VOGONS


First post, by retroboy87

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I have an MSI 661FM3-V socket 775 board with an AGP8x slot, two PCI slots, and SiS661FX / SiS964 northbridge and southbridge respectively.
Unfortunately it doesn't have an ISA slot or an SB-Link header.
I have the AOPEN AW744L II, which has OPL3 in pure DOS, and good GM/XG support in Windows.

Are there any PCI sound cards I can use to get General Midi in real-mode DOS with this setup?

Reply 1 of 9, by The Serpent Rider

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Any card with external wavetable connector.

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Reply 2 of 9, by mothergoose729

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I don't use a PCI sound card for DOS, but any card that can listen on port 300 or 330 can use external midi. I run my midi out to roland UM One USB midi interface on another PC and then use MUNT or the Roland VSTi plugins.

Reply 3 of 9, by Joseph_Joestar

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The SBLive / Audigy cards can provide General MIDI in pure DOS using ECW sets. It doesn't sound that great to me, but it works.

A better (and slightly more expensive) solution would be to get one of Serdaco's Chill adapters + whatever wavetable daughterboard you like, and then plug that into your Yamaha card.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 4 of 9, by matieo

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Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?

Gigabyte 440BX, C3 Ezra 866, Voodoo 3, 512mb, 32gb SSD, YMF718+Dreamblaster S2
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Reply 5 of 9, by retroboy87

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matieo wrote on 2021-05-28, 11:04:

Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?

Doesn't that require an SB-Link header on the motherboard though?

Reply 6 of 9, by The Serpent Rider

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ESS cards also had software solution to pass ISA DMA via PCI, like some other manufacturers at that time. SB-Link standard was designed to work directly without a driver, just like a real ISA sound card, i.e. no memory managers shenanigans and waste of conventional memory.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 7 of 9, by Joseph_Joestar

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The ESS Solo-1 doesn't have General MIDI capabilities under pure DOS. It only supports FM synthesis. See the product sheet here:

https://www.alsa-project.org/files/pub/manual … ess/DsSolo1.pdf

Of course, you can connect a wavetable daughterboard or an external MIDI device to it, but the card has no inherent GM of its own.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 8 of 9, by Revolter

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retroboy87 wrote on 2021-05-28, 13:54:
matieo wrote on 2021-05-28, 11:04:

Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?

Doesn't that require an SB-Link header on the motherboard though?

SB-Link is 100% absolutely not mandatory with ESS Solo-1; in the Phil's video (which seems to have confused the hell out of everyone not familiar with the card) he's just showing that capability as a side note, proving it exists or something.

While it does work fantastic (I'm using it all the time on a SB-Link -capable i815 mobo and am yet to discover a single DOS game refusing to work perfectly with it - other than the DOOM engine games, which work correctly in Windows with VxD drivers, but require the DOS32/A extender in pure DOS for some reason - but that's really the only exception I ever found), there are also at least two other strong chip/hardware-based legacy DMA compatibility measures, as was already mentioned (with the correction that it's not done by software, but by the chip itself, which makes it a truly CPU speed-independent solution).

Celeron 800@1066, 512MB, GeForce2 MX AGP/GeForce 8400GS PCI, ES1938S/Dreamblaster S2, DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11/Windows ME/Windows 2000

Reply 9 of 9, by pc-sound-legacy

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Soundblasters PCI / Ensoniq Soundscape PCI has great GM waveable sound in DOS. But FM-emularion is terrible so I can't reallly reccomend it. I also don't know if it will work with your mainboard but as these cards are widely available and quite cheap it may be worse a try. (They are like Radeon 92xx or GeForce MX cards - you don't find them, they'll find you)