That is quite ingenious, but complicated , considering that the YMF744L should have just worked in stereo .

That said, RayeR worked on DOS mixer for YMF7xx cards : http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/ymf7xx.exe

See this thread for details : Pure DOS gaming system with 100% digital audio output

Hi !
I intend to do the same thing or nearly with another pci soundcard, with a ESS-1 solo chip or CS48xxx.
Will let you know if i succeed !

Best regards
Philippe

Darry, that Yamaha DOS mixer sounds like exactly what I was after. I'll try it out today. Thanks for the link!

I tried RayeR's utility, but it's not quite what I was looking for. It allows me to manually set the PCI registers for the Yamaha (don't know if I said that correctly), or enable/disable SPDIF with a command line switch. I'm sure I could use this to adjust mixer volumes, but I don't know what data to put where. I'll do some trial and error work with DS.INI and see if I can figure out the values.

In other news, when I revisited today to test RayeR's utility, I discovered that the 2 sound cards won't work together anymore. The Yamaha takes over for PCM audio even though SETUPDS only enables Adlib and Joystick. I'll troubleshoot the issue and update my first post once I figure out what I screwed up. Both sound solutions are actually quite nice if only they had good documentation. Maybe I've been using Linux for too long 🤣.

Just out of curiosity about your Doom stereo issue on ymf744, is yourBLASTER var set correctly for SB Pro 2.0 ?

Incidentally yhe datasheet says the DSP version for SB (pro) compatibility can be set to sb mode . Maybe yhe card is not inited in the right mode ?

https://html.alldatasheet.com/html-pdf/101284 … /1/YMF744B.html

I'm currently using SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4. It works in mono with the Yamaha, but stereo with the VIA 686B. It never occurred to me to just look for the dang datasheet. I'll dig through it later today.

johnnycontrario wrote on 2020-04-22, 19:06:

I'm currently using SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4. It works in mono with the Yamaha, but stereo with the VIA 686B. It never occurred to me to just look for the dang datasheet. I'll dig through it later today.

b[14:13] ......SBVER: SB Version Select
These bits set the version of the SB Pro DSP. The value set in these bits is returned by sending the E1h
DSP command.
“0”: ver 3.01 (default)
“1”: ver 2.01
“2”: ver 1.0

maybe ?

Meant to reply to this yesterday but didn't get a chance.

Why on earth are you using DSDMA? that is only for chipsets that don't support DDMA.. and your chipset does, so no need to use it at all. All you will accomplish is less compatibility if you run it in DSDMA mode.

SETUPDS is also the default mixer for the Yamaha YMF7xx chips. You run SETUPDS /S to initialize it in autoexec.bat or I guess through the command line if you really want.

Then run it without any command line switches and it will open up a GUI that has the mixer and tests and other settings such as IRQ, DMA, etc.

You may have to mess with BIOS settings. DMA 0 usually works fine for DDMA, but it really depends on your motherboard and BIOS.

Once you change mixer settings through SETUPDS, it is very easy to tell how the SETUPDS.INI file works and you can just edit manually if you want.

johnnycontrario wrote on 2020-04-22, 17:07:

In other news, when I revisited today to test RayeR's utility, I discovered that the 2 sound cards won't work together anymore. The Yamaha takes over for PCM audio even though SETUPDS only enables Adlib and Joystick. I'll troubleshoot the issue and update my first post once I figure out what I screwed up. Both sound solutions are actually quite nice if only they had good documentation. Maybe I've been using Linux for too long 🤣.

I found my mistake: if I run DSDMA I can't run both cards at the same time. I've updated the original post with the exact configuration I'm using to run both cards simultaneously.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:16:

Meant to reply to this yesterday but didn't get a chance. […]
Show full quote

Meant to reply to this yesterday but didn't get a chance.

Why on earth are you using DSDMA? that is only for chipsets that don't support DDMA.. and your chipset does, so no need to use it at all. All you will accomplish is less compatibility if you run it in DSDMA mode.

SETUPDS is also the default mixer for the Yamaha YMF7xx chips. You run SETUPDS /S to initialize it in autoexec.bat or I guess through the command line if you really want.

Then run it without any command line switches and it will open up a GUI that has the mixer and tests and other settings such as IRQ, DMA, etc.

You may have to mess with BIOS settings. DMA 0 usually works fine for DDMA, but it really depends on your motherboard and BIOS.

Once you change mixer settings through SETUPDS, it is very easy to tell how the SETUPDS.INI file works and you can just edit manually if you want.

AHEM.. /FACEPALM. Oh yeah, the menu item clearly labeled VOLUME 🤣. OK I feel proper stupid now. Thanks for pointing that out.

I would love to get the Yamaha to handle everything, but DSDMA has been the only way I could get it to work. I have to set SB DMA to 0, the IRQ MODE to INTA# 10 or 11, DMA set to D-DMA and I have to load DSDMA. If I don't load DSDMA, it doesn't work. My machine is a SFF industrial PC formerly used as a point of sale device. Maybe the BIOS or motherboard has something funny preventing it from working without DSDMA.

My original question is answered, but I'm re-reading the YMF7x4 thread to see if I can get the YMF card working without DSDMA. If so, hopefully it means I get stereo SB Pro compatibility. I'll start a new thread if I can't figure it out. For now, my inelegant solution works.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:16:

Why on earth are you using DSDMA? that is only for chipsets that don't support DDMA.. and your chipset does, so no need to use it at all. All you will accomplish is less compatibility if you run it in DSDMA mode.

The stock version of SETUPDS doesn't detect the 686B southbridge, you have to use a modified one.

Think this one should work, even comes with a handy utility for changing the IRQ of your Yamaha card.

Kamerat wrote on 2020-04-23, 02:00:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:16:

Why on earth are you using DSDMA? that is only for chipsets that don't support DDMA.. and your chipset does, so no need to use it at all. All you will accomplish is less compatibility if you run it in DSDMA mode.

The stock version of SETUPDS doesn't detect the 686B southbridge, you have to use a modified one.

Think this one should work, even comes with a handy utility for changing the IRQ of your Yamaha card.

OP already said they were running the modified SETUPDS.

In my sig links I have all of the modified SETUPDS versions saved on my Google Drive plus a whole bunch of other stuff. No need to even try to search for these anymore... took me quite a while to wrangle them all up.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-23, 04:38:

OP already said they were running the modified SETUPDS.

In my sig links I have all of the modified SETUPDS versions saved on my Google Drive plus a whole bunch of other stuff. No need to even try to search for these anymore... took me quite a while to wrangle them all up.

Oh, missed that. Shouldn't really browse Vogons on a smart phone. 😀

johnnycontrario wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:37:

I would love to get the Yamaha to handle everything, but DSDMA has been the only way I could get it to work. I have to set SB DMA to 0, the IRQ MODE to INTA# 10 or 11, DMA set to D-DMA and I have to load DSDMA. If I don't load DSDMA, it doesn't work. My machine is a SFF industrial PC formerly used as a point of sale device. Maybe the BIOS or motherboard has something funny preventing it from working without DSDMA.

You can try using the PCI.EXE tool to see if you have a device with vendor ID 1106h and device ID 0686h. If that's the case you can try playing around with the YMFIRQ utility. I also like to change the FIRSTTRY= value of the DS.INI file from 0 to 1 every time I try to reconfigure with SETUPDS, it will the try to find the correct values by itself.

johnnycontrario wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:37:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-22, 23:16:

Meant to reply to this yesterday but didn't get a chance. […]
Show full quote

Meant to reply to this yesterday but didn't get a chance.

Why on earth are you using DSDMA? that is only for chipsets that don't support DDMA.. and your chipset does, so no need to use it at all. All you will accomplish is less compatibility if you run it in DSDMA mode.

SETUPDS is also the default mixer for the Yamaha YMF7xx chips. You run SETUPDS /S to initialize it in autoexec.bat or I guess through the command line if you really want.

Then run it without any command line switches and it will open up a GUI that has the mixer and tests and other settings such as IRQ, DMA, etc.

You may have to mess with BIOS settings. DMA 0 usually works fine for DDMA, but it really depends on your motherboard and BIOS.

Once you change mixer settings through SETUPDS, it is very easy to tell how the SETUPDS.INI file works and you can just edit manually if you want.

AHEM.. /FACEPALM. Oh yeah, the menu item clearly labeled VOLUME 🤣. OK I feel proper stupid now. Thanks for pointing that out.

I would love to get the Yamaha to handle everything, but DSDMA has been the only way I could get it to work. I have to set SB DMA to 0, the IRQ MODE to INTA# 10 or 11, DMA set to D-DMA and I have to load DSDMA. If I don't load DSDMA, it doesn't work. My machine is a SFF industrial PC formerly used as a point of sale device. Maybe the BIOS or motherboard has something funny preventing it from working without DSDMA.

What BIOS settings are you using? Sometimes it can bet tricky to get it working properly. Is there a setting to assign specific IRQs to specific slots and or/set the IRQs to legacy / ISA... or even set the IRQ assignment to manual instead of AUTO?

Kamerat wrote on 2020-04-23, 05:17:

You can try using the PCI.EXE tool to see if you have a device with vendor ID 1106h and device ID 0686h. If that's the case you can try playing around with the YMFIRQ utility. I also like to change the FIRSTTRY= value of the DS.INI file from 0 to 1 every time I try to reconfigure with SETUPDS, it will the try to find the correct values by itself.

I can confirm VID 1106 and DID 0686, VIA VT82C686B PCI to ISA bridge.

1Vendor 1106h VIA Technologies Inc
2Device 0686h VT82C686B PCI to ISA Bridge
3Subsystem ID 00001106h VT82C686B/A PCI to ISA Bridge
4Subsystem Vendor 1106h VIA Technologies Inc

I did some testing with SETUPDS and YMFIRQ. The BIOS usually assigns IRQ 10 or 11 to the card at boot, and I can change the IRQ of the card with either SETUPDS (INTA IRQ mode) or YMFIRQ. Both the PCI.EXE and YMF7XX.EXE utilities show the card using the new IRQ. However, DOOM crashes unless I run YMFIRQ right after SETUPDS /S. Both programs are setting the IRQ to 5.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-23, 18:17:

What BIOS settings are you using? Sometimes it can bet tricky to get it working properly. Is there a setting to assign specific IRQs to specific slots and or/set the IRQs to legacy / ISA... or even set the IRQ assignment to manual instead of AUTO?

Currently, all COM ports, LPT ports, NIC, on board audio, and on board USB are disabled to free as many resources as possible. The BIOS doesn't have a setting to assign IRQ's to specific slots/devices, but IRQ's and DMAs can be reserved for Legacy ISA devices, or left available for PnP PCI/ISA devices. I set IRQ5 and DMA0 to Legacy ISA. I also tried moving the card to a different PCI slot (there are only 2), but it didn't make a difference.

In SETUPDS, IRQ mode is set to INTA# IRQ5, and DMA set to 0. All sound tests within the utility play OK.
After exiting and saving SETUPDS, I execute:

1SETUPDS /S
2YMFIRQ 5 edge
3set BLASTER=A220 I5 D0 T4.

With this configuration, DOOM plays FM music, but no sound effects at all.
Wing Commander2 plays FM, but freezes right before playing speech.

What happens if you don't set IRQ5 and/or DMA0 to legacy ISA in the BIOS?

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-24, 04:37:

What happens if you don't set IRQ5 and/or DMA0 to legacy ISA in the BIOS?

IRQ5 and DMA are both set to legacy already. I tried setting them to PnP for kicks and got the same result.