VOGONS


First post, by ricochet76

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Hey guys,

I've just recently gone back to my roots and built up a P3 based rig with multi-boot for DOS, Win 3.11 and Win98. It all went like clockwork really and everything's working well, but I've just striked one snag that's really bothering me as I cannot for the life of me figure it out.

I'm using an AWE64 value ISA PnP card and its on the standard channels and ports (5 - 1 - 5 - 220 - 330) - at least when I go into c:\sb16\diagnose and run auto-detect they are the figures it gets and I am able to hear both stereo sound + awe32 midi perfectly fine.

All games I've thrown at the card are also playing both sound and midi, although the midi on some games sound pretty crumby and basic (almost adlib-like) compared to playing .mid files in windows 98 using the awe32 extender - it sounds 10x richer.. not sure how to get my games under dos 6.22 to sound like that?

Anyway, onto the problem. In line of having just mentioned that everything's working fine... this is super super odd. I have the original boxed copy of Xwing Collectors Edition from 1994. It installed fine but when I run setmuse.exe to set up midi and sound, midi refuses to play through to the speakers.. this is regardless of whether I let it auto detect (which does detect it as an "Awe32 midi", or if I change it to adlib, or sb16, any of them.... doesn't matter.. when you press "test midi" and the bar goes from left to right I should be hearing music but its dead silent. However sound effects are working fine.

I have CTCM etc. all loaded in config and autoexec.. that's obvious as all other games work.. wc3, dott, need for speed, Indiana jones fate of atlantis, space quest iv etc. etc.

why would it be just this game (and a very popular well remembered game at that) which refuses to play any midi? is this a common problem for this game with AWE64's and if so, is there some sort of AWE64 patch out there I can use?

Any tips, suggestions very much appreciated. Cheers guys.

Reply 1 of 6, by jesolo

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Make sure you also have Aweutil loaded and that it did load successfully.
For Real Mode DOS games, make sure you have it loaded with the /EM:GM parameter.
For Protected Mode games (that load via a DOS extender like DOS/4GW), use the /S parameter.
For X-Wing, instead of using auto detect, manually select your sound card settings via the Advanced settings.
This will allow you to separately select the digital settings (Sound Blaster 16/AWE32) and music (AWE32, not General Midi).

Reply 2 of 6, by ricochet76

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Champion!!!

AWEUTIL was previously running, but simply as AWEUTIL /S

I changed it to be AWEUTIL /EM:GM /S then rebooted and ran the game.. both midi and sound effects working beautifully now! /bows to you

I wonder if having adjusted AWEUTIL to have those parameters (EM:GM) has 'undone' some of my other DOS games from working now though? or should it be fully compatible with all games?

Reply 3 of 6, by jesolo

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If you load Aweutil with the /EM:GM parameter then it will initialise the EMU8000 chip for General Midi sound support.
As such, you do not have to specify the /S parameter when you also load it with the /EM:GM parameter (the /S parameter only initialises the sound card for FM synthesis playback but, the /EM:GM parameter initialises both).

Your other games should still work. It is dependent on what sound options the particular game supports and this is usually selectable in the game's setup menu (Adlib, Sound Blaster, OPL3 FM synthesis, General Midi, AWE32, etc.)

Just remember that with protected mode games, you require native AWE32/AWE64 support (it will not function if you choose General Midi). Unless, you run out via a Windows 95/98 DOS command prompt (window).
But, this is a separate topic which I already touched on in my other posts.

Reply 4 of 6, by HunterZ

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I know this is a necro, but I found some more information here:

Running X-Wing Collector's CD-ROM in pure DOS 7 (Win98SE rebooted to pure DOS) with an AWE64 Gold, I get no sound or terrible screeching.

If I run Daggerfall or its sound setup utility first, *then* run X-Wing, it works fine.

It seems that X-Wing is not initializing the AWE64 correctly?

Reply 5 of 6, by alytle

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This thread was very helpful. In my case I had to switch aweutil to /em:gm (and also make sure I had the synth driver file in the path), but I also had to disable the "PnP" option in my BIOS. Until I did that, I got sound but no music.

Reply 6 of 6, by Namrok

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Necroing this thread again to add my own experience.

Just got an AWE64 Value, plugged it in, initialized with UNISOUND, everything is going great. Try to play X-Wing Collectors CD-ROM, and I either get no audio at all, or horrible screeching. Probably down to some unpredictable state the sound card is partially initialize with on startup.

I'm running a K6-2+ 500, and using setmul to drop the multiplier down to 2 seems to nip the problem in the bud. Didn't need to run AWEUTIL /EM:GM, although running it didn't seem to hurt anything.

Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS