First post, by LSS10999
I've been struggling to get all functionalities of my YMF718-based sound card work as intended on this board.
Firstly, I configured the board's LPC controller to enable 200-2FF, 300-33F/380-3BF, 500-5FF, A00-AFF ranges.
The 3B0 range was said to be used for monochrome resolutions but so far I haven't noticed any apparent breakage with this option. At least this config frees one of the four address ranges so I could assign one for allowing port 530 (WSS) to be accessible. Even so, setting up the card on such a board always needs some nonstandard values that YMF71x somehow permits:
- YMF718 defaults to 370h for its control registers, which is not accessible with the aforementioned config. SETYMF can move it to A28h, and when using UNISOUND I need to add RA28 into the BLASTER environment variable.
- When using default I/O ranges (200-2FF, 300-373, 380-39F, A00-AFF), WSS can be set to A20h (through SETYMF, or put WA20 in BLASTER with UNISOUND) and still work, but it's mostly useless outside as most WSS-supported software/drivers expect hardcoded ranges (530, 604, E80, F40) and do not permit custom values. In some cases it may be possible to patch the programs or drivers in question to allow such I/O ranges.
Sound Blaster Pro, FM and MIDI work fine in DOS. However, I'm noticing some very odd behaviors when it comes to WSS.
When testing with SETYMF, the sound appeared to be fine at first, but subsequent tests would often result in a high-pitched screech despite test results appear fine (such as IRQs fired). WSS doesn't appear to work in other places. I tried Tyrian 2000 as well as the DIGPAK demo, and neither worked when setting sound output to WSS.
I also tried using the card in Windows NT 3.51 with the help of GRUB4DOS (first set up the LPC in DOS then use GRUB4DOS to boot its NTLDR), and I'm getting mixed results with Windows' Sound Blaster drivers and Yamaha's OPL3-SAx ones.
- When using Microsoft's default Sound Blaster drivers, sound and FM work fine but MIDI does not work. I get no MIDI output and media player stops responding for about 2-3 minutes when I stop playback.
- When using Yamaha's OPL3-SAx NT driver, in some cases the driver fails to install complaining "the driver may be missing", which may mean I'm using a driver that's not really supporting the chip (YMF718). Eventually I managed to get a version of the driver installed. It actually uses WSS for digitized sound, but the card refuses to use Sound Blaster's IRQ (claiming it's already used) and instead moving WSS and MIDI to separate ones (as such it would technically be taking 3 instead of 2 IRQs).
After reboot, it appears the sound is not working correctly, though MIDI works fine. Whenever a sound plays (such as Windows startup sound), it would keep looping the starting part of it for like about 3-4 seconds. I haven't tried FM in this state as I intend to use MIDI. I'm not sure if dual DMA (namely using both DMA 1 and 3) is needed, but from what I tested, this doesn't make any difference. Also, whenever I try changing the settings of the sound card from "Drivers" there's a good chance for the driver to hardlock the system requiring a hard reset.
So in the end... this card can only be used as a normal Sound Blaster Pro with MIDI in DOS, and without MIDI in Windows... I never really used WSS before, so I'm not sure if the chip has a buggy implementation of WSS or I'm missing something when configuring it...