I fear I blew up my GUS and/or motherboard \ VOGONS

I fear I blew up my GUS and/or motherboard

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First post, by EZ

Posted on 2011-07-11, 20:49

EZ Offline

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I soldered myself an XM1541 cable and used it to transfer C64 files to disk with StarCommander. After a while I played BlackThorne, and the SFX were mostly screeching sounds. And I didn't have music on my sound blaster, and sounds were as well screeching in BlackThorne. I noticed that I had left my LPT port on the same IRQ as the UltraSound in the bios. I have flashed my bios to a newer version, installed another sound blaster, reinstalled windows. The screeches are gone now but I still don't have music during the intro scene of BlackThorne (strangely, ingame music works), and I don't have sound on my sound blaster other than voices. Perhaps it's just still some faulty IRQ or DMA setting (PNP stuff? it's a BX440 based mobo) but I got a bad feeling about it. 😒 (and ordered a ZoomFloppy)

Reply 1 of 5, by Norton Commander

Posted on 2011-07-12, 15:09

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I've used an XA1541 with Star Commander, never had a problem. It sounds like a config problem, your LPT and sound card shouldn't be on the same IRQ.
I generally like the sound card at IRQ 5 & LPT at IRQ 7. Some devices can share IRQs, some can't so it's best to assign separate ones whenever possible.

Reply 2 of 5, by EZ

Posted on 2011-07-12, 19:20

EZ Offline

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No it can't be a conflict, I tried multiple IRQ and DMA settings,
It seems to me the DMA has become flaky. Besides it was all suddenly wrong from one day to the other. About when I used my XM1541.

Reply 3 of 5, by sliderider

Posted on 2011-07-12, 20:14

sliderider Offline

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Have you read this?

"The XM1541 multitask cable is only a bit different from the XE1541 extended cable. It has two wires swapped at the Commodore end of the cable. This allows other transfer software to use interrupts rather than polling to do handshake with the Commodore drive under GNU/Linux. It's a serial cable, it's compatible with all Commodore machines and drives that have the usual serial bus port and it works on all parallel ports, including the ones integrated onto most Pentium and above motherboards (see the info page for exceptions!)."

You may have chosen the wrong version of this cable to use. If this version uses interrupts, then it may very well have come into conflict with the GUS. That's what it sounds like to me when you were getting the strange sounds through the GUS. You were probably hearing the data transfer taking place when the Commodore drive was accessed. Was there a particular reason you chose to make the XM version of this cable instead of the X, XA or XE versions?

Reply 4 of 5, by EZ

Posted on 2011-07-12, 22:32

EZ Offline

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No, I missed that 😖
I have used StarCommander in real DOS mode for transferring images to my commodore drive; which it actually successfully did. I think I could as well have opted for the XE version, or indeed perhaps better so, but that's hindsight now 😖 (besides, I've ordered a ZoomFloppy anyway). The reason I chose the XM cable was of course it's support for multitasking, in the case I wanted to transfer from/to the C64 from Linux.

Btw. Because I used real DOS mode, I naturally couldn't have played games alongside it.

Reply 5 of 5, by EZ

Posted on 2012-02-20, 23:44

EZ Offline

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Must have been my motherboard, I resurrected another motherboard from death and now both sound cards work nicely, with the very same settings 😀

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