Well, that was more of a "would be nice" thing.

On my original Compaq, I had video in jacks that took me forever to figure out how to use. Once I did, I used those to play my NES fullscreen on the monitor when my TV died for a few months until I got a new one.

I do still want to be able to play fullscreen console games on the monitor, but I can do the VGA capture thing to another machine no problem. Was just curious about how feasible it would have been.

Pictures to come of the build.

For now, I had to come on and bitch a bit. I got everything installed, windows 98, all drivers, etc. Went into Duke3d cause it has pretty forgiving sound setup. All sounded wonderful. The daughtercard was amazing.

Then I figured I'd try TIE Fighter cd-rom because it still had the gorgeous midi music. I got about 3 seconds of music in the setup test area and then nothing. The onboard wavetable on the Vortex card works just fine, but has some weird font choices when playing music in the game, but when I switch over to the mpu-401 for the daughtercard...nothing. DOS mode...nothing. Even slapped it onto the SB16...nothing. I think it's dead. Pisses me off so bad.

Am I doing something wrong, or did the card die 2 minutes into using it?

Use a DOS Sound/Midi player for testing the hardware since playback is for that specific application a main feature and is usually much better tested than a playback engine of a game with its quirks.
For Midi try GSPlay.

@luckybob
Heeey I have the same cooler on my K6/3+ rig 😁

senrew wrote:

After pouring through the pile of games on my list, I think the most demanding game I'd want to play is Klingon Honor Guard. Assuming I go with a K6-2/3, will I be able to go dual V2s in SLI and get any kind of decent performance with this game? How would this handle Unreal engine stuff?

3dfx + K6/2/3 has always been a great combo. Never fear, Unreal engine will sing like a bird 😊

senrew wrote:

Well, that was more of a "would be nice" thing.

On my original Compaq, I had video in jacks that took me forever to figure out how to use. Once I did, I used those to play my NES fullscreen on the monitor when my TV died for a few months until I got a new one.

I do still want to be able to play fullscreen console games on the monitor, but I can do the VGA capture thing to another machine no problem. Was just curious about how feasible it would have been.

Using one monitor to play the NES/console games should be good even with period capture devices. Though beware that some cards and software can introduce a delay on video signal to the monitor. This can be very annoying in for example 2D sidescrollers and racing games which require high precision.

To entirely avoid going through the PC, but still using the same monitor having a device like this can be a solution. Connect the VGA cable to a VGA switch and then you can just switch between console and computer and get the image directly.

Am I doing something wrong, or did the card die 2 minutes into using it?

Keep testing it as Elianda suggested. I once had a Voodoo2 card that had been laying unsused for 10 years. I plugged it in, had it working in Quake2 for roughly 5 minutes before the colors went completely off the chart and the game crashed. After that whatever game or thing I tried to test with it gave the same result immediately. Switched to another Voodoo2 card I knew was working and everything was as normal (just so I knew it wasn't my system or drivers). Card was in practice dead 🙁 So yes, it is possible that the daughtercard did die after 2 minutes, unfortunately 🙁

Well, downloaded GSPlay. Set the aureal control panel to use the MPU-401. Set GSPlay to play through mpu401. Nothing. Switched the midi setting in the control panel to use the built in wavetable on the vortex card, started playing right away.

Same thing when setting it to play through waveblaster on the sb16. The program is playing, but nothing is coming out of the speakers unless I switch back over to the built in wavetable thing.

BTW...posted this from the p200 with IE5...damn site is faster on here than it is with my modern laptop with Chrome!

1. you are sure mixer setting routes playback from wavetable to line out?
2. if sound is distorted you are sure that there is no signal going to the line in of the db60xg?
3. port setting in ini is right and midi initialisation setting is ok? (I think it was M or N for SCB55, which should work)

Is this tested from plain DOS or Windows DOS window?

Just as hint, you can enter multiple midi interfaces in GSPlay and switch with F1 F2 and so on while playing a song.

I'm not sure how to check the mixer settings under dos, but as far as I can tell in windows, it's all setup (I think).

Tried gsplay both in dos windows and pure dos. Under windows, setting the midi to the mpu-401 in the multimedia control panel, I get nothing when playing a midi file in media player, but when I switch it back over to the aureal wavetable, it plays just fine. Same with the dos window setting in the aureal control panel. Setting it to mpu I get nothing when running the music test in duke 3d setup in a window, but switching it to the wavetable I get music.

Under dos, I get nothing either way from gsplay, either mpu or wavetable.

Well. Some progress.

If I change the AU30DOS.INI file to show MPU401External=1 instead of 0, then reboot in MS-DOS mode with the AU30DOS.COM line in my dosstart.bat, I can get midi music in GSPLAY that sounds pretty goddamn good.

However, when I return to windows, or when I boot into window from being off, the line in the INI file is back to 0 for the external MPU.

No matter what I try in windows, I can't get MIDI out of anything but the aureal built in wavetable, which sucks compared to the daughtercard from what I've been able to hear so far.

Growing up, I just heard whatever shitty fm was built into whatever machines I happened to be using. Now that I KNOW I can hear my games way better, it's almost an obsession to get this working.

Also, I can't get any programs to actually start once I reboot into ms dos mode from the win98 desktop. They all open just fine in dos windows from there, but under real dos, they just hang when starting. This is getting a bit ridiculous..

AHA!

After finding a few FAQs, it seems on the version of the vortex driver that came on the install cd for this card, the mixer for the daughtercard is VIDEO in windows. I unmuted that, and BAM, Midi audio.

Still having trouble getting shit to run in dos mode...but at least I can hear the midi in windows now.

senrew wrote:

AHA!

After finding a few FAQs, it seems on the version of the vortex driver that came on the install cd for this card, the mixer for the daughtercard is VIDEO in windows. I unmuted that, and BAM, Midi audio.

Still having trouble getting shit to run in dos mode...but at least I can hear the midi in windows now.

Never had issues with the Mixer settings on the daughtercard, but good you figured it out. I'll check if my mixer setting is called Video too, but I don't recall that tbh. Though it is strange then when you switched to the SB16 card that the problems still persisted.

Trouble getting all programs/games to run in real dos mode? That just recently started to happen? If you press F8 during bootup and select "command line only" selection in the Windows startup menu, does everything crash then too? Or is it only when rebooting from Windows into DOS?

Not sure, still testing out dos modes between a boot disk, command prompt only, restarts into dos mode, etc.

When I call the aud30dos app to initialize the vortex card in dos from the autoexec.bat, I get a winbootdir not loaded type of error, but when I do a command prompt only clean boot, it loads it just fine, but without the external midi as I don't think the line to call the external mpu is set correctly on a clean boot without me changing it first.

So...how do I initialize the vortex with all settings from a boot disk? I pulled out the SB16 for the time being.

Have you tried looking at the DOS mixer settings with vortmix.exe? Line maybe have turned down to 1, happened to me. So to avoid it in the future for pure DOS I added an autoexec.bat line and had the mixer settings set manually everytime I boot.

What is this vortmix thing and where do I get it? I don't have that anywhere on my system or the install disc...

I thought it was official, but a Google search reveal it's from a hobbyist. Download here:
Re: How do I use an external wavetable within dos applications/games?