VOGONS


First post, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I am working on a new machine that will be my primary retro box and have been working on it for months as time permits. Been through many motherboards, processors, sound and video. I am narrowing in and noticed something really odd and was wondering if anyone else has experienced anything similar.

Sound card: AOpen AW744L II sound card with SB-Link/PC-PCI header added and using a cable to connect to motherboard. IRQ and DMA set to use link. Official Yamaha drivers 4.07.1040 for Windows and 3.16 for DOS from Yamaha's website http://device.yamaha.com/en/lsi/download/

With a Pentium III 850 running at full speed and no slowdown tools at all or any cache settings disabled, Dune II speech and sound works flawlessly in Windows and in pure DOS. What the heck? Is it possible this combination is more compatible than ISA? I then used a slow down utility (Throttle) to get the scrolling speeds to the right speed.

This is looking really good. Can someone recommend another sound related speed sensitive game to test?

Perhaps James-F can look at this card and get the correct capacitor values for SB filtering.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 1 of 18, by Neco

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Isn't there some Indiana Jones game that is game animation/speech timing sensitive? (check Phils's review of this card)

Also hate to be a dunce but can someone explain this SB Link thing to me...🤣

Reply 2 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

SB-Link allows the card to access DMA and IRQ in hardware as if the PCI sound card has access to the ISA bus. More or less.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 4 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

6-pin connector on card and motherboard populated with 5-pins, wired straight through. Meaning that pin-1 on first connector goes to pin-1 on second connector and so forth. Most 440BX motherboards have them or the spot where they would go. Some early PCI sound cards had them or the spot where they would go.

Here is the card I modded about a year ago.

AW744L II - YMF744 - AOpen Cobra Sound Card - Install SB-Link Header

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 6 of 18, by cyclone3d

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

The Yamaha YMF7xx cards are not speed sensitive.

Pretty sure no PCI sound cards are going to have speed sensitive sound issues.. as in the CPU can't be too fast.

However, if you have a game such as Wing Commander, the music for the Origin loading screen will play too fast, but that is because the game itself is speed sensitive.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 7 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Yes, you can use software but hardware doesn't require software, ie a TSR loaded. It's just better. If you can only use software, use it. If your motherboard has a SB-Link, I'd rather use that.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 8 of 18, by cyclone3d

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
Neco wrote:

Yeah I was kind of wondering about that when I bought myself one of these.. But I thought you could address it that stuff via software or w/e so wouldn't the SB-link be redundant ?

DDMA is going to be almost as compatible as having SB-Link, but ISA DMA via SB-Link is going to give the same compatibility as a real ISA card. (nothing loaded in RAM, just initialized with setupds which you have to use even with SB-Link).

DSDMA (TSR) requires EMM386 or similar so is going to have compatibility issues with the few games that will only run in real mode.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 10 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Well pulled out the YMF744 datasheet and discovered, or rediscovered because I probably forgot, that SB Pro filtering does not exist like it does with YMF719. The card sounds good and I am ok with that.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 11 of 18, by j^aws

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Neco wrote:

Isn't there some Indiana Jones game that is game animation/speech timing sensitive? (check Phils's review of this card)

Yes, these games have issues due to being speed-sensitive, and the fix is keeping CPU cache enabled and still slowing down the CPU to an appropriate speed. I did some tests years ago with VIA C3 CPUs and SB-Link:

"Day of the Tentacle runs fine. This game behaves like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - with speech, they both need caches enabled on the VIA CPU, otherwise, they eventually crash after running for a few minutes. Presumably, some buffering is needed to enable the speech to work correctly. "

Re: Yamaha PCI YMF-724 DOS Compatibility Thread

Since SB-Link is usually available on Slot 1 and Socket 370 boards or newer, most people don't use an appropriate CPU capable of such slowdown techniques due to usually using PII and PIII CPUs.

Reply 12 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Heya J^aws, long time no see. I've been away......

I think you misunderstood me.

Pentium III 850, full speed. ie 300fps Quake 1 OpenGL
YMF744 PCI, S-IRQ and PC/PCI

No issues with voice or sound. I am stunned. I am going to try a few other games soon. I was expecting voice not to work until I slowed it down but it worked in Windows and pure DOS.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 13 of 18, by j^aws

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

^^ Yeah, long time; don't post as often. Try the aforementioned Lucasarts games - the speech enabled editions. They should fail eventually when using fast CPUs. They did when I used VIA C3 at full speed using SB-LINK with S-IRQ and PC/PCI as well.

Reply 14 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Are we talking minutes or hours to fail?

I'll run a test tomorrow.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 15 of 18, by j^aws

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
squareguy wrote:

Are we talking minutes or hours to fail?

I'll run a test tomorrow.

It's not hours, but after playing for a couple of levels or so. Zone 66 is another that needs slowing down amongst various demoscene productions - most are listed in my link posted earlier.

Reply 16 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

ok, we are not living in an alternate universe after all thank goodness.....

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis had music but no sound or speech until I slowed it down with Throttle. No caches were disabled (or harmed) in the making of this test.

I think this Pentium III 850 is gonna work out great!

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 17 of 18, by j^aws

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

^^ Good choice of OPL3 sound card. If you're into demoscene productions then you can try some. This card worked with everything I threw at it with appropriate slowdown. Only one game failed for me besides the ones requiring 2/3bit ADPCM (Duke Nukem 2), which was Quarantine. I have some tests for it, but haven't tried them yet.

Reply 18 of 18, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Awesome. Thanks j^aws

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE