VOGONS


First post, by kobalt

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Hi,

Long time reader of these forums, and also first post.

After having being Thinkpad collector for years, I recently started building a DOS / Win9x retro station, using spare parts i've been collecting through years. Despite I am very happy with old Thinkpads, they lack the ability to plug a Gameport controller, and I can't find a PCMCIA / Pc card offering this feature. That's why I'm now moving to a desktop solution.
Current set up uses a Pentium 3 866 on a Gigabyte mobo(GA-6VTXE), 512 mb ram, and a Asus Radeon 9250 GPU. OS is Win98 SE.

This mobo has an ISA port, so i'm using an old Addonics A151-a00 ISA sound card I got in my boxes. It sports a YMF719 sound chip.
Have installed Yamaha drivers (to get more options than with Win98 embedded drivers), set up the card to "Hifi" "Excellent quality" and a mpu-401 emulation for dos.
Sound is working well in the few games I've tested so far, but only in mono. Can't get stereo working.
Playing .wav files with media player gives the same result : nice sound, but mono only.

The output was very loud, i read somewhere to add a jumper in JP1 to disable the amp, it works nicely and indeed reduces the insane output level without this jumper.

I can't find info the output of this sound card ? Is there any way to enable stereo sound ?

Also, since I'm relatively new to this, i've read you can some sort of module to enhance MIDI sound bank. Could you please provide more infos about this ?

I've been watching a lot of videos from "PhilsComputerLab" (thx for you very nice work by the way), and he often talks a lot about a dreamblaster wave table module. Is it this kind of module I should be looking for ?

Thx

Reply 1 of 8, by James-F

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Welcome.

The 719 is indeed stereo, but sometimes the 3D effect makes it sound like mono.
Disable the 3D effect by turning the slider down to zero and mute the channel in the Win98 mixer.

You can buy a new wavetable MIDI module from: http://www.serdashop.com/
Dreamblaster S1 or Dreamblaster X2.


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Reply 2 of 8, by kobalt

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Hi James-F

3D is disabled in opl3-sax conf panel, and "3D LARGE" slider in Windows mixer is set to 0.
Still, I can't get stereo sound. Tested with both headphones and Speakers. Clear and bright sound, but mono :<

Reply 3 of 8, by boxpressed

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Are you able to test with the setup programs of games such as Descent or Duke3D (that test the left, center, and right channels)?

Reply 4 of 8, by James-F

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There are two jumper on the board side by side to switch between amplified output and line-out, are you sure you didn't jumper the two outputs together?


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Reply 5 of 8, by kobalt

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I just switched the 2 jumpers in the "down" position, and it now works well !

This sound card comes from an old PC my father had years ago, for some reason it looks like he switched to "line output".

For reference, this the working jumper position I use to get a proper stereo sound :

mini_762849DCP6841.jpg

Thx for the help !

Reply 7 of 8, by kobalt

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Tried again "up" position, checked the jumper, not rusty or broken. This position disable the amp for sure, and gives a very low line-out output level.

Now I'm going to read the thread you mentioned, thx for the link 😉

Reply 8 of 8, by James-F

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Actually, the output level of the line-out settings is the correct setting to use and will give similar output like all modern Realtek chips.
The speaker-out on the other hand is meant to be used with passive computer speakers that were made in the 90s, I am 100% sure you don't have a pair of these or know how they even look like. 😀
Read: Sound Card Line Out and Speaker Out


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