Re: Voodoo 3 2000 Artifacts and noisy video.

Posted on 2024-04-05, 03:28

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I understand that this thread is a few months old, but I have some new and relevant information to add. I experienced this issue with multiple later Voodoo cards on my Athlon-XP machine, using the KT133A chipset. Today, I read through the datasheet and discovered this PCI register: Device 1 Offset …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-09-26, 17:42

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

maxtherabbit wrote on 2023-09-23, 22:46: One thing that doesn't work on CT1747 based cards with DSP 4.05 is ADPCM (duke2) The digital sound driver in Master of Magic also causes the game to hang briefly after every sound effect using DSP 4.05 on CT1747 based cards.

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-28, 20:27

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Actually, there might be a quite elegant solution to the SB16 stereo conondrum: If the optional ASP is installed, it is exactly in the right position of the signal processing chain to demultiplex full-rate mono samples into half-rate stereo samples. So instead of reprogramming the DSP to do such a …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-28, 17:58

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I recall reading that Creative initially planned full SB Pro 2.0 compatibility for the SB16, but changed their minds about it . Can anyone share some i sight about why this might have been the case ? Having looked at this for a few days already, I'm not really seeing a reason why the SB16 couldn't …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-25, 06:17

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

why the weird D52 and not classic ida/ghidra/radare? Simply, it was the first thing I found that required zero configuration to get a disassembly. Rom goes in, disassembly comes out, no questions asked. Control file is text and source control is happy with it. That's about as simple as you get. IDA …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-24, 16:40

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

This sounds exciting ~ It already is! I have discovered for example there is a bug in the frequency conversion table in the 4.05 and 4.11 firmware that is fixed in the 4.13 firmware. It appears one of the values was shifted one bit to the left. That might explain this strange graph posted on a …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-08-24, 16:24

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I realize this thread has been dormant for some time, but it also seemed like the correct place to mention I've started work on reversing the Sound Blaster 16 DSP code posted here. Thanks to the forum members for posting the decrypted dumps, and Tube Time for getting things started with the SB 2.0 …

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VIAFMTSR, but with a better FM core

Posted on 2023-08-20, 16:55

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In doing some research on the VT82* south bridges, it looks like FM NMI is a feature that can be enabled so that you can hook into something like INT 2h to process messages sent to an FM synthesizer. I suspect that VIAFMTSR sends its own emulated audio to the AC97 interface (I haven't reverse …

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Programming support for proprietary APIs

Posted on 2023-08-10, 17:15

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Greetings! I'm working on some project scaffolding targeting MS-DOS. I am aware for VGA I can just use the standard BIOS calls and ports.. but some manufacturers of VGA cards had drivers specifically written for them that maybe took advantage of features specific to a model or line of products ( …

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Re: Working around MPU-401 bugs in SB16

Posted on 2023-08-01, 23:50

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I don't have any SB16-based sound card affected by the hanging note bug but I'm aware that there is a workaround written by NewRisingSun: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=77392 Thanks for this! I've been cooking up a music related project myself and I think incorporating that technique into …

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VSA-100 chips..what to do with them?

Posted on 2023-07-31, 18:42

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Greetings all, I've had a tray of 24 VSA-100 chips sitting in storage for a while. I think I picked them up from a surplus somewhere, can't remember where specifically. I don't have the know-how to do much of anything with them. Does anyone know of indie projects that could make use of them so that …

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Working around MPU-401 bugs in SB16

Posted on 2023-07-31, 18:38

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Greetings all, I'm working on a blog post with the aim of providing solutions that work around MPU-401 bugs in the SB16 while still being able to use the other functionality of the SB16 itself. I still like being able to have a real SB16 in my system - more or less because some music production …

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Re: Orpheus II soundcard thread *** LT board now available ***

Posted on 2023-07-08, 20:23

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Orpheus 2 LT arrived this week. Very pleased with the card! It is by a large margin the least noisy card in my possession right now. I think the only thing I ran into was, because music in Zone 66 is a combination of digital and FM music, the digital instruments were out of tune with the FM …

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Re: Sonic Buster 8: A new 8-bit ISA sound card

Posted on 2023-07-01, 00:03

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Wow! This is really impressive looking. Very tidy, very simplified. Having a discrete mixer is just perfect- we can then make adjustments on the fly without needing to route the individual signals to a mixer or bouncing between app and setup program.

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Re: VIASBCFG - VIA SBPro configuration tool for VIA VT8231 & VT82C686/A/B chipsets (v0.12d)

Posted on 2023-06-26, 05:51

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Thank you so much for this utility. I am using it with my SL-75KAV motherboard just to enable MPU-401 support through the motherboard so that my Sound Blaster 16 is unburdened by external MIDI playback. This particular motherboard has BIOS options for these things, of course, but I will be testing …

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Re: UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.78b

Posted on 2022-08-16, 17:35

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Just dropping by to say thanks to JazeFox. I was not being able to make my sound card/modem combo (aztech at6800w) work in DOS, running UNISOUND did the trick. Thats the reason I love this community :D Indeed- UNISOUND simplified Aztech sound cards for me immensely. The stock drivers are quite …

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Re: What are the best Vga to hdmi scalers or peripherals for MS-DOS games ?

Posted on 2022-08-16, 15:07

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'm going to share my experience with scalers: The reason I had issues with 320x200 and 720x400 on cards I used is, the sync timings are 100% identical between those two modes. (At least, according to the VGA spec.) Exact timings were obtained using Datapath cards and RGBEasy API, and this held true …

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Re: Soundcard with same color scheme as SCB-55 : S2 limited edition

Posted on 2022-04-06, 17:03

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Reminds me a lot of the Mello Yello can design. Especially with the thick "GS" logo (on the original, that is.) It could be Mellow Edition. 😀

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Re: ARGUS Project thread (aka GUSsel Crowe) - it's not dead (yet)

Posted on 2022-04-06, 16:58

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Thank you for making another batch available. 😀

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Re: Fun thread: Things you thought you knew but were soooo wrong..

Posted on 2021-12-10, 21:55

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by SaxxonPike

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used to think that all the good documentation on testing efforts and knowledge sharing would last forever. I didn't consider how important it would become to start mirroring some of the more obscure drivers and libraries (Intel RSX3D is my latest example.) But it turns out there's this huge gap in …

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