VOGONS

FM not working on CMI8738

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First post, by pixel_workbench

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So I have the complete opposite problem with this card as everyone else on this forum and random youtubers - I can get digital sound working in pure DOS and in a Win98 DOS session no problem, but the card refuses to play FM music no matter what.

I tried it on several systems - a 440bx board and a socket 370 board with a Via 686a south bridge. I tried various different VXD drivers - 1088, 1091b, 1096. I tried different versions of the Dos program that initializes the card from Autoexec.bat. In device manager I have the Audio Legacy Device that runs the card for DOS compatibility in Windows, and it has IO address range 0388-038F in use, besides 0220 and 0330, with DMA 1 and 5. I tried forcing the card to IRQ5, as well as letting it sit on IRQ9 by default. Still, whenever a DOS program is supposed to play FM music, there is no FM music at all.

How the heck is everyone else getting their "random cheap Chinese card" to play FM sound?

I have a photo of my card attached here, and my autoexec.bat.

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Reply 1 of 1, by bertrammatrix

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You can try setting the 388 address to something else if possible and then setting the game appropriately as well

You can also try and go to control panel-multimedia-midi, here you can usually set what windows does with midi output- usually there is midi out, wavetable (or software wt), and FM midi. If you select FM here any midi played by windows will come out as FM and I THINK that additionally if you do this, and select "general midi" and its address as usual in the game - it should come out as FM. Possibly this could be a workaround if it works.

In the least you can try and set it to FM here and play back some midi files and see if you get FM audio

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