Has anyone managed to get Orpheus (I or II) working in native WSS mode with Impulse Tracker 2.14v5 in pure 6.22 DOS?
I'm aware that included drivers.txt states that autodetect is not working with WSS and one should use set preferably IRQ7 DMA1. Still IT cant detect card while Cubic Player is working fine...

It doesn't work, drivers are not well coded, I seen the source code of IT. In Orpheus II IW works well 😀

Thanks Marmes. Yes Orpheus II works very well with IW. So with original Oprheus then SBPro is the way.

So after 18 years break I got for myself CRT monitor again.
Run some "scientific" tests over weekend and can now with 98.99% certainty say that Orpheus 2 sounds and feels better with CRT. 😀

ah yes the it is a common secret that CRT synergizes with retropcs to produce better graphics, sound and dopamine levels 😁

vutt wrote on 2023-05-18, 18:49:

Has anyone managed to get Orpheus (I or II) working in native WSS mode with Impulse Tracker 2.14v5 in pure 6.22 DOS?
I'm aware that included drivers.txt states that autodetect is not working with WSS and one should use set preferably IRQ7 DMA1. Still IT cant detect card while Cubic Player is working fine...

Now, there's a driver for that.

The Orpheus II sure is a big boi 😀
I was set on installing it in my 486 Pizza box (Globalyst 510), but ran in to a slight issue...

No matter the angle I tried to get it in, it was just not possible, even when I started removing the case supports and floppy drive etc.
Went and had a cup of coffee and decided that I wasn't going to accept that, and went to the shed and busted out the metal saw and got to work.

Thanks to the driver packages on pcmidi.eu, I had it setup and playing games in no time!
Great work, everyone involved, it's an excellent card. Also makes nice home for the Yucatan FX and it's booming midi 😁

awesome!
I am a sucker for small cases, great job fitting the card in it!!!
hope it brings you many hours of retrogaming goodness RockstarRunner !

Hahaha, awesome ~

I actually did the same thing to my favorite microATX case for an original GUS classic. It was still a bit too short so I trimmed a few extra centimeters off of the PCB with some garden shears.

So if you ever see a sad, butchered GUS in the wild, I'm sorry. That was me.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-03, 03:45:

I actually did the same thing to my favorite microATX case for an original GUS classic. It was still a bit too short so I trimmed a few extra centimeters off of the PCB with some garden shears.

So if you ever see a sad, butchered GUS in the wild, I'm sorry. That was me.

You're not the only one. I remember cutting a rectangular part off the corner off my original GUS as well, to make it fit in a system.

My soul is bleeding when I read you guys.

Got this card couple of weeks ago and I've been tinkering with it during the last week or so. It is simply stunning and finally, it is operating how it supposed to be.

I decided to install this on my Tulip P166MMX/Onboard AT24/64MB/1.7GB machine with 3dfx Voodoo 1 and which previously carried ES1869 sound card. I did a clean install of 98lite (98SE) and started to install all the required drivers for Orpheus2. Everything went pretty smoothly, but PnP forced wrong resources to the card's functions, for example IRQ11 was typical for GUS part, which isn't good for DOS and for some reason, couldn't manually set IRQ7 for it. I don't have any other addon cards installed to this computer, but it has quite a lot of built-in goodies such as USB and AMD PCNet 10MB ethernet, so there are functions that require IRQs and I/O addresses.

It was a true struggle to get the card running on the defaults (Crtystal 220, 5, 1 and Gravis 240,7,7,7,7). I have PnP/ISA settings in BIOS for IRQs, but setting BIOS to ISA just seemed to mess up things. I either got conflict error on boot, or something didn't work in Windows and resources were still a mess. I did several installs, tried to disable certain functions in Windows, tried different driver installation order, but every single time I either ended up with somehow non functioning configuration or the resources were still wrong.

I was almost giving up and deciding to use the card in one of my pure DOS 486DX2-66 machines. Today it all just somehow clicked and still quite don't know how I managed to get it working as it should. I decided to try another ISA slot, but I'm not certain if that actually did anything. But first, I disabled net and LPT/COM ports in Windows and installed Orpheus2 driver pack. Crystal part didn't go exactly like it should, but I configured it manually where it should be. After that, I installed GUS stuff and through manual configuration I managed to edit its resources as should.

After I enabled Ethrnet, it started to give troubles although it was set in automatic configuration: it didn't function and it didn't let me edit the resources manually either. Sometimes windows didn't boot to desktop and it gave protection error. In the end, I decided to let windows handle Crystal part automatically. That somehow solved everything: it still retained the resources it should have and network started to work after I removed it and let Windows find it again.

I've never before had such a difficult time with any other addon card. It was a struggle! But now Crystal and GUS works both in DOS Mode. DOS games with GUS support work in DOS window too, at least based on the few tests I made. And Windows sounds are OK too. I still need to test MPU-401 with my SC-55mkII and MT-32pi at some point, but I'm not too worried about it. I got 300, IRQ9 to it after I manually set one of the base configurations in windows (it didn't get IRQ at all in automatic and default).

In the end, it was definitely worth all the hassle, the card is amazing! Sound quality is extremely good and of course GUS sounds really good. And still there is the trusty OPL3 if needed.

Here is the card sitting in the Tulip. It is a mighty card and completely covers the Voodoo1 in a PCI slot below it:

Big thanks to an amazing team that managed to pull this off and made it an actual product! It was worth the wait and every penny!

You can actually reserve IRQ and DMA channels from within Windows. There is an option for this somewhere in Device Manager; at least on 98se and ME. This can be useful when a resource you want is being gobbled up by a device that won't allow you to reassign it.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-04, 08:21:

You can actually reserve IRQ and DMA channels from within Windows. There is an option for this somewhere in Device Manager; at least on 98se and ME. This can be useful when a resource you want is being gobbled up by a device that won't allow you to reassign it.

Well, indeed! If you click properties in device manager without selecting any device, you can get to a screen where you can reserve IRQs and DMAs. Knowing this would've probably made this ordeal much easier 🤣.

I've been using Win9x quite a lot, but never knew about this feature. Probably would've made resource conflict problem solving quite a lot easier already back in the day. Thanks, this is definitely worth the "Tip of the day" award in my books! 😁

It's definitely a secret menu! I didn't find out about it until I got back into retro a few years ago.

RockstarRunner wrote on 2023-06-02, 18:01:

The Orpheus II sure is a big boi :) I was set on installing it in my 486 Pizza box (Globalyst 510), but ran in to a slight issue […]
Show full quote

The Orpheus II sure is a big boi 😀
I was set on installing it in my 486 Pizza box (Globalyst 510), but ran in to a slight issue...
g510_o2_1.jpg

No matter the angle I tried to get it in, it was just not possible, even when I started removing the case supports and floppy drive etc.
Went and had a cup of coffee and decided that I wasn't going to accept that, and went to the shed and busted out the metal saw and got to work.
g510_o2_3.jpgg510_o2_4.jpgg510_o2_5.jpg

g510_o2_6.jpg

Thanks to the driver packages on pcmidi.eu, I had it setup and playing games in no time!
Great work, everyone involved, it's an excellent card. Also makes nice home for the Yucatan FX and it's booming midi 😁

Out of curiosity, what is the card with the YucatanFX on it? Is it an Aztech card?

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-06-04, 13:03:

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-06-04, 08:21:

You can actually reserve IRQ and DMA channels from within Windows. There is an option for this somewhere in Device Manager; at least on 98se and ME. This can be useful when a resource you want is being gobbled up by a device that won't allow you to reassign it.

Well, indeed! If you click properties in device manager without selecting any device, you can get to a screen where you can reserve IRQs and DMAs. Knowing this would've probably made this ordeal much easier 🤣.

I've been using Win9x quite a lot, but never knew about this feature. Probably would've made resource conflict problem solving quite a lot easier already back in the day. Thanks, this is definitely worth the "Tip of the day" award in my books! 😁

What. The. Fuck.

I got really good at playing system resource roulette when trying to combine three sound cards (ISA, two PCI), and two video cards (PCI, PCIe) in a modern socket 775 with too many of its own onboard devices fighting me for precious legacy resources.

I would love to use this system with my Orpheus II for the Ultrasound, but it does not support DMA over the ISA bus.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-05, 07:26:

Out of curiosity, what is the card with the YucatanFX on it? Is it an Aztech card?

It sure is, well spotted 😁
Aztech Sound Galaxy Nova 16 Extra II
It took the Orpheus II to finally unseat it, I consider that high praise.