Very very nice , i see audio-grade capacitors too . That's a carefully designed card . Well done .

That's a really nice feature set.

Contrary to popular belief, WSS was actually supported by a decent number of games so this card should do fairly well in terms of 16-bit sound too.

keropi wrote:

No you can't hardcode it like you do with other setup options , S/PDIF setup and enabling is like the SRS 3D audio function that needs an extra program to enable/disable.
It's just a 0.5sec function, you run it - it access some registers and it S/PDIF works. So basically you run 2 programs on boot that just initialize the card: the main one and the s/pdif one if you want it. Both are pretty fast and consume no memory.

Does the SPDIF come out of the Crystal chip, or is mixer first? Something must sample the waveblaster and mix it digitally with everything else? I am quite interested in how this all works...is there a high level schematic?

The Crystal chip ADC's its analog sources for inclusion into the SPDIF output.

This card looks lovely and is exactly the type of card I am looking for with regards to my newest project.
If possible - put me on the waiting-list, please!

Thank you!

kolderman wrote:

Does the SPDIF come out of the Crystal chip, or is mixer first? Something must sample the waveblaster and mix it digitally with everything else? I am quite interested in how this all works...is there a high level schematic?

It's exactly like Tiido says, the CS4237 does all conversions internally - the chip was built with S/PDIF in mind IMHO
You can see the path of analog sources on the schematic from the datasheet, it's the area around the INPUT MIXER

looks very nice ineed 😀

Thanks Keropi. It looks like a very powerful chip. Did you have to salvage them from other sound cards or could find a unused batch of them?

It's so good you are able to combine it with a real OPL and PCMIDI. Is the internal FM Synth disabled on the Crytal? Are AUX1 and AUX2 used to input PCMIDI and Waveblaster? How does the OPL get into the Crytal?

I'm getting excited to get my hands on one of these 😁

No salvaged chips, we secured a stock of genuine chips so there won't be any issues.

Internal FM is indeed disabled on CS4237 under DOS (win9x on the other hand insist of enabling it because it ignores the setup in the card's eeprom , still working on it but it's hard since we don't have any SDK/sources or extra info)
LINE IN / MIC / WT-AUDIO / CD-AUDIO all are using the chip's analog inputs and get converted to digital internally if needed.

Now if you look on the card you'll see there is NO yamaha opl3 DAC... remember that "CS9236 Wavetable Digital Audio Interface" that was mentioned before? That's how things are done and that's why the CS4237 can also act as a DAC for the OPL3 😊
The thing is very integrated!

I did look at the card but I did not notice that 😁. I did notice the OPL3 is a little square one though...is that the low power OPL3 that comes on sound blasters like CT2900? It's very cool you can input the digital out of the OPL into the crystal....will this be the only board in history to do this? Maybe the AWE32 I don't know.

I am very much looking forward to playing Monkey Island Ultimate under DOS with this card...using OPL/Midi/soundblaster sound together. I currently do this with a AWE32+PCMIDI which I guess is pretty close, but this will have better digital sound, plus SPDIF for everything.

Will there be a sufficiently large enough batch made for everyone to get one?

if it's not too much trouble, you might see if it's possible to have an option to switch to crystalFM (or it would really be bonkers if you could get them to both play in parallel)

OPL3 is the GOAT, but crystalFM is interesting in its own right (sometimes)

Yes the YM289 is the newer version of the older OPL3 chip... not only in power but in output too , they dropped the oddball frequency and made that 44.1khz
The only other card for DOS that is kinda similar is the Turtle Beach Malibu but you are limited to internal FM on this one

With this card you'll get as digital as it gets using "old age" chips and without going crazy routes ... It will be more than enough because let's face it - the source material from games are 8bit 11khz samples most of the times due to space constraints...
Demand will be met, no worries!

@maxtherabbit
it is possible to switch from external to internal FM , we can provide a small script to flash the card's eeprom , on next reboot the change is active
Both at the same is not possible when the external synth need to do FM work

keropi, would you consider adding a jumper to enable and disable the Yamaha OPL3 so that we can fall back to CrystalFM when wanted? I love me some CrystalFM and choice is always good 😎

Fm enable or disable is a software feature, it's not possible to add a jumper unfortunately 🙁

Marmes wrote:

Fm enable or disable is a software feature, it's not possible to add a jumper unfortunately 🙁

Enabling/Disabling the external Yamaha FM synth and reverting to the internal Crystal FM one can only be done at hardware level I would think, not software.

like marmes said a jumper to do that is not possible - this can be done with configuring the card's eeprom. I wrote in some previous post that we can supply a batch file that will do just that so choosing an OPL3 device is a reboot away 😀

keropi wrote:

I wrote in some previous post that we can supply a batch file that will do just that so choosing an OPL3 device is a reboot away 😀

literally the post immediately above his question 😒

maxtherabbit wrote:

keropi wrote:

I wrote in some previous post that we can supply a batch file that will do just that so choosing an OPL3 device is a reboot away 😀

literally the post immediately above his question 😒

I noticed after I posted 😊
Sign me up for this!

Absolutely amazing design, congratulations to Marmes and Keropi.

Best soundcard ever

thanks!
though I don't know about best soundcard ever, only 2 people have this so far so the bias is real 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣