Replying so I get notified on this topic... Also: does it already support Keropi's Orpheus card? I have to test when I come home...

root42 wrote on 2020-07-07, 09:07:

Replying so I get notified on this topic... Also: does it already support Keropi's Orpheus card? I have to test when I come home...

As the card has a Crystal CS4237B it should work out of the box, if the EEPROM is standard (and the VendorID is known).
Anyway I guess it could lack some features because i see it has custom features on-board.

Maybe keropi could clarify the card's details in order to add proper support for the card in Unisound, if he wants...

I read a bit about the Orpheus card, I think it'll be easy to add the specific support via Crystal's registers in theory. I would add on-the-fly switch between internal CrystalFM and external Yamaha OPL3 FM, S/PDIF activation, or any other register-configurable setting. Also ability to disable/enable a specific PnP logical device / specific resource... And of course, it will be XT / 808x and newer compatible, as usual.

If keropi is OK with this I would add Orpheus support... anyway I only have the info read on the official thread. If he want to provide any further detail here or by PM, it would be great.

Yeah, support would be great. I am running his beta card on a 286, which of course has no PnP support. And currently I am stuck with the crappy CrystalFM, and can't use the OPL3 on the PCB.

Mate, just wanna say THANK YOU! I owe you a beer! Just bought an ESS688 card and was in struggle-town. I tried multiple drivers, IRQs, autoexec.bat/config.sys files, the lot!

Ran UNISOUND.COM and BOOM, all sorted! It's a silver bullet for me! 🎮

Success story on a 386 Toshiba T5200 and ESS688 ISA sound card, MS-DOS v5.00

root42 wrote on 2020-07-07, 11:51:

Yeah, support would be great. I am running his beta card on a 286, which of course has no PnP support. And currently I am stuck with the crappy CrystalFM, and can't use the OPL3 on the PCB.

do drivers work for 286? I think they are 386+ only - if you init the card with the stock drivers it will read the eeprom config and internal fm will get disabled. PnP is not needed at all to configure the card so YMF289 works, PnP is only needed for our beta tools but the crystal dos driver is 386 code. Maybe it half-works on 286

anyways I missed all those latest posts and developments here , ofcourse unisound support would be great to have no need to ask about it! 😀

Well, I might swap the 286 board for a 486 soon. The DOS driver worked on the 386 until I fried the mainboard... 😉

JazeFox wrote on 2020-07-07, 09:01:

Shreddoc wrote on 2020-07-07, 08:01:

I am having problems finding working DOS drivers for my AD1816JS + YMF704C-S based ISA card. It is a rare card called "Gallant SC70P PLUS". The Device Id is AXS7180.

This card will be supported in the next version. Stay tuned the next few days.

Thanks a lot, looking forward to it.

JazeFox wrote on 2020-07-07, 11:42:

I read a bit about the Orpheus card, I think it'll be easy to add the specific support via Crystal's registers in theory. I would add on-the-fly switch between internal CrystalFM and external Yamaha OPL3 FM, S/PDIF activation, or any other register-configurable setting. Also ability to disable/enable a specific PnP logical device / specific resource... And of course, it will be XT / 808x and newer compatible, as usual.

If keropi is OK with this I would add Orpheus support... anyway I only have the info read on the official thread. If he want to provide any further detail here or by PM, it would be great.

There isn't much other information that should be required. Basic support should not be complicated to add to your software, and all of the relevant features are governed by the registers of the CS4237. The PCMIDI portion, when it is present, is completely separate; it has independent address decoding and is configured via on-board jumpers. The intelligent MIDI functionality has no PnP connection to the CS4237 at all.

This may change, but the current prototype uses ISA PnP ID CSC7537, like many other CS4237-based cards. The YMF289 is connected digitally via the wavetable serial port, and is enabled at power-up when the CS4237 reads the device configuration portion of the serial EEPROM. As long as my information is still current, there is no option to disable PnP support on the card (though it was discussed), so there is no need to upload configuration data or firmware.

All of the Orpheus "magic" comes from selective manipulation of the registers, and when you get into the details, it can get rather interesting.

root42 wrote on 2020-07-07, 11:51:

And currently I am stuck with the crappy CrystalFM, and can't use the OPL3 on the PCB.

Unless something is going wrong, this shouldn't be happening. The configuration data should be read on power-up and the OPL3 enabled, whether you want it or not. This implies that something is going wrong with the software, or the EEPROM is corrupted or not being read correctly. I'm sure keropi can give you instructions to read the EEPROM and confirm that the contents are valid if you contact him privately.

640K!enough wrote on 2020-07-09, 20:08:

There isn't much other information that should be required. Basic support should not be complicated to add to your software, and all of the relevant features are governed by the registers of the CS4237.

This may change, but the current prototype uses ISA PnP ID CSC7537, like many other CS4237-based cards. The YMF289 is connected digitally via the wavetable serial port, and is enabled at power-up when the CS4237 reads the device configuration portion of the serial EEPROM. As long as my information is still current, there is no option to disable PnP support on the card (though it was discussed), so there is no need to upload configuration data or firmware.

All of the Orpheus "magic" comes from selective manipulation of the registers, and when you get into the details, it can get rather interesting.

Yep, I have been in conversation with keropi last few days and made some test versions of Unisound for him to test. Now complete initialization (as you stated, like any other CS4237 based card) is done and switch between internal and external FM on-the-fly is working well (this is working regardless of the GCB1 config in EEPROM, as it's done via register manipulation). S/PDIF is another story (I guess you know it well), a lot of registers are involved, datasheet is very confusing about it and lacks a lot of info. Will have to work more on it, to fine-tune...

The "special" config for the Orpheus (FM switch and S/PDIF -when it works, not yet-) is done by Unisound only when the correct ANSI ID (card label) is detected (as per custom EEPROM) + of course the CSCxx37 ID checking, and not on every CS4237 card.

You're right, this chip is rather interesting. It's fun to play with all the settings provided by the regs. It's a pity that the datasheet is not as good as it can be...

Edit: Well, it seems S/PDIF works now, but it may require some timing fine-tuning , as it seems it's not 100% stable over the time...

Edit2: It seems to be working properly... Some more tests will be required just to be sure...

I have successfully tested unisound tool on my Pentium 233 MMX + ASUS SP97-V system. In my opinion it's amazing tool!
List of cards: CT2920, CT3910 (non PnP), CT4330 (AWE32 with chips like CT4500), YMF718, ESS1868.
Wishlist:
Parameter(key) to disable internal IDE PnP controller (like on CT2920).
Parameters to enable and tune reverb, chorus in EMU8000 chip (on AWE32/64).
Parameters to tune volume of cd-in, mic-in inputs (to reduse noise). Also "00" volume must be equal to mute mode (like in windows mixer).

Just wanted to say THANK YOU for this amazing program. It helped me get a Sound Blaster 16 CT4170 fully working on my NuXT v2.0 build. I was not able to use the joystick port as I was using the SBPNPXT program and it does not initialize the joystick port. I have also used it on three Socket 7 builds all using Sound Blaster 16 PNP cards. No more headache trying to use Diagnose, CTCU, CTCM, and Mixerset programs!

Thanks for this awesome tool.

I have an Aztech "AZT1006 PnP Sound Device" FCCID I38-MMSN853

If I try to set IRQ to 7 i cannot get several games (Settlers2, Warcraft, Blackthorne,Innocent Until Caught) to work.
Autodetect fails in Setup Routines, Only FM Syth is working if Adlib is selected.

If I set IRQ5 everything works fine.

With a YFM719 i do not have this Problem.

Is this a bug? or ist the AZT2320 not capable of using IRQ7.
Would be a shame because I want to use the card for early 90s Games too and most of them like IRQ7 better then IRQ5.

First world problems. i know. but could you look into that please? I could not find a azt2320 datasheet.

Also.:
I have a non PnP CS4248-KL based soundcard (TT Maestro 16) which has Adresses assigned via Jumpers (220/240) (300/310/320/330) and has to be initialised via a sound.sys in config sys. This sound.sys is TSR and has to be loaded even before himem.sys.

Driver can be found here:
http://terratec.ultron.info/Audio/Maestro/16/ … rv_3x_Disk1.exe

Maybe if you have time to look at the sound.sys can you tell me if it was possible to integrate such thing into Unisound.

Thanks in advance. I'd Like to give you a tip. so maybe you share a PayPal address 😉

Do you have a parallel port that might be using IRQ7 already? Might be a simple resource conflict. If you have a new-ish mainboard with LPT1 using ECP/EPP it is probably using IRQ7.

I configured the Parallel Port in Bios to use (278/IRQ5,ECP/EPP1.9,DMA3). Therefore it should be impossible to use IRQ5 for the card, shouldn't it? It works anyway with IRQ5. But not with IRQ7 which the YMF719 can use.

If the LPT is disabled it wont work either. In setup I hear a popping noise when the setup is trying to initialise and following an error stating no card found.

EDIT: If I manually set the IRQ to 5 although i configured IRQ7 the card is detected. Seems that IRQ5 is hardwired. With BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T4 configured autodetect runs into that error.

Wow, ok. That is seriously weird. I would say that the settings are not written correctly to the card? And that the default of IRQ5 is in its EEPROM?

zapedge wrote on 2020-07-13, 13:29:

If I try to set IRQ to 7 i cannot get several games (Settlers2, Warcraft, Blackthorne,Innocent Until Caught) to work.
Autodetect fails in Setup Routines, Only FM Syth is working if Adlib is selected.

If I set IRQ5 everything works fine.

That is a limitation of the card (The same issue happens with original Aztech drivers).
In fact, the dump of the PnP info shows that the available IRQ lines for the AZT2320 are: 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 15 (see that 7 is not even listed). Default value listed for this chip is 5. Unisound does not prevent to set IRQ value as 7, but as you can see it does not work (by card's design, it seems).

EDIT: I confirmed now that my card does not even have the IRQ7 pad present in the ISA edge connector (B21). Probably yours neither...

About TT Maestro 16, as it's a non-PnP card, it's not supported by Unisound. For now, only Creative non-PnP cards are supported. No changes on this are planned.

serj_popov wrote on 2020-07-12, 07:13:

Parameter(key) to disable internal IDE PnP controller (like on CT2920).

By default IDE controller is always disabled (or it can be force-disabled using parameter C0 in BLASTER var). I don't understand your suggestion there... Which card are you having the issue with?
Thank you for your suggestions, I'll take note and I'll think about some of them perhaps for a future release

Its me again. 😉

Thank You for your swiftly answer. I totally get that you cant implement any 3rdParty No Name Card.

I found an issue

I also own an YMF-719E-S card labeled ATC-6631. I am pretty sure i have had successfully initialized this card using UNISOUND with my now sold Intel-TX-Based Mainboard without problems.
Now I put it into my new VIA MCP3 SS7-Board and UNISOUND does nothing. In BIOS it is recognized and with SETUPSA.EXE i can initialize and test the card.

I made a dump. See File Attached.
It is recognized as 'QHA0800'

Would you please add it to the tool?

Still looking forward to pay a bunch of Coffees for you 😉

I tried using Unisound with my GUSar light, which works fine with IWINIT, but it keeps failing. Says no PnP cards are detected. Any ideas? I downloaded the 0.72b from the first post -- the header says 0.72c, but can't seem to find that one...?

Any help is appreciated!

zapedge wrote on 2020-07-17, 12:29:

I also own an YMF-719E-S card labeled ATC-6631.
Would you please add it to the tool?

Yes, It'll be added to the next version.
It's been a busy week... I hope I'll have the new version ready towards the end of the next week with some new features and a bunch of bug fixes.

root42 wrote on 2020-07-17, 19:21:

I tried using Unisound with my GUSar light, which works fine with IWINIT, but it keeps failing. Says no PnP cards are detected. Any ideas? I downloaded the 0.72b from the first post -- the header says 0.72c, but can't seem to find that one...?

Any help is appreciated!

The version is 0.72b, I made a mistake editing the post title.

The card should be detected, but only if it has the EEPROM written and if its contents are OK. If there are corruptions in the header zone and the checksum does not match, it won't be detected.

Does Intel ICU (or other PnP manager software) detect the card properly?