danieljm wrote on 2023-02-06, 05:19:
AOpen AW744 - My first PCI OPL3 card. Should be fun to tinker with. I might do the mod to add the SB-Link connector to it just for the fun of it. 😀
Just so you know, there are various compatibility and driver quirks with these PCI cards, in general, and among chipsets. I have a few of these Yamaha XG PCI cards, and there are even some compatibility variations between them, even with the same chip.
For example, some cards or cards combined we th some systems will blue screen with VxD drivers. AOpen, I believe, provided their own driver packages. So if you find that you're having any issues, using their drivers may fix it for you.
Some heavily customized XG implementations won't work at all with anything other than the manufacturer supplied drivers, such as on some laptops.
I also experienced some kind of filesystem corruption with the DOS utility. I did not investigate this thoroughly, but it happened at least twice, is it wasn't a fluke. It might have been a result of using FAT32 or something that was triggered by Windows 3.1; I'm not exactly sure. Just beware, if you use the DOS tool on a system with data that you care about.
I found this card is most stable in Windows 9x with the WDM drivers. However, you will lose Yamaha OPL support in Windows. In this case, pair it with a second card for OPL and use the Yamaha for Windows sound acceleration, Roland MIDI emulation, and XG synthesis.
It's really a great card, if you can get it working.