Sound Card Roland

[Doretta Castoe]

CanI run two sound cards? I heard this is the setup I should use below. Also which sound card has that perfect soundblaster 1600 CT speech for old dos games and is adlib compatible as well as MPU 401?

Of course, with a PnP card, you can disable a few resources, but choosing PnP resources is like wrestling with Hulk Hogan. (Maybe not that bad, but still). The 16 is still quite usable with these settings if the game supports choosing the resources in the install program or actually looks at the SET BLASTER variable.

SoftMPU ( ) should work on a CT1600 , possibly with reduced compatibility. SoftMPU does require EMM386.EXE , however . That said, most (possibly all games) games that support the MT-32 through an MPU-401 in intelligent mode will be old enough to not mind EMM386.EXE . Some newer one may not like EMM38.EXE , but those will generally run a "dumb" (UART only) MPU-401 , like the one present on most sound cards .

You can have and AWE/SB16 with an SB Pro in the same machine . That resource setup should work .

I have and AWE64 , an Orpheus, a Gravis Ultrasound and an SB Live! in the same machine . Everything works and there are no resource conflicts (except that one of the joystick had to be disabled)

You should try it first, without installing any additional cards. (Even if you do put one of your other cards in, you're still going to have to use SoftMPU for the MT-32, unless you buy a sound card that doesn't require it).

Solution? There's a program called SoftMPU that performs intelligent mode function - so the game talks intelligent mode to SoftMPU and SoftMPU translates that to MPU-401 for the sound card. It's really simple and works great.

Anyway, one thing to learn is to be specific. Give exact model numbers for those sound cards and we can give you an exact answer. Probably the Aztech card is the best choice, with AWE64 Gold in second place, but if the Aztech card is too old it doesn't support MPU-401. Look for something starting with: "I38-MMSN" and then three numbers on the card. That's how we can identify them. Same with the Sound Blasters, there's "CT" and then four numbers. For the Aureal card, we'd need to know which motherboard you have.

I have the CT1600 in one of my machines and use SoftMPU with it, and I agree with some of the comments regarding reduced software compatibility. Warcraft II and the Secret of Monkey Island, for instance, run flawlessly. Duke Nukem 3D, Panzer General, and Sim City 2000 do not. Your mileage may vary, but you just need to ask yourself which games you want to play and whether you want to run them on a genuine Soundblaster Pro 2.0 or whether the above compatible sound cards would be satisfactory for your wants. In this hobby, there are a lot of tradeoffs with original hardware. Frankly, I am amazed at some of the ongoing projects that continue to improve decades-old hardware. SoftMPU is one such example, another that comes to mind is the UNISOUND driver. Good luck!

The Roland MT-32 doesn't use drivers, per se. Either a game specifically included support for the MT-32 or it did not. All the game does is it looks for is a compatible port, usually P330 or sometimes P300 may be used. The problem is, some games need "intelligent mode" MPU-401 interface ports for music, which SoftMPU can provide in many cases through emulation. MT-32 predates the General MIDI standard, although it is possible to pass a Sysex file to the MT-32 telling it to understand General MIDI format, though not 100% perfectly. This would have to be done before you launch the game.

There are conflicting reports about compatibility of these cards, they're supposed to support SBPro2 (i.e. everthing your CT1600 does), but then with MPU-401 added, but some say only SB2.0 (mono) works well. Still, the MPU-401 should be solid.

have my cables plugged into the MT32 "input" and to the joystick port of the CT1600 . some reason my sound card driver is only detecting on irq 5 not 7 , not sure if this matter, When running softmpu. I get a low level driver error and cannot run sbproset if on Irq7

how would i do this? install the sound card and then install AWE64 dos drivers? set my irq to like 5?

Not sure why i cannot set my CT1600 to IRQ 7 any idea , it has been over a decade since i messed with dos machines and irqs.

Thanks!

Does the motherboard automatically assign the address and will the driver pick it up or do I just assign them in the driver?

also I am very interested in this product

Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support

do you think orpheus is the way to go for a one sound card solution? I want sound blaster pro 2.0 sound or even sb16 combined. Not sure if this is possible. along with full mp401

Thanks

some cards have jumpers, some have software setups to allocate resources... it depends on card

I assume you want SBPRO2.0 compatibility? Then only a real SBPRO2 will be 100% compatible I'm afraid... if you really mean SB2 + SB16 then a nice SB16 like the CT2230 will offer that.

With a separate mpu401 interface (or softmpu) you can mix and match until you find a combo that works best for your needs IMHO

Thanks I remember now. IRQ settings are on the sound card with jumpers . I can figure it out. What about this sound card that was just developed?Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support

Audio quality is somewhat subjective, although it's my opinion that the Roland MT-32 produced superior music quality. You can compare them with a number of videos on YouTube. Here's one for Space Quest 3:

DOSBox, however, doesn't emulate the Roland MT-32. It only passes MIDI data to whatever MIDI devices are available on your PC. This might be the actual Roland hardware, although that's unlikely in this day and age. However, most modern sound cards have rudimentary support for MIDI, but the quality depends on your card, its drivers, etc. There are a few 3rd party MIDI device emulators for DOSBox - there's a good article on their wiki about setting them up.

Wavetable Synthesis uses samples of real instruments that are pitch shifted up and down the musical scale. Generally there are 128 instruments and 32 drum samples, but Roland GS and Yamaha XG have additional instruments banks (sets of 128 instruments) and drum sets.

As an additional consideration, the larger the sample memory on the card, the more samples per instrument the card uses. This makes them sound less "weird" on lower and higher notes as MIDI pitch shifting is done from the closest sound.

General MIDI won the "MIDI war." As such, it's the only one supported directly by Windows via a software synthesizer (named Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth1). DOSBox and the like also tend to emulate FM (Soundblaster / Adlib) since that was common back in the day.

DOSBox does not emulate MT-32, despite the fact that it only requires instrument remapping and sending the MIDI command to increase the pitch bend range to 12 semitones (General MIDI defaults to 2 semitones).

Side note: Gravis Ultrasound is the third major music option. It's a wavetable option that supported loading the samples into the card's RAM dynamically. Newer versions of the Ultrasound used System Memory instead and could even be loaded as General MIDI devices.

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