First post, by keropi
- Rank
- l33t++
Hello!
After several months of development, testing and guessing 🤣 I am happy to present you the Orpheus sound card 😊
(in case you were wondering about the name Orpheus was a legendary poet/musician in ancient Greece you can read the wikipedia article if you are more curious about it)
The design goal was to make a DOS soundcard that would be SB/WSS compatible, would have a real OPL3 , an optional PCMIDI MPU interface and the ability to output all the sound inputs/outputs via an S/PDIF port under a pure DOS environment - in other words to be a nice DOS card with useful features for some good'old DOS gaming.
FINAL revision done, cards can now be ordered if one wishes: Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support
http://orpheus-soundcard.eu is a quick'n'dirty page with jumper/setup info.
As you can see the board is now a "classic green" one 😀
There is an extra jumper block added that lets the user select which MPU device will control the wavetable header, the gameport midi and the dedicated midi-out jack.
So if a card has the pcmidi part installed the user can enable the CS4237 MPU device and have 2 MPU devices working at the same time controlling different parts of the card.
(ofcourse this feature only makes sense with the pcmidi part installed)
The card comes in 3 flavors - all prices include registered airmail shipping in a hard box with fully assembled and complete items ready for use:
- Orheus soundcard : 130eur
- Orpheus soundcard with PCMIDI installed: 180eur
- Orpheus soundcard with PCMIDI installed and Dreamblaster X2GS daughterboard: 240eur
link to order: http://pcmidi.eu/order.html (please keep in mind this is a queue atm since the 1st batch sold out - more cards are being made)
For now anyone interested can use the PCMIDI order form located in serdashop.com and www.pcmidi.eu - there is an Orpheus item in the drop-down product list.
Thanks for your support on this and I hope people will like the card as much as we enjoyed making it!
some prototype recordings:
Monkey Island 1 SE: https://soundcloud.com/user-919839499/mi1se-orpheus
Day of the Tentacle CD : https://soundcloud.com/user-919839499/dottcd-orpheus
Alone in the Dark: https://mega.nz/#!QI9GQIpQ!wsOgLaObBpC_Xa-pbK … KxslXDgEx6Q0zuM
Please keep in mind that the following pics are to be treated as an "evaluation board" , they were built to test features and stability.
new rev1.0h pcb revision - it has further analog/digital side separation, more filters, extra buffers, altered routing, different jack placement - in general a more optimized design based on feedback.
older rev1.0g (added AC'97 header, back ports re-arrange and some other design tweaks) , bracket needs some tweaks
... and a couple of quick recordings , the audio caps in use still need some hrs to stabilize though... things are very clear as you will hear, I don't know if that's a bad or good thing after decades of SB filtering 🤣
Monkey Island 1 SE: https://soundcloud.com/user-919839499/mi1se-orpheus
Day of the Tentacle CD : https://soundcloud.com/user-919839499/dottcd-orpheus
Alone in the Dark: https://mega.nz/#!QI9GQIpQ!wsOgLaObBpC_Xa-pbK … KxslXDgEx6Q0zuM
these are mediafire links, soundcloud could re-compress or something not sure
https://www.mediafire.com/file/c0zd4aqdnwnv1o … rpheus.mp3/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/2d9knsqejxj7lp … rpheus.mp3/file
older 1.0f version
Features:
- based on the Crystal CS4237B controller which offers SB/SB-PRO/WSS compatibility
- discrete YMF289B OPL3 chip
- 44.100hz 16bit S/PDIF output of all internal and external audio sources
- 4-layer PCB design with attention to analog output part and usage of audio-grade capacitors
- 2 MPU-401 options: internal CS-4237 UART interface or PCMIDI intelligent mode one, card can be ordered with either option or upgraded at a later point from 4237->PCMIDI interface
- Gameport, Line IN, Line OUT, MIC and Coax S/PDIF ports
- Wavetable daughterboard and AC'97 headers
- dedicated midi-OUT port with the ability to also use at the same time a common gameport->midi or DB15MIDI adapter to gain an extra OUT and IN ports
- UniSound is the card's driver thanks to JazeFox , it initializes the card , enables/disables s/pdif, switches between OPL3 and CrystalFM , enables/disables CrystalMPU device
TO-DO list: - Although the aim was to make it a DOS card we also have a Win9x driver package that works great except one thing: windows driver disregards the card's hardware setup so under windows the internal FM synthesis is used, you can write to a known register and fix this behavior but we did not find a way to patch the driver to do that yet, if anyone can help with this please get in touch 😎
As always the crime partner in this is marmes 😎 we would love to hear your thoughts and comments on Orpheus card.
Thanks!
