Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-01, 13:44:A shorter board with onboard memory, please. The Orpheus II is too large to fit into the case I would like to use it in.
Are you willing to pay $400-$500 for one sound card? That’s what you’re asking for…
Socket5Alive wrote on 2024-09-02, 19:59:Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-01, 13:44:A shorter board with onboard memory, please. The Orpheus II is too large to fit into the case I would like to use it in.
Are you willing to pay $400-$500 for one sound card? That’s what you’re asking for…
I would like to add: if the memory has problems, it becomes a real pain to find the damaged chip and replace it, while with the socket you replace the memory bank and off you go fast 😁
I am having an issue with my Orpheus II where the wavetable with my X2GS does not play midi correctly under DOS. Music is either playing wrongly or notes are missing. Additionally, trying to play the GM music test in the Duke Nuke 3D setuo causes the system to hang.
Disabling either (or both) L1 and L2 cache doesn't seem to make a difference. The instability seems to be random between reboots.
I am running a Celeron 533 on an Intel 440LX with 256MB of memory, a Rage XL, the Orpheus II and nothing else, booted into pure DOS.
I am calling "UNISOUND.COM /C2" to initialize the card.
That sounds like a resource conflict, probably mpu address one as this can cause wrong playback like you described
Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-05, 19:57:I am calling "UNISOUND.COM /C2" to initialize the card.
Is there a benefit to the unisound driver? I just use Orphinit and the gravis init and everything works great. What is the unisound driver for?
keropi wrote on 2024-09-05, 20:21:That sounds like a resource conflict, probably mpu address one as this can cause wrong playback like you described
There is nothing else plugged into the board. I have also disabled the onboard serial and parallel port, just in case.
Socket5Alive wrote on 2024-09-05, 20:33:Is there a benefit to the unisound driver? I just use Orphinit and the gravis init and everything works great. What is the unisound driver for?
There is no benefit. It's just what I am familiar with for initializing ISA sound cards.
Gotcha. I’m just asking from ignorance. I’m relatively new to dos sound and had no clue what the unisound was for.
I run the “ call orphinit” and “call ultrasnd” and it works great with default settings for me.
UNISOUND is a convenient way of enabling various sound cards with a single driver. It also offers more control over sound card settings than some of the official drivers, and can be much simpler to install and use than some official drivers (i.e. Creative Labs).
I've also found that UNISOUND will work in some cases where official drivers fail. For example, the official drivers for the MK8330 didn't work on the Pentium 4 setup I tried, but UNISOUND worked fine.
Shponglefan wrote on 2024-09-05, 20:50:UNISOUND is a convenient way of enabling various sound cards with a single driver. It also offers more control over sound card settings than some of the official drivers, and can be much simpler to install and use than some official drivers (i.e. Creative Labs).
I've also found that UNISOUND will work in some cases where official drivers fail. For example, the official drivers for the MK8330 didn't work on the Pentium 4 setup I tried, but UNISOUND worked fine.
Thanks for this explanation!
@Kahenraz
That doesn't mean there is no conflict
What mpu is assigned to wt header? What address? Is unisound assigning the same address as pcmidi? Is pcmidi jumpered to something else than irq2 that is probably not free on a LX system?
Also for orpheus2 orphinit is the correct tool to initialize properly - unisound atm cannot enable the Yamaha opl3 on orpheus2 and LT cards. But if you don't care about it then unisound is fine.
Here is a picture of the jumpers. I apologize for the upside-down photo. I cannot remove the card from the case without disassembling the entire front of the chassis, which is exceptionally difficult, as I have to remove and then re-glue the disc facia into place (the original, facia-compatible drive has long since died).
Please let me know if you would like me to run any specific commands for testing. As far as I'm aware, calling Unisound with /C2 is initializing the Crystal card only. I didn't see any mention of the PCMIDI in the output.
Edit: I can confirm that the problematic wavetable output also occurs in Windows 98. I have no other sound cards configured other than the Crystal Audio. I set "Crystal Audio PnP Audio System MPU-401 Compatible" to use port 330 and loaded Duke Nukem 3D setup in a DOS window.
Here is a video of the problem:
And a photo of the jumpers:
Changing the midi port to 0x340 in both DOS and Windows fixed the problem. I wonder what the issue could be? This motherboard has an integrated YMF740, but I have that disabled with a jumper. The YMF740 is also on the PCI bus, not the ISA bus, so I don't think that it should conflict either way without being initialized.
Maybe PCMIDI is on 0x330. Does the Crystal wavetable header normally clash in this way? I thought that the PCMIDI is disabled unless I enable it with the jumpers, as I had to do to get the wavetable header to work.
It is indeed a conflict because both PCMIDI and CSMPU tried to use port330
when you moved CSMPU at 340 the conflict was gone and things worked
PCMIDI has no OFF state, it is active on either port 300 or 330 - no drivers no init needed for it
so if you want to have CSMPU at 330 just remove the P jumper of PCMIDI and you will get the job done
I think I am misunderstanding how to use the jumpers. I already moved the wavetable jumper from P to C but none of the other jumpers. Is PCMIDI still functioning on 0x330 on the joystick and rear jack? That makes sense now. Thank you.
I am also having a different problem with the X2GS. MIDI sounds fine from DOS, but from within Windows it sounds terrible, like it's coming out of a tin can. There is a stark contrast in quality. The wavetable header goes through the Crystal audio chip whether it's in DOS or Windows, so I don't know what this issue could be.
I tried using both the OEM drivers built into Windows 98 and the latest Orpheus II drivers from the pcmidi.edu website.
It is desirable for the wavetable to function separately from PCMIDI so that I can choose whether I want MIDI from an external synthesizer or the onboard wavetable simply by selecting the port.
Yep, on your photo pcmidi is at port330, irq2 and controls jack and gameport.
What you describe under windows is another resource conflict, something else wants to use the crystal resources
My motherboard BIOS doesn't provide options to reserve DMA 7 for the ISA bus. I don't have any memory yet for the Ultrasound. Will this cause any problems with resource conflicts?
I found the problem with the wavetable MIDI in Windows. The drivers automatically enabled Crystal 3D Audio, which truly destroys the quality of the output. I don't know why anyone would want to enable this.
See attached for recording examples.
Suddenly my Orpheus II is acting very strange. I can't initialize the Crystal Sound Blaster DSP from DOS and Windows is refusing to play digital sound, despite the decide being selected and configured correctly.
Other parts of the card work fine, for example, playing midi through the wavetable synthesizer, Ultrasound synthesizer, or PCMIDI.
There is nothing else installed in the system other than the CPU, memory, one disk drive, and the Orpheus II. I have both serial and parallel ports disabled go keep resources free. Reserving the necessary IRQ and DMA from the BIOS doesn't make a difference.
Edit:
Now the Crystal wavetable isn't working anymore under DOS. The MPU-401 can't be detected.
I managed to solve the issues with the the Crystal chip, wavetable header, and MPU-401 in DOS by setting "PNP OS Installed" to "Yes" in the BIOS. I think that it was assigning the Ultrasound resources that the Crystal chip was trying to use.
However, I cannot get the Gravis Ultrasound to work in DOS or Windows DOS box. I misspoke when I said that it was working in Windows. I read that it does not use the memory stick in this scenario (playing a midi in Media Player). Even though it is detecting as 16MB by Unisound, perhaps it is a memory problem.
I also still have problems getting any music files to play in Windows on the Crystal chip, but this may be a software error. I can't know for sure without reinstalling Windows.
I know that I bought the right kind of memory.
"16MB FPM MEMORY NON-PARITY 60NS SIMM 72-PIN 5V 4X32"
I also tried a second stick that I use in my AWE64 that I know is good, and that works fine.
I'm going to try this card in a simpler Socket 7 system and see what happens.
I chatted with Leo who was very helpful in helping me sort out the Ultrasound issue. While I was initializing the Crystal chip with ORPHINIT and the Ultrasound with UNISOUND, I did not understand that sound patches need to be uploaded to the card's memory with ULTRASND.BAT for the setup floppies.
I'm still working through some other minor issues, but every issue I've had so far has been a configuration issue. This is a very complicated setup already, and I was also unfamiliar with the extra step needed to get the Ultrasound working.
Edit:
The Windows playback issue seems to be some problem with broken drivers or a bad file somewhere. I had to reinstall Windows to fix it.
I've managed to solve all of these users and they were down to user error. Good luck to anyone else on their Orpheus II journey!
