pentiumspeed wrote:

I saw one article suggests to feed PCM to one card, and MIDI to 2nd card and mix into one? This is from this link: […]
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I saw one article suggests to feed PCM to one card, and MIDI to 2nd card and mix into one? This is from this link:

https://flaterco.com/kb/audio/ISA/index.html

How is this done to mix this two outputs into sound system from two cards?

Also I'm interested about this keropi's Orpheus sound card;
Pure DOS gaming system with 100% digital audio output

Cheers, pentiumspeed

As long as the sound cards do not share resources it's as simple as installing the two of them seperately. Either through jumpers or initialization switches set them like this:

Card 1: A220 I7 D1 (H5) E300
Card 2: A200 I9 D3 (H7) E330

When configuring games set them to IRQ7 DMA1 High DMA 5 and MIDI Port 330, and digital sound will come out of Card 1 while MIDI comes out of Card 2.

It probably helps if at least one of them is a non-PnP card, or if they are not initialized with the same program/TSR, though I do not have experience with this kind of configuration and can only guess it would be a problem (Not sure if you can specify which of two different SB cards you want to initialize with DIAGNOSE.EXE through command line switches, for example) but someone who tried this will probably teach me better soon.

Do note that not all bugs of SB cards have to do with playing PCM and MIDI together, they still have MIDI bugs without PCM audio in many cases so I would pick a non-SB Card 2 for MIDI playback regardless (a cheap ESS/Opti/Crystal/ALS card would do nicely. Even CS4235, a chip reviled for its broken FM synthesis would do the job here, and people will probably pay you money to get them off their hands 😉 )

You avoid the note bug by using a sound card that does not have the note bug. It's not like your choices are limited.

pentiumspeed wrote:

https://flaterco.com/kb/audio/ISA/index.html

Hey, this is a nice article! It's one of the few resources that correctly gets DOS startup configuration for PnP Creative cards:

REM CTCM will set BLASTER based on CFG. REM DIAGNOSE and CTCU are unnecessary once configuration is stable. REM CTCU search-and- […]
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REM CTCM will set BLASTER based on CFG.
REM DIAGNOSE and CTCU are unnecessary once configuration is stable.
REM CTCU search-and-replaces *ALL* BLASTER settings in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\LOCAL\SNDCARDS\SB
SET CTCM=C:\CTCM
SET SOUND=C:\LOCAL\SNDCARDS\SB
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
C:\CTCM\CTCM.EXE
REM C:\LOCAL\SNDCARDS\SB\DIAGNOSE /S
C:\LOCAL\SNDCARDS\SB\AWEUTIL /S
C:\LOCAL\SNDCARDS\SB\MIXERSET /P /Q
REM C:\CTCM\CTCU /S

There is a small confusion in the section talking about using AWE64 from DOS:

DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D can play music either in Sound Blaster mode or in General MIDI mode. The former is to be avoided because AWE64s have only Creative's lousy clone of the OPL3. The latter gets you the ROM sound font, which is hardly stellar as sound fonts go.

In DOS, you need to select "AWE32" to play AWE music. 'General MIDI' in DOS games will not work without AWEUTIL run in emulation mode (/EM:GM), which, as he mentions, is not actually compatible with protected DOS games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D (it actually may work sometimes, if I recall, but is buggy and unreliable).