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...🤣

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.

I guess what is confusing to me is the connection part... what is connecting to where on the motherboard and do you need specific boards to do this, etc..

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

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

Cool, thanks for the info.

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.

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.

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.

^^ 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.

Are we talking minutes or hours to fail?

I'll run a test tomorrow.

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.

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!

^^ 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.

Awesome. Thanks j^aws