Hello.

pesarif wrote:
> I did all your patches at that URL (sound + serial) and got:
> i.e. the serial patches required "fuzzing" and the DPMI patch failed.  Using 
> dosemu 1.0.2.1.  What I am doing wrong?
At least one thing: serial patches have nothing to do with sound stuff, so it
is not necessary to apply at all (testing them is a good idea anyway:).
And DPMI patch was diffed against dosemu-1.1.2 and it is necessary only for
better SB detection, but there were some more patches for this, which I am
currently submitting, so detection will be available later. I am excluding DPMI
and PIC fixes from my sound patch to prevent any further confusion.
Don't forget to reinstall your sources after you got rejects.

> And, btw, what do the serial patches do (do they make null-modem games
> work?)?
Maybe, but I was solving a problem that prevented me from transferring files
more that 10Kb size via modem. With that patch I am no longer limited in a
transfer size. I would be glad to hear that it also fixes something else (which
is rather possible).

> > Note2: you have to select "Sound Blaster clone" or "Sound Blaster 
> > or 100% 
> > compatible" in your games, but not "Sound Blaster Pro" and of course
> > not "Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32".
> Why not?  I used to be able to select "Sound Blaster Pro", but I can't 
> anymore in any of my games and this is reducing the sound quality in some 
> games.
This is not a mandatory, at least I hope that all the programs that used to
work with SB Pro before, will work with it also now. I just want to warn you
that some programs will not work if you specify SB Pro, and will work with SB.
I don't want to drop any functionality of course. My original goal was to
completely outperform the old code. But your tests indicates that this goal
will require some more work than I expected.

> I've had mixed results with your new patches.  In general, the code seems to 
> have gotten slower but works better.
What do you mean by "code seems to have gotten slower"? Slow execution
or slow sound? Or somethig else?

> Here are some results of testing:
You have done a very good work actually, thank you for such a detailed
testing (esp. for the comparision with the old code!)

> Program               no sound patches        original sound patches  new sound 
>patches
>                       (sb pro)                (sb pro)                (sb or sb 
>clone)
> 
> Jill of the Jungle    no sound                distorted               perfect (even 
>better than win98!#)
> Scream Tracker 3      locks up                locks up                perfect
> Wolfanstine 3D        no sound                no sound                perfect #
Seems strange: Wolf used to work for me previously. And the detection
problems are Adlib-related I think.

> Swiv3D                no sound                intro works             perfect
> Descent               perfect                 stutters                perfect
> Warcraft 2            stutters horribly       works                   perfect
> Spitwad Willy         no sound                ?                       perfect
What is "?" :)
This all looks very good. Detection problems are deferred, as I mentioned
above.

> Count Down            initial sound, lock up  stutters,clicking       
>perfect,clicking
Clicking is generally caused by an OSS limitations (buffer must be empty
if I want to change speed, I have to reopen (!!!) the device if I want to
change fragment size) or by direct DAC writes (which I can't improve -
pc-speaker problems). So this is also deferred (see below).

> One Must Fall 2097    perfect                 music is too fast       music skips & 
>stutters *
Fixed: http://www.dosemu.org/~stas/snd-patch1-1.1.2.diff.gz
This game uses an undocumented ability of a command 0x1C to set a transfer
length. Previously none of my programs does this, so I didn't implemented
this, while now I can see it was implemented in the old code. Thanks for
pointing this anomaly.
Actually I was thinking that my "test suit" is rather large, but apparently it
was not.

> Liero                 no sound                perfect                 sound stutters 
>*
I can only hope that it is the same problem as above. And if it is not, I need
this game (link) or the debugging output.

> Clyde's Adventure     no sound                partial                 partial
What is "partial"?

> Need for Speed        no sound                no sound                no sound
> Shell Shock           perfect                 no sound                no sound *
Not good. Link or debugging output needed.

> Monster Bash          no sound                no sound                no sound
> Kiloblaster           no sound                no sound                no sound
> Clyde's Revenge       no sound                no sound                bombs out
> Mugen                 no sound                dos4gw exception        dos4gw 
>exception
What??? Give me a link to this one, please! Oh, I beleive it is DMA problems
again:(((

> Commander Keen 4      no sound                no sound                locks up :( *
I guess this game is not very large for download?:)

> Cosmo                 locks up                locks up                locks up 
Not now...

> (for Oliver Ob: with Stas' latest patches, Scream Tracker
> 3 works perfectly  
> if you use SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T1 and it plays MODs very nicely) 
ST3 was a troublesome beast. I added a support for it only after you have
mentioned it here:) It sets a DMA transfer from an interrupt handler when
speaker is disabled, so retriggering the interrupt immediately causes a
deadlock. And also it sets a transfer size for DSP *much* larger than for
DMA, while the sane way is opposite. So it required some dirty hacks:(

> I can't hear the music in any of the games above (except for OMF 2097 and 
> Swiv3D).  This music is sb, not adlib.
SB have the same FM synthesizer as Adlib have (OPL2-based for classic
SB and early SB Pro).

> > Have you tried to select "General MIDI" or "MT32" or something "MPU401" for
> > midi? It must work perfectly if you have /dev/midi working (your sound card
> > must support this feature) and dosemu is properly configured.
> Cheap (but decent-sounding) PCI sound cards such as the Creative vibra 128, 
> don't have MIDI support builtin. 
You can probably use SoftOSS. The problem is that it blocks /dev/dsp so you
will not hear any sound, only music...

> I wish dosemu could use TiMidity++ code or 
I was thinking about it but found no docs. Anyway, this is not for the near
future as I am targeting at improving DSP and DMA now.

> Perhaps ARTS (KDE 
> sound server) should be used since it's higher level and would support
> mixing?
I have looked at both ARTS and ESD and they both doesn't meet the
requirements. I probably have to look at NAS later.

> > api to make it compatible with SoftOSS, that will hopefully allow me to use
> > midi with it...
> : (
> I want adlib! :)
I was suggested to steal an OPL2-compatible FM tone generator from another
project. The code seems good, I will try to make it use under dosemu.

> > > Trouble is, a game that worked perfectly before (One Must Fall 2097 - 
> > Oops, I was not aware of some games that used to work before :)
> This is my favourite game and now it doesn't work very well at all :(
It will. But don't try to tell me that you are going to play on a speed like
that:) (the game doesn't seem to use timer for synchronization). I assume
you are using this game only to enjoy its music (which is pretty nice:).

> This may sound blunt but it still needs a lot of work.
Definitely. But my primary target for now is outperforming the old code.
All other improvements are later, when my code gets included.

> I am, however, very, very appreciative of your efforts.
Thanks:) From your tests I can see that my code is already better then the
old one, which is good and promising fact.
BTW, it is still havily based on the old codebase. Previous authors did a very
good framework so they must also get a credits (I mean Alistair MacDonald,
Michael Karcher and Michael Beck). And the code from some other authors was
completely removed:)
And, as I can see at a ChangeLog, initial work was done by Joel Weber, who
was 15 years old!

> I'll be looking foward to any more code that you can provide.
> Please keep up the good work!
See the link above (or just go to www.dosemu.org/~stas and follow the link
from there).

> This email was typed while Scream Tracker 3 was playing MODs in dosemu in the 
> background :)
:))) Actually ST3 sounds not as perfect as it could on a real soundcard.
The really good player that is 100% compatible with my sound code is
IPlay (Inertia Player). Consider using it instead. It supports tons of sound
formats and the sound is perfect.
For MIDI you can use Cubic Player v1.4 (no other version plays midi for me)
starting it with dos4gw (else it will use pmode and crash).

Thanks again for a very good testing.
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