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IBM P70 and Audiovation

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CloakedAlien

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Sep 12, 2011
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Well, I finally got my hands on a IBM Audiovation MCA card after looking for it for a few years.

However it dawned on me.. "what if... "... what if it wasn't really what I was looking for? I've been googling a bit today and I ended up even more confused =)

I've got a fully operational IBM P70, hoping to get it outputting digital/fm-sound as if it had a proper Sound Blaster in a pure DOS environment. Does anyone have any experience with this and this machine? Am I going to end up having to install Win3.1 because DOS-support is only done through emulation? Is the DOS-support spotty or good enough for pure DOS?
 
The ONLY microchannel soundcard to do proper OPL3 (via ESS's "ESFM" which sounds different from Yamaha's YMF262) is the chipchat. The soundpiper and MCA soundblaster have a lot of problems and issues.

Unfortunately the audiovation soundcard doesn't do FM-- and if it did, it would likely have problems like the soundpiper and MCA soundblaster because no electrical engineers at the time were interested in making proper microchannel audio devices.
--> I believe there are ways to hack and mod the MCA soundblaster, but honestly, at the price they go for I wouldn't say it's worth it.

There's a lot of caveats to microchannel systems. The majority I didn't even know about until one weekend I read basically every personal system/2 archive page that exists on the internet. So far the only audio microchannel device that I own which works well is the revision 2 Roland MPU-IMC I obtained. My Model 9595 will only ever be used exclusively for MT-32 / SC-88 / SC-55 games with the nice MIDI controller.

All microchannel Personal System/2s have an ABIOS and CBIOS (for DOS and OS/2). All Microchannel PS/2s will run MS-DOS just fine (to my knowledge). Ironically, Windows 3.1 does not have very good DOS support even though it's just a shell-- Windows 95 is much better at it. So use 95 or straight up DOS. The P70 will probably prefer straight DOS.

If you want DOS and FM synthesis, get yourself an IBM with ISA.
Or you can wait for a few years while I try to develop an OPL2 microchannel soundcard if I ever get around to it (I got so many stupid projects on the go). The biggest problem will be reverse engineering the microchannel controller chip that speaks to the bus due to the extra logic layers.
 
I was under the impression that SB MCA worked fine under everything except OS/2... Is this not true? I also second the Roland MPU-IMC. I have one and it works flawlessly but given the current prices (PeterLI had posted a link to one for $300 or so dollars) + a Roland synth it could be very unattainable...
 
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Well. I've got the card, ADF installed and I seem to get some audio from the card when using the diag software (haven't tested with the loopback cable).

However I can't get the drivers in Windows installed =(((

It gives me error: 301 and says it can't start the installation. Any experience with this? Without the drivers it's pretty damn useless...
 
Just a follow-up. I think my Windows was broken or something. Anyways I got it fixed and my system now runs Windows 3.1 and the Audiovation flawlessly.

Only downsides are that I have to run DOS games/apps through Windows to enable sound, and music emulation is mind-numblingly slow on a 386DX-20 =P

I'm considering testing OS/2 Warp to see if it performs better.
 
Sorry to bump this old thread. But I've got a few updates =)

1) I can't seem to get digital audio to work in a dos shell, no matter what address, irq, dma I use. I test digital audio using FastTracker 2 and OpenCubicPlayer.

2) My IBM P70 has 8MB ram, a 4GB SCSI drive and a 387 co-processor. I installed the first Windows 95 version on it yesterday and it actually ran much smoother than expected. I installed the audiovation drivers in it and it gives me a windows startup sound, after that I can't play anymore digital sounds though. Same issue with digital sound in a dos shell as in Win 3.1.

FM/AdLib emulation however works just fine in both operating systems, but Windows 95 is more DOS-friendly so I can actually run Commander Keen 4 with audio support under Windows 95. Something that didn't work under Windows 3.1.
 
I'd love to see close-up detail of that IRQ add-on to see if we could cobble one together to upgrade the Rev1 MPU-IMC cards (I have two of those...)
 
CloakedAlien said:
I test digital audio using FastTracker 2 and OpenCubicPlayer.
Click to expand...

I would suggest trying something other than demoscene prods to test the sound card -- they can be pretty fast and loose with the specs and only work with real sound blasters (I know that FT2 used to have issues with clone cards).

It is possible the emulation doesn't support auto-init DMA, making it akin to an original Sound Blaster 1.0. Try testing a game that works well with those cards, like Prince of Persia.

I installed the audiovation drivers in it and it gives me a windows startup sound, after that I can't play anymore digital sounds though. Same issue with digital sound in a dos shell as in Win 3.1.
Click to expand...

I know microchannel is different than ISA, but that sure "feels" like an ISA hardware conflict (like, two cards using the same IRQ)...

FM/AdLib emulation however works just fine in both operating systems, but Windows 95 is more DOS-friendly so I can actually run Commander Keen 4 with audio support under Windows 95. Something that didn't work under Windows 3.1.
Click to expand...

If the FM/Adlib emulation is entirely in software, and also sounds accurate, I'm very impressed. Try a game like Indianapolis 500 with /adlib on the command-line and see if the engine sounds are normal.
 
PeterLI said:
That is really interesting. Did you try to search for additional drivers online? The reference disk worked properly?

There is a MPU-IMC up for sale relatively cheap right now: http://cgi.ebay.com/221539917514.
Click to expand...

Afaik there are no other drives. It's the MWave install disks for DOS/Win. I use them, as instructed, under both Win 3.1 and Win 95.

The diagnostics disks that goes with the card doesn't detect any errors so that seems just fine.

The ADF is "installed" and configured correctly (not really anything to configure there) =)
 
Trixter said:
I know microchannel is different than ISA, but that sure "feels" like an ISA hardware conflict (like, two cards using the same IRQ)...

If the FM/Adlib emulation is entirely in software, and also sounds accurate, I'm very impressed. Try a game like Indianapolis 500 with /adlib on the command-line and see if the engine sounds are normal.
Click to expand...

Ah, thanks for the tips. I'll try to test those games.

And yeah, IRQ conflict has been on my mind as well. I haven't really seen anything about resource conflicts, Win95 doesn't even show the printer port as taking up an IRQ. I can't seem to configure it in the reference disk, I can however try to disable the printer port all altogether.

I did try to change the sound blaster emulation settings to alot of things (I can do this via system.ini). Port: 220/240, Irq: 5/7, Dma: 1

I can't say how well it emulates AdLib but I haven't heard anything obvious. Wolfenstein 3d works like a charm but it's totally unplayable with the music turned on because it takes up so much CPU.
 
Tried disabling the printer port and some other stuff. Still not able to produce digital sound under DOS/SB-emulation, tried a few other games but still no dice =/
 
I read a bit in the documentation (av20doca.exe and av20doc.exe, one of them mentions jumpers but there are none on the card except for enabling/disabling the game port).

it did however mention that the SB-emulation does not work in protected mode so I tried replaying MODs with the old trusty Modplay v2.19b. It autodetects the SB just fine (I tried clearing the BLASTER-variable to make sure) but it just freezes when trying to play back.

I feel that if the SB-emulation is working at all then it should work with Modplay since it's, afaik, running in real-mode and autodetecting the SB settings.

I wonder what's causing it. Doubt there's a problem with the card since it works just fine in Win 3.1.
 
CloakedAlien said:
I feel that if the SB-emulation is working at all then it should work with Modplay since it's, afaik, running in real-mode and autodetecting the SB settings.
Click to expand...

Don't be so sure -- modplay is a direct-drive player only, which means it uses the "send one sample at a time" mode of the Sound Blaster which was not commonly used and may not be properly emulated by your card. Try DMP instead, which only uses DMA. (Or almost any other player, like Inertia Player, or Galaxy Player, or Cubic Player... at least two of those are real-mode players that should work.)

Have you tried a real-mode game with digital sound, like Prince of Persia?
 
Trixter said:
Don't be so sure -- modplay is a direct-drive player only, which means it uses the "send one sample at a time" mode of the Sound Blaster which was not commonly used and may not be properly emulated by your card. Try DMP instead, which only uses DMA. (Or almost any other player, like Inertia Player, or Galaxy Player, or Cubic Player... at least two of those are real-mode players that should work.)

Have you tried a real-mode game with digital sound, like Prince of Persia?
Click to expand...

Ahhhhh.

I found the players mentioned at http://www.dcee.net/Files/Music/Player/

Downloaded a bunch, the only one that did work was the oldest DMP version. It sounded like crap though despite different settings =P
For some reason later versions of DMP wouldn't work despite having support for really old soundblasters.

And I transferred the first Prince of Persia, it does actually seem to play back digital samples!

Wow, I guess I've learned a few things now =)

However I'll probably have to resort using my Disney Sound Source. I actually ordered a couple of "Covox Speech Thing". Gonna try to connect one to route through the line-in of the audiovation ^^
 
CloakedAlien said:
For some reason later versions of DMP wouldn't work despite having support for really old soundblasters.

And I transferred the first Prince of Persia, it does actually seem to play back digital samples!

Wow, I guess I've learned a few things now =)
Click to expand...

What I've learned from the above results is that your Sound Blaster emulation works in real-mode only, DMA only, but without auto-init DMA in the Sound Blaster 2.0 and later. So it is essentially a Sound Blaster 1.0.

However I'll probably have to resort using my Disney Sound Source. I actually ordered a couple of "Covox Speech Thing". Gonna try to connect one to route through the line-in of the audiovation ^^
Click to expand...

Disney Sound Source uses less system resources, but has an upper boundary on sound reproduction, and has less game support. Covox Speech Thing (or a generic LPT DAC) has better quality, but uses more system resources. Both will work fine on your system, and modplayers will happily support the Covox at rates up to 44.1KHz.
 
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