Had a bit of insomnia last night.........did a lot of sound debugging on my 486......
Quick short rundown - 486 DX2/66, 64MB RAM, 8GB HDD w/DDO running MS-DOS 6.22/WFWG 3.11 with a multi-boot config...in an XT Clone chassis.Soundcard is a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 (CT-1600, I'll be mentioning it a LOT here), and video is an S3 805 1MB VLB SVGA.
- Played some Monkey Island 2 for awhile, wanted to rebuild some of my lost savegames from the old 638MB HDD I had in there a few years ago (I have an 8GB in there now, and am planning to put a 20, 40, or 80GB in there eventually that I can multiboot to win/DOS, Win95/98, and Win2Kpro, but that's far off). Got to the part where Guybrush watches his parents sing and dance the bone song under the tree.
- Figured out why Monkey Island was sounding like someone was taking a heat gun to my sound card whilst playing, seems the "auto-detect" for which sound device you have in the 1st Edition VGA version of TSoMI. Wrote a batch file (MONKEY.BAT) to fix it so as to batch in the "a" command line parameter for "adlib" sound, that fixes the problem. Not sure what's going on with the SoundBlaster driver on this version of TSoMI but it's the same thing that happens with Ultima VI: THe False Prophet.
Now for some Ultima sound tweakage.....
- Speaking of, changed Ultima VI: The False Prophet over to Creative Music System and got the same result as TSoMI, so I switched that to adlib, fixed that issue.
- Got Ultima 7, Serpent's Isle, 8, and the Worlds of Ultima Titles going. All of those work fine with the SB Pro 2 setup as a SB Pro. I had U7 and Serpent on Adlib so no SFX, switched em' over to SoundBlaster Pro mode, now I get the sound effect.
- Akalabeth (Ultima Collection) was a different case, seems to auto-detect in setup.exe as a SoundBlaster 2.0 on IRQ5, address 220, DMA1, when it's IRQ7. Switched that over to SoundBlaster Pro on A=220, I=7, D=1, now I had digital sound, but no Midi, swapped the OPL3 setting over to SoundBlaster Pro and I got the Claire DeLune going in setup.....finally, I can play this with sound.
- For once I got Car & Driver working with the radio station, not sure if it's a Duplex problem or not with my old cards (Which is funny because they were newer, and a few plug N' play) but it seems I CAN get the radio stations working in the game using the SB Pro 2. I quite like the top station in the list, very fitting music when flying around the 3 stages of Philly in a Mercedes IMSA racer circa 1990 in a nice blocky 320X200 @256 colors.
Also spent some time trying out a few MiDi Sequencers. My MiDi setup involves running a Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang Pro guitar controller (it's actually a MIDI controller) into the SoundBlaster Pro 2 using a special adapter from the Creative SoundBlaster MIDI kit I have from like 1987 or so (came with Voyetra Sequencer Pro, which I also use).
Works okay in presto arranger but the Fender's string triggers are a tad....well....sensitive, might need to do some tweakage to get them to not be triggering on their own so much (bending the rods or using foam as some kind of stabilizer). This causes a lot of missed notes not heard during recording.
Got a GPF while running some "Pro" program I can't remember the name off the top of my head under Windows For Workgroups, probably related to the above MIDI controller triggering issue.
Cant get the Mustang going under Sequencer Pro in DOS, but I think more of that is just me not remembering the Hotkeys to enable it more than anything.
Either way, kind of cool to play arpeggiated patterns using the SoundBlaster hardware with an interface I'm familiar with.