Goldfinch combo probably won't have any of those (hanging note etc) midi bugs that occur with SB16 cards.

janih wrote on 2022-03-31, 06:28:

furan wrote on 2022-03-30, 21:58:

janih wrote on 2022-03-25, 06:56:

Does the Goldfinch card provide any benefits over a wavetable card like Dreamblaster X2? If I already have a good SB16 or combatible card with wavetable header.

The use of soundfonts.

That is true of course. I thought you could load soundfonts into Dreamblaster but it uses its own soundbank format. Also SB16+Goldfinch combo probably won't have any of those (hanging note etc) midi bugs that occur with SB16 cards.

While that's true, keep in mind that SB16+Goldfinch (which is technically very similar to an AWE32) provides no hardware MPU401 support for the AWE-type wave-table synthesizer. There is AWEUTIL, which is a hardware-assisted MPU401 emulator that works with real-mode software only. There is DOS32AWE, a replacement for DOS4G(W), which acts as a bridge between DOS4G software in protected mode and AWEUTIL, and there is MPU401 emulation in Windows 95 in its DOS box. Furthermore, a lot of newer games have native support for the AWE32, but they use the built-in mapping for the ROM soundfont of the AWE32/Goldfinch, so you can't use soundfonts with the native AWE32 support. AWEUTIL on the other hand does support MPU401 emulation supports .SBK-format soundfonts, making DOS32AWE interesting even for games with native AWE32 support.

A dreamblaster on a standard sound card provides MPU401 hardware compatibility (UART mode only, as always), without the need of any drivers in DOS (except for possibly sound card intialization).

EDIT: Pointed out clearly that the remark about missing hardware MPU support on the SB16+Goldfinch combo was meant to be specifically about using MPU401 to address the Goldfinch music synthesizer, contrasting it to a dreamblaster that can receive data through the SB16 MPU port. Sorry for any confusion.

mkarcher wrote on 2022-03-31, 08:53:

While that's true, keep in mind that SB16+Goldfinch (which is technically very similar to an AWE32) provides no hardware MPU401 support.

What about the MPU401 on the SB16?

badmojo wrote on 2022-03-31, 11:23:

mkarcher wrote on 2022-03-31, 08:53:

While that's true, keep in mind that SB16+Goldfinch (which is technically very similar to an AWE32) provides no hardware MPU401 support.

What about the MPU401 on the SB16?

The SB16 tries to implement UART mode of the MPU401 interface in hardware. Like most other sound cards, it does not support MPU401 "intelligent mode". MIDI data passed through the MPU401 emulation is sent to the waveblaster header (e.g. a Dreamblaster module) and to the MIDI pins at the game port. MIDI data passed through the MPU401 interface is not parsed and forwarded to FM synthesis, though.

The SB16 MPU401 implementation is less than perfect: In certain circumstances it is so slow that games time out trying to access it, and in one specific case, it mangles data by transmitting a single byte twice. This is the primary cause of the "hanging note bug".

mkarcher wrote on 2022-03-31, 12:42:

The SB16 MPU401 implementation is less than perfect: In certain circumstances it is so slow that games time out trying to access it, and in one specific case, it mangles data by transmitting a single byte twice. This is the primary cause of the "hanging note bug".

That bug depends of the revision of SB16 and AWE cards. The ones having DSP < 4.11 and 4.16 (mostly AWE64 cards) aren't prone to this bug and the revisions with the CT1747 chipset such as the CT2230 doesn't have at least the hanging note type 1 (illegitimate hanging notes) regardless of the DSP version.

CT1920 has its own special version of AWEUTIL that allows MPU401 emulation without the NMI mechanism that real AWE32/64 cards use. I don't know any further details though.

Tiido wrote on 2022-03-31, 14:43:

CT1920 has its own special version of AWEUTIL that allows MPU401 emulation without the NMI mechanism that real AWE32/64 cards use. I don't know any further details though.

Big if true

Here are the files that CT1920 CD installs : http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/PCschit/CT1920.zip
There's AWEUTIL.EXE instead of normal AWEUTIL.COM, with much bigger size. I imagine it has some protected mode component to trap IO writes and whatnot.

mkarcher wrote on 2022-03-31, 08:53:

While that's true, keep in mind that SB16+Goldfinch (which is technically very similar to an AWE32) provides no hardware MPU401 […]
Show full quote

janih wrote on 2022-03-31, 06:28:

furan wrote on 2022-03-30, 21:58:

The use of soundfonts.

That is true of course. I thought you could load soundfonts into Dreamblaster but it uses its own soundbank format. Also SB16+Goldfinch combo probably won't have any of those (hanging note etc) midi bugs that occur with SB16 cards.

While that's true, keep in mind that SB16+Goldfinch (which is technically very similar to an AWE32) provides no hardware MPU401 support for the AWE-type wave-table synthesizer. There is AWEUTIL, which is a hardware-assisted MPU401 emulator that works with real-mode software only. There is DOS32AWE, a replacement for DOS4G(W), which acts as a bridge between DOS4G software in protected mode and AWEUTIL, and there is MPU401 emulation in Windows 95 in its DOS box. Furthermore, a lot of newer games have native support for the AWE32, but they use the built-in mapping for the ROM soundfont of the AWE32/Goldfinch, so you can't use soundfonts with the native AWE32 support. AWEUTIL on the other hand does support MPU401 emulation supports .SBK-format soundfonts, making DOS32AWE interesting even for games with native AWE32 support.

A dreamblaster on a standard sound card provides MPU401 hardware compatibility (UART mode only, as always), without the need of any drivers in DOS (except for possibly sound card intialization).

EDIT: Pointed out clearly that the remark about missing hardware MPU support on the SB16+Goldfinch combo was meant to be specifically about using MPU401 to address the Goldfinch music synthesizer, contrasting it to a dreamblaster that can receive data through the SB16 MPU port. Sorry for any confusion.

Thank you for the explanation. Someone is selling a bunch of NOS Goldfinch CT1920 cards on ebay and I needed some convincing that I don't need more retro sound cards 😀

Tiido wrote on 2022-03-31, 16:15:

Here are the files that CT1920 CD installs : http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/PCschit/CT1920.zip
There's AWEUTIL.EXE instead of normal AWEUTIL.COM, with much bigger size. I imagine it has some protected mode component to trap IO writes and whatnot.

Basic inspection shows: That's true. This AWEUTIL seems to rely on processor-based port-trapping instead of NMI feedback. Probably, the goldfinch doesn't support NMI feedback at all. Actually, that makes a lot of sense, because contrary to the SB AWE32 which allocates ports for an MPU401 interface, the goldfinch only decodes the EMU8K ports.

Relying on VM86 port trapping doesn't mean this AWEUTIL works fine with protected mode games, though. It's more like the opposite: As long as no central DPMI server is present, protected mode games switch between EMM386 based real mode emulation and their own protected mode kernel which is unrelated to EMM386. So there is not EMM386-based port trapping in protected mode at all. AFAIK this matches the MEGA-EM specification: No protected mode support. The only generic way to get port trapping into a protected mode application is to provide an external protected mode kernel that will be used instead of the protected mode kernel bundled with the game. Nearly all games support interacting with external protected mode kernels using the DPMI specification. This is necessary to work inside the Windows DOS box, because you can't run a second protected mode kernel while Windows (no matter whether 3.1 or newer) is running.

So in fact there are two approaches to get port trapping (or other low-level extensions) into a protected mode game: Provide DPMI (that's what Windows 95 does to provide Soundblaster and MPU401 emulation in the DOS box), or replace the game-bundled protected mode kernel with a custom one (that's the approach of DOS32AWE).