1988 Battle Chess with adlib option enabled - No sound and jerky animations \ VOGONS

1988 Battle Chess with adlib option enabled - No sound and jerky animations

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First post, by pcsintheup

Posted on 2025-02-17, 16:48

pcsintheup Offline

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Hello! I have a clone XT (DTK-1000) which is basically a Turbo-XT clone board with a 10mhz v20, 640k ram. It has an IBM CGA card long board, an 8bit Soundblaster 2.0 with the CMS chipset upgrade and what looks like a genuine OPL2 to me (came with the card when I bought this in the 90s), a DI-500 multi-IO card (game port disabled to not conflict with the soundblaster) and has com1, and lpt1 enabled w/standard irqs and IO), DTK low density floppy controller (standard ibm clone controller) and finally a Western Digital MFM controller for my Seagate ST-4038.

Battlechess 1988 VGA version (which also functions in Hercules, CGA, CGA composite, and EGA mode) fires up fine and works completely fine with the PC speaker mode if I fire it up like this: chess /comp
If I fire it up like this: chess /comp /adlib (to enjoy the adlib sound via my Soundblaster 2.0 OPL2) theres no sound and all the animations are jerky when sound "should" play.

The soundblaster 2.0 I have seems to have an original yamaha opl2 - ym3812 (it was bought new back in the 90s had it ever since). This is the same chip as the ADLIB cards... afaik the soundblaster uses the same IO ports for adlib? I have my jumpers set to IO:220, Irq 5, DMA 1. The adlib feature afaik doesnt use dma or irq and just the IO ports.

To me battle chess is behaving like its trying to write to a non-existant IO port. Now I read Adlib is ports: AdLib's I/O port range, 388h/389h (originally) (pasting from another document).

Do I have to pop the hood of my XT and see if I can jumper the soundblasster to 388 instead of 220? Looking at statson the CT1350 (the card I have) doesnt have a setting for 388? -> https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/sound-cards-mult … R-2-0-CT13.html

Any ideas would be great. Does anyone else have adlib working in battlechess with a soundblaster?

Reply 1 of 3, by Jo22

Posted on 2025-02-17, 16:59

Jo22 Offline

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pcsintheup wrote on 2025-02-17, 16:48:

Do I have to pop the hood of my XT and see if I can jumper the soundblasster to 388 instead of 220?

No, not that I know of.

Port 388/389h became the standard AdLib port* and the Sound Blasters do respect this (they listen to it).

However, it's true that Sound Blasters do additionally support FM via the Sound Blaster i/o ports.
Why?
a) to make developers abandon AdLib support and accept Creative/Sound Blaster as new king.
b) to support multiple Sound Blasters in a single PC.
By writing to the Sound Blaster FM port instead of 388/389h, each FM chip is adressable individualy.

Edited.

(*The original 1987 AdLib supported multiple port adresses via jumper block, with the 388/389h setting being default. I know of no game that uses another AdLib address, though.)

Edit:

Western Digital MFM controller for my Seagate ST-4038.

I have my jumpers set to IO:220, Irq 5, DMA 1.

In an XT with MFM HDD?! Be careful, XT HDD controllers do historically use IRQ5!
Please change it to IRQ7, it's safer. And the original setting, increasing compatibility with old games.
The IRQ conflict with LPT1 is no issue. DOS doesn't use IRQs for printing (OS/2 does).

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Reply 2 of 3, by pcsintheup

Posted on 2025-02-17, 17:28

pcsintheup Offline

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OK thanks I'll make sure to check the IRQ's and modify accordingly. Funny thing is, I used checkit 3.0 to confirm a free IRQ but who knows how accurate that was! I sure dont need any data corruption.

HMMM the soundblaster functions perfectly fine in every other game (digital and FM/adlib) and I mean *every* other game but most other games I play with adlib are sierra titles which may be more forgiving if I have an issue somewhere.

I have very little idea on what the issue could be with battlechess unless all other games are using IO 220 ranges for adlib and battlechess is using the 388/389 address (where that IO address may be having issues due to a problem with the soundblaster or some other conflict in the system). Cant imagine what else could be conflicting with 388/389 or what battlechess might be doing.

Reply 3 of 3, by pcsintheup

Posted on 2025-02-17, 17:31

pcsintheup Offline

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Oh boy... I think I may have found the issue. In searching online I did find the following:
Adlib is
* Supported in 256 color MCGA/VGA version only.

Im running in CGA composite mode... it seems to still take the switch but then malfunction instead of ignoring the switch. I'll pop an 8bit VGA card into my XT and try again. Only idea I have.

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