This is a nice card for General Midi DOS games!

Well, the program is unable to detect the onboard 2MB ROM, hence 0 samples in use. The card doesn't need any Simm module to run, it works well just with the onboard ROM.
You might try another driver version. Usually the driver of the Tropez card works well with the Maui. I had the best experience with the OSWF.MOT firmware. Download it and try again!

If I put some ram on the card (2 x 1mb) I get timeout errors everytime.
I guess theres hardware damage to the card, ROM or onboard RAM. 😢

The good thing first: The sample ROM now gets detected! We get closer!

What are your system specs? Are there any other devices using similar addresses or interrupts? Remove any other sound related hardware first!

Follow these steps:
1. Make sure you make a clean boot without autoexec.bat and config.sys (Press F5 at startup). There is a chance that other programs are interfering.
2. Go to your directory and type SETUPSND OSMAUI.MOT and see if if fails again!
3. You can also try to clean the contacts of the card. Try again with No1!
4. Try the other firmware mentioned in my previous post. The latest OSWF.MOT is a 1.15 firmware. Download the firmware from the net and put it into your maui directory.
5. Type SETUPSND OSWF.MOT and see if it works now!

Good luck!

P.S: Would be a shame if this nice card is defective 🙁

I will try with the clean dos boot and with the oswf.mot, there's no visible damage to the card and everything is clean.
If the problem is in the onboard ram or dead caps I can repair.
I have hope 😊

I am sorry to get into your thread, but speaking of TB Maui and Tropez - could anybody tell me how do I load custom sounfonts to card memory in pure DOS?

And it works! 🤣
Bad solders in the ROM chip, a quick reflow of the solders and the card now configures correctly and plays 100%.

Using the OSWF.MOT firmware 1.15

Well it sounds great, very happy 😀

Thanks for the guidence with the software!

tikoellner wrote:

I am sorry to get into your thread, but speaking of TB Maui and Tropez - could anybody tell me how do I load custom sounfonts to card memory in pure DOS?

That's my next step, get some extra ram, and use the 3rd party software for dos setupmaui, but need to read further to figure out how to use it. Will post here if I get it to work.

I actually use Tropez (classic), but can you tell me what 3rd party soft you refer to and where do I get it? I'm happy for you that you fixed your card!

From the Vogons driver library, it's not setupmaui, but setmaui

https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … 619&menustate=0

Inside the maui.zip on the Drivers folder there's a Setmaui.zip.

One of the suposed features of the program is the hability to download WaveFront bank to the Maui, but as I say, I need to see how it works or "if" it works.

I'm happy that your card works now. Maybe it was a cold solder joint. Seems to happen even on the high quality Turtle Beach boards.

tikoellner, AFAIK there is no possibility to use samples in the RAM within plain DOS.
It's a different story in Windows, of course. Read this thread: Turtle Beach Soundfonts ??? / WEMP player

Thank you, it seems you're right. I really hoped there is a single card - apart from GUS - where you can load patches in DOS.

BTW - I really like the TB Tropez card, but I find it's TSR to be really troublesome. If I restart my PC without previously turning it off, it always fails to load (says there is IRQ conflict).

I am also still dissapointed with the quality of the card itself in some rspects. I have version 1.8 of Tropez and it still uses this shabby little wire soldered to one of the caps and drilled through the PCB to correct some design errors. There are also signs of further corrections, like there are two pins on the midi oputput socket soldered together in a messy way. Odd simm slot is the other thing.

It CAN load patches in dos, I've managed to load a patch with MT-32 sounds and it plays very nicelly in games that support MT-32 but don't patch them (use the standard MT-32 instruments), tested Monkey Island 1 ,Risky Woods and 4d sports driving in MT-32 mode and sounds very much like the MT-32 😁 .

Again, games that alter the MT-32 and use extra patch/banks won't play correctly with this (Monkey Islands 2 does this, and many more), just games that use the standard MT-32 instruments.

I guess that with enough ram in the TB Maui other WFB files can be loaded (needs testing)

Just set the card normaly with "setupsnd wfos2001.mot" and then "setwf mt32.wfb".

I've attached the files needed.

The MT32.WFB is not really a sound bank. It is a rearrangement for the existent instruments to meet the MT32 compatibility, equivalent to the MT32.SBK to load with the AWEUTIL on the AWE sound cards. So the capability of loading the MT32.WFB doesn't imply one can load any other WFB-banks, especially those including real instrument samples.

As there are more and more Turtle Beach Maui users here on vogons, we should really find out IF there is a possibility to load real patches in DOS. That would enable fantastic possibilities for the use in General Midi compliant games. It would open the door to use virtually ANY existing sound bank up to 8.25MB of size to be played with the Maui as there are many sound bank conversion utilities out there.

I used to have a Turtle Beach Rio which uses the same ICSWavfront chip and I seem to recall there being a dos utility that allowed one to load patches. It's been so long that I could be mistaken though. I think it was called the wavefront utility or perhaps wfutil.exe for the file name. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

The tool to upload soundsets and patches is mentioned and linked two posts above. It is called SETWF and is well documented. Regarding the included readme file the card should be able to load full banks in pure DOS. This tool is for the MAUI, Tropez and Tropez+ only, as the RIO daughterboard works with a different uploading mechanism.

The 68EC000 would certainly be brawny enough to run intelligent mode MIDI. Looking at OSMAUI.MOT, it seems to be a full m68k firmware image for the uC. Does anyone have experience with reverse engineering 68k machine code to see if we can patch in intelligent mode to this board?

I've naively attempted to convert Deemster's SC55 SF2 bank to WFB format using AWave, but I run into an upper limit on instruments. Seems there might be some limits to the soundbank format.

That's good thinking! It would be so cool to have intelligent mode MPU as an addition to the card!

Regarding the soundbanks:
I would love to use AWave Studio, but I don't have the reg key so I can't convert soundbanks with the free version. I am so curious if it is possible. Just imagine the possibilities.. Maybe it would be the best idea to use a soundfont that has only the GM patch set with the default instruments to see if it works.

Sorry for going a bit off-topic, but could anybody tell me how long the Turtle Beach Maui card is in MM?

The length of the card from the edge of the PCB to the edge of the slot bracket measures 23,5cm or 235mm.