Hello all. Some of you may remember a post on generation-msx.nl a few weeks back on this PC ISA card. With the help of neogeoman and Saku Taipale, the card now sits happily in my dual boot Win98 / Debian Linux machine. I have done some preliminary hardware investigations on it and published the results at:
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~rga24/computer/msx/msx-audio_isa.txt It's similar to the first version of the Soundblaster Pro, except that it has no 8 bit PCM channel. The lines used on the ISA connector indicate it is an I/O only card, with the ability to signal interrupts. It works with the Adlib music demos on Malfunction/Altair's excellent FM Synthesis Heaven site so the FM parts of the card are clearly in the "right" places. I am pretty sure I have heard sound from both the YM3812 OPL2 and the Y8950 MSX-AUDIO (or at least their corresponding DACs) as sometimes the instruments have the extra waveforms of the OPL2 and sometimes they don't (when they ought to) indicating the MSX-AUDIO is being used. I have downloaded DJGPP to develop some MS-DOS applications, but in the end decided Linux was a more suitable development environment anyway. I hope to have some simple root-user applications working soon, to demonstrate the ADPCM buffer of the MSX-AUDIO. It is worth noting that the MSX-AUDIO has 64K of sample RAM (not 32K or 256K) and that this is upgradeable with sockets on the card to 128K. It is also interesting to note that the card uses the keyboard input port for a variety of control lines including the status of some or all of the jumpers, so it may be possible to write some form of auto-configuring drivers for the card, and the capabilities of this arrangement may be comparable to a Philips Music Module without the keyboard. The card has MIDI using an 8251 clone as well. Finally, the YM3812 OPL2 aspect of the card is also interesting, as you may know that YM2413 OPLL is in fact a register-incompatible subset of this chip and not the earlier YM3526 OPL. I have a seperate and quite long-term project to find out the Instruments ROM code of the YM2413 OPLL using the Test register, and maybe one day if this works it will be possible to emulate MSX-MUSIC on standard Adlib cards and of course the Super Sonic. If so, then the Super Sonic is something of a HardMoonBlaster card as it has both the Y8590 MSX-AUDIO and the YM3812 OPL2 which might be able to emulate YM2413 OPLL for all but the most tricky forms of hardware instrument switching. This is all, of course, dependant on getting the Instruments ROM code out of the YM2413 in the first place. For those that have read this far, I hope I have been able to shed some light on this card, and maybe some of you will be able to find one yourselves on the Japanese auctions or through .jp sellers trading in Western sites. If so, do let me know so that I can keep you informed of all software developments for these cards. Thankyou for your interest, Richard -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
