Yamaha YMF-724 and siblings

J

jbltecnicspro

[H]F Junkie
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Good evening all,

I just wanted to make those of you who want a PCI soundcard that can run in DOS aware of this sound card. The YMF-724 is just a two-channel sound card, but it's pretty much the ultimate PCI legacy sound card. It has a real OPL3 chip, so that your Sound Blaster or Adlib titles will play just nice with it. It emulates the Sound Blaster Pro digital part just fine as well. I have a gameport to MIDI cable adapter on its way from Ebay, so we'll see just how the MPU-401 compatibility holds up. Early trials with none of my sound modules hooked up to games known to throw a fit if they don't find a legitimate Roland MPU-401 device seemed to have passed, and I haven't gotten any errors yet. I'll finalize my findings once I actually get my MT-32 and Sound Canvas hooked up to it though. I'm about to hit the bed right now, but if you all want, I can post links to the DOS drivers for this guy, and explain the process of getting it to work in DOS.

The cards usually go for pretty cheap. I paid $10 shipped for mine. The one huge caveat though, is that it requires a motherboard with Distributed DMA. There's a thread on VOGONS as to which motherboards support it. But if you don't have it, your SOL. Usually DOS and PCI is a bad combination (so I've read), so I decided I'd throw a heads up to anyone wanting to take a crack at a DOS box that doesn't have an ISA slot. Geniune Intel boards seem to be your best bet (I have an old Celeron 1.7 Ghz Socket 478 that's Intel-branded, and the card works perfectly). More to come! Good night. :)
 
Alright,

Not sure if anyone's paying attention, but I figured that I'd report in. I got the gameport-to-MIDI adapter the other day and on its own, the card is more or less a bust. WarCraft 2 - at least the setup program - seemed to work okay. But none of my Sierra games worked at all with it. Hooked it up to the Sound Canvas and played Kings Quest 6 and got a cacophony of terrible sounds. Next, I tried the MT-32 and nothing but Checksum Err's and more cacophony.

Finally, I decided that it's probably due to the lack of a true Roland MPU-401. So I downloaded a nifty TSR called SoftMPU. It's things like this that really do breathe new life into old hardware. I ran the program with the following string:

C:\SOFTMPU\softmpu /mpu:330 /sb:220 /irq:05 /delaysysex

The last bit delays the sending of sysex strings so that the first generation MT-32 units don't lock up or produce errors.

After I did this, I booted up my first game - Laura Bow - with the MT-32, and instead of seeing "Checksum Err" I saw "Welcome to the 20's!", and then the sound came through. Next, I tried Kings Quest 6 with the Sound Canvas. At last! The music played as it should! After this, I'll be trying System Shock.

Other than requiring the SoftMPU to work with MIDI (which should be a given - only a few cards actually fully support MPU-401), I have to say that this card is a go for DOS gaming. The only downside is that it does have a Yamaha XG Midi mode built into it, though it's inaccessible through DOS. A real bummer. Ah well, I'll have to make do with the Rolands. :D Seriously. To sum it up:

+ Real OPL3
+ Perfect Sound Blaster Pro emulation
+ OPL3 means backward compatibility with OPL2
+ Gameport and MIDI

- Requires Distributed DMA
- Requires TSR's to function
- XG MIDI cannot be used in DOS
- No "clean" way to get it to work in DOS

If there's interest, I can post a guide to getting this thing to work on straight DOS. The trick is downloading the right driver (straight off Yamaha's website in japan) and then extracting the right cab file and picking the right files to put onto a floppy and loading them up.
 
dandragonrage said:
Haven't used one of those cards, but there is also: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/Patches-Updates-Misc/UpdatedSoundCardDrivers.html that may or may not be of use to you

My favorite old sound card is probably still the Gravis Ultrasound. Though it's not universally compatible, really :/ (And looking at Ebay prices for them, I am mad at myself for getting rid of mine!)
Click to expand...

Yes, I've never had a Gravis Ultrasound before. For the games that offer exclusive, honest-to-goodness support, it sounds awesome. :)
 
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