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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I had FM synthesis and AWE working with my ISA SB sound cards but one of 
my motherboards finished dying (the IDE controller card I used to replace 
the bad onboard controller stopped working in there, though it works 
elsewhere) and I had to replace it with something with one fewer ISA slot.


I have some PCI sound cards: two SB Live and two ESS esssolo1.  The former 
two won't work in DOS (address 220 failed, DOS 'diagnose' does not offer 
any choice of io addresses, CTCU does not find the plugplay cards) or 
linux (sb won't insmod - 'dsp reset failed' though I specified io=0x200 
through 280, with standard irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5.)  I think I had the SB 
live working in another computer under linux, without midi which works 
with emuk101 under alsa but not oss.  I think it does not do OPL3 FM 
synthesis because they expect you to use the onboard AWE capabilities for 
playing midi.

The ESS, if I set vol to the maximum with aumix, and turn the speakers up 
too, plays wav files.  It does not do AWE.  I cannot insmod opl3, 'opl3 
not detected'.  I read something online about it having FM synthesis built 
into the card, and also something about port conflicts that prevent OPL3 
from working, and someone provided a kernel patch written in .c which I am 
not going to tackle.  Is there some simple way to play midi with esssolo1 
cards and OSS?

I also have one each es1370 and es1371 cards which I have not tried yet.

If I were lazy, I would replace the internal ISA modem with an external 
one and put back the ISA sound card.

What I really want is to play midi files to the electronic piano through 
the gameport.  I tried this on my slower test computer but even with two 
ISA SB16 cards, one pnp and one jumpered (not using CTCU/CTCM or isapnp, 
which I have only needed before for AWE cards) I cannot get linux to play 
any sort of midi.  playmidi -r gives a segmentation fault.  playmidi -4 or 
-f gives me back the prompt. (On a computer at another location all three 
of these work properly, without CTCU).

DOS programs play FM synthesized midi.  In DOS or linux if I try to play 
midi on an external device it looks like something is happening but I hear 
nothing.  I have no way to test the cable, which has an optical isolator 
in the circuit, or the 'MIDI in' on the piano (where the line out works, 
and the line in works but sounds bad), but I should at least be able to 
get FM synthesis to work right first, so I switched to this other computer 
where I can't get any cards to play any midi in any OS.

To get the DOS programs to stop crashing, I had to set bus speed back from 
75 to 66Mhz x 3.  We replaced the 133MHz with a 233MHz AMD cpu, which 
apparently does not work properly at 225MHz.  Memtest test 5 gives pages 
of errors.  Putting in slower DIMMs did not help.

My partner wants people to know that you can fix clogged nozzles in Epson 
Stylus and C80 printers by forcing air through with a syringe.  These are 
built into the printer, not the cartridge, so there are lots of free 
printers around.  Ghostscript supports the former, as does netpbm in mono.

Did Creative make any PCI SB16 cards?

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org