Nobody so far tested P55 Express chipset particularly but because newest chipsets are working, its there big probability that Yamahas and Aureal would be working.

Thanks for this great guide!

Although I'm having trouble getting my 724 card working on an Asus P2B (440BX) board with the sblink cable.

Out of the 3 IRQ modes available,

• S-IRQ option gives me the "Cannot detect interrupt.." message.
• ISA gives me "Cannot detect card at..."
• INTA# seems to work for FM but as soon as a I do the sound test the screen goes black. Same for when i load a game like Jill of the Jungle - the music works, as soon as Jill hits the first apple the screen goes black but the music keeps playing

I originally thought it was due to my Voodoo banshee taking IRQ5 but I've since swapped that out with a temporary PCI VGA card which is now on IRQ11.

Has anyone else come across this? Or have some recommended settings to try?

In the BIOS, i've tried:

• Setting PnP OS to both on and off
• Assigning IRQ5 to the Yamaha card
• Reserving IRQ 5,7 and DMA1 for Legacy/ISA

Any other suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated 😀

Thanks!

If you force IRQ7, its still broken?
What about Yamaha utility, errors from above are from it?
Is EMM386 used?

What drivers autoexec and config lines you are using, there drivers loaded without any error messages?

i had better luck getting ddma and irq 5 configurable with my 440bx board , my socket 7 mvp3 can only use the irq 11 option.

i believe the fix on the 440bx was moving the card to a different slot. i also wasnt using the sb-link, and my card is the 744.

i also recall having some success by running the dsdma in initialise mode, the switch is /s i believe.

do you run w98se? you can check/change the pnp resources in dev manager. might help.

I tried a YMF724 with SPDIF and SBLink...and while it seemed to work alone most of the time, it was totally unstable with an ISA sound card as well. Which was a shame.

Using a YMF724 (also tested with 744), SB-Link cable with S-IRQ and PC/PCI enabled, King's Quest VI with latest AUDBLAST.DRV doesn't work properly.

The narration cuts off, the screen goes black, and then narration stops working.

If an older AUDBLAST.DRV is used, it's somewhat better, though the screen goes black momentarily, but it does recover and the narration continues.

I got a similar result with Thunderboard selected for the narration. I did get Thunderboard working better though by disabling ACPI, assigning an IRQ in the BIOS to the card, and reserving the IRQ for Legacy ISA. No more black screens and it seems to be working fine (though I will have to play longer to know for sure).

The narration is of noticeable lesser quality with either thunderboard or the old audblast.drv.

EDIT: It works perfectly.

I installed a real SB16 and still had issues, so I installed the SB16 drivers, and it ran fine, albeit with an older audblast.drv. I removed all the strings from autoexec related to SB16 except for the modified SET BLASTER line it had placed there, re-installed the Yamaha card, and it works flawlessly. So KQVI runs fine with SB-Link.

But the most important thing you need to do after copying the older audblast.drv is described here:

Diagonsing and Fixing DOS Games - King's Quest VI and the Sound Blaster 16

Increase the audio buffer size for smoother speech. First, make sure you're using a boot disk to free up plenty of memory. Ed […]
Show full quote

Increase the audio buffer size for smoother speech. First, make
sure you're using a boot disk to free up plenty of memory. Edit the
RESOURCE.CFG file in the C:\SIERRA\KQ6CD> directory. The default is
"AudioSize = 8K". Increase the size to "24K" for smoother speech with
more free memory. Note that this is for KQ6 running under DOS (rather than Windows.)

I set mine to 16K, and you can read the blog post to understand why (I was afterall trying to get it to work with an original SB16 DSP 4.11 as well).

Now unfortunately, the 5871 byte Audblast.drv seems to downsample to 8-bit. The author, who goes by Great Hierophant on this forum, describes three versions of the file:

King’s Quest VI, Version 1.000
AUDBLAST.DRV 09/10/1992, 5,871 Bytes

King’s Quest VI CD, Version 1.000
AUDBLAST.DRV 04/26/1993, 7,670 Bytes

King’s Quest VI CD, Version 1.034
AUDBLAST.DRV 07/16/1993, 8,749 Bytes

I've PM'd him to ask for a copy of the 7670 Byte version.

EDIT #2:

While the above fix was indeed pertinent to getting KQ6VI to work with my SB16 DSP4.11, it in fact had nothing to do with the Yamaha cards.

In fact, what makes KQ6VI work properly is having DSDMA load at startup. I had inadvertently enabled it when I was playing with autoexec.bat in-between card swaps. So I'm not sure if having SB-Link and DSDMA together is the solution, or perhaps it can work with only DSDMA itself, but the fact is the game does work perfectly with these cards.

I managed to get mine working. Originally I was using two old cd audio cables to hook the yamaha card to the motherboard but found an 8 pin to 8 pin ribbon cable which definitely fixed the audio and black screens. So I'm assuming the pins weren't connecting to the right pins.

After about 5 mins of gameplay, the game would freeze but the music would keep playing. I tried a few times and it would keep happening. If i disconnected the sblink cable while it was frozen, it would un-freeze.

So i've just reverted back to an ESS ISA card which works nicely with minimum fuss

ideasman69 wrote on 2020-01-15, 21:09:

I managed to get mine working. Originally I was using two old cd audio cables to hook the yamaha card to the motherboard but found an 8 pin to 8 pin ribbon cable which definitely fixed the audio and black screens. So I'm assuming the pins weren't connecting to the right pins.

After about 5 mins of gameplay, the game would freeze but the music would keep playing. I tried a few times and it would keep happening. If i disconnected the sblink cable while it was frozen, it would un-freeze.

So i've just reverted back to an ESS ISA card which works nicely with minimum fuss

Are you talking about King's Quest VI?

I just tested with an ESS1869 and it crashes with it (whole system crash).

It ran fine with the Yamaha and DSDMA TSR loaded. Totally stable and went relatively far into the game with narration without any glitches.

It also crashed with a Crystal ISA card. Seems like a very finicky game when it comes to sound cards.

I never found KQ VI to be tricky.

I have YMF744 and it works flawlessly with H55 chipset in DOS.

One question -- I can only see front speaker out and rear speaker out outputs. How you actually change this card to work in line out mode (bypassing internal amplifier)?

My YMF724 has a pair of jumpers that routes amplified or direct signal to output jack so I can select it. In your case I guess that front speaker output is amplified and rear output is direct.

RayeR wrote on 2020-02-13, 18:15:

My YMF724 has a pair of jumpers that routes amplified or direct signal to output jack so I can select it. In your case I guess that front speaker output is amplified and rear output is direct.

Interesting. Any documentation on that around?

ideasman69 wrote on 2020-01-15, 21:09:

I managed to get mine working. Originally I was using two old cd audio cables to hook the yamaha card to the motherboard but found an 8 pin to 8 pin ribbon cable which definitely fixed the audio and black screens. So I'm assuming the pins weren't connecting to the right pins.

After about 5 mins of gameplay, the game would freeze but the music would keep playing. I tried a few times and it would keep happening. If i disconnected the sblink cable while it was frozen, it would un-freeze.

So i've just reverted back to an ESS ISA card which works nicely with minimum fuss

this issue sounds similar to the problem i had running day of the tentacle talkie version. the intro played fine, the first bit of dialogue in the game was fine but as soon as i had control of the game, it would crash 100% in the next minute or 2. I was running a p3 450 @ 366 at the time, with caches turned off or on it did the same thing.

the moment i changed to a pentium mmx 166 system i didn't have that issue any more. in both PCs i was using the ymf744. dsdma and setupds.

does ymfirq work for anyone ever? it does a good job at crashing my pcs.

YMFIRQ does not work for me on my Compaq Deskpro EN-SFF, the IRQ is hard stuck at 5 and I just roll with it.

Hi I got an XWAVE pci soundcard has YMF724F-V chip.
I'm in need of advice.
Wanting its midi output on windows 98se, whats the best driver?
Also, I need a download link.
My system is a dual P III Abit VP6 (I use only 1 cpu for windows 9x)
which has VIA Apollo Pro 133A (VT82694X) / VT82C686B chipset does it need manual configurating?
Sometimes i use windows xp and i hven't seen anything about midi support for it.

The driver should be on the CD,
MPU-401 mode for it to act as a MIDI IN/OUT interface.

I’ve got it on a Pentium I 75 MHz (the manual says 120 MHz minimum)
it should work without the extra 128 voice add-on synth and that Virtual Analog/Physical Modeling engine?

I just need it for MIDI IN so I can sequence the computer externally (using Freq Monster 801 and maybe the TG-300B mode on this card)

I’ve been thinking about Roger Powell’s Texture.

That’s why I chose this Yamaha card, because of its MPU-401 UART which some old programs need...
I’ve got plenty of other older/niche FM sound cards with character.
But for pure MIDI stuff this should be good?

MIDI is serial in nature, so how does it behave (stability) on a Parallel bus? My computer’s BIOS does have a MIDI IN/OUT via Serial option in the BIOS (those COM ports?)

Ok, quick question:
The MPU-401 on the Yamaha,
does it support intelligent mode? I'm almost there with Magentic Music Texture!

Only UART mode, pretty much nothing outside few dedicated MPU401 interfaces support intelligent mode.

Tiido wrote on 2020-03-12, 06:58:

Only UART mode, pretty much nothing outside few dedicated MPU401 interfaces support intelligent mode.

Anything that is 486 or above should be able to comfortably run SoftMPU to emulate an intelligent mode MPU401 though, no?

When your hardware has PCI slots it will be powerful enough for SoftMPU to be usable. But on hardware level, there is no intelligent mode support on most hardware out there.