Did some sound driver hacking for the NEC Versa M/75 (it has that cantankerous Crystal CL-4231-KQ chip and no OPL). I've been working on this slowly so that I can put it on my site and people can finally put that WSS Chipset to use.
First was The 7th Guest. The version I have needed to have a patch (there are 2) installed to even get Windows Sound System as an option in the installer. Still not working as sndsys.com (DIGPAK driver) won't find the chip when Groovie.ini has the IRQ set to "Default" "5" "7" "10" or "11". Basically it uses WSS.ADV for the non-existent OPL, and sndsys.com for the PCM. I found the game did not end with an error saying the Interrupt Vector was not found if I put the IRQ as -1 like a lot of games detect from this chip....so I'm going to probably need to either hack-it deeper, or I'm going to need to do some more observation of the behavior of this chip.
Next was the GOG Talkie version of Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist. Which turned out to be a resource allocation issue. Needed to edit the resources in Resource.ini to e:\sierra\FPFPCD\Audio as it was just pointing to the FPFPCD Directory. I also set the Audio Buffers to "4" and the audio is very crisp and clear on that game. Not too surprising, seems Sierra had the best WSS Support.
Interesting hack was Abuse. So, I'm starting to figure out what sound systems are used on what games based on what the setup menu looks like and what discreet drivers (if any) are present in the game directories. DIGPAK was 7th Guest.....which does not seem to get along with this chip very well because for some reason any auto-detects give it an IRQ of -1, probably because it's a "Codec" and not a full blown sound system. But this one was also the easiest to hack. Turns out Blood & Magic uses the same sound system, likely a later version, and I was basically able to just cut and paste in the line from setsound.ini for 06 Windows Sound System 530, -1, 1, 1 and was able to basically get it to turn up and work. Basically a copy+paste between the BAM And Abuse resource files is what worked. Pretty nifty.
I did some other games earlier this year as well. Either way, I think I'm finally getting the hang of getting this thing working in DOS. There were a few other games where I was copying *.ADV, *.DIG, and *.DRV files over and editing the resource files to get sound working with the new drivers.
Another thing I'm doing is thinking of tinkering with making my own PCMCIA sound cards at some point - maybe. All depends on if I can figure out my own PCMCIA dev-board. that can be wired into a breadboard. for testing. I was doing some looking at the ESS688 datasheet and reading some of YYZKEVIN's thread. Based on the sample diagram in the ESS688 datasheet - it looks quite doable. I was thinking I'd make 2 cards, one Adlib only, the other Adlib + ESS688 (ESS688 does not have it's own controller). Maybe if I score another P/75 I might also look at how the sound card in that is wired.
