First post, by rawonam
Hi!
I have Zenith Noteflex laptop, which has a WSS card.
Digital sound works fine in Windows, games that support WSS or as SB card with SB emulation. Not even sure if it is supported (wikipedia claims it is), but I can't get 16 bit sound, only 8 bit as the original Sound Blaster.
A bigger issue is that I can't get the FM to work, not even in Windows: it claims not to have any MIDI compatible device, although the driver loads and no errors are displayed.
WSS is claimed to be 100% Adlib compatible, but none of the Adlib apps can find it, neither as Adlib nor as SB FM.
As the page on Microsoft's site comparing versions is not available ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/121259 , maybe someone has this info? ), I was trying to get information elsewhere, for example trying to understand what Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Sound_System wrote:The WSS 1.0a drivers released in February 1993, introduced single-mode DMA, supports games in MS-DOS, supports Ad Lib and Sound Blaster emulation.
The WSS 2.0 drivers released in October 1993, supports OEM sound cards also (Media Vision, Creative Labs, ESS Technology), improved DOS driver, WSSXLAT.EXE, that provided Sound Blaster 16 compatibility for digital sampling. However, they did not provide support for FM or wavetable synthesis.
I'm a bit confused, so version 1.0a had Adlib compatibility, but version 2.0 does not provide support for FM? Should one downgrade the drivers to get Adlib sound?..
So, is there anyone who could answer to these questions:
- How to get MIDI sound/Adlib compatibility?
- Could it be that laptop version of WSS is a stripped down version that does not have a Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262-M) chip on it?
- How to get SB16 compatibility?
I'm actually planning to open the laptop and check if the chip is present there, if it is, there must be some way to get FM working.
Many thanks 😀