mholtz@sactoh0.UUCP (Mark A. Holtz) (06/30/90)
I just have a few questions about the Sound Blaster.
* Can you hook up two joysticks to the Sound Blaster?
* Do I have to load up a special driver to get Adlib compatibility?
--
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"Remembrance of the Daleks" ??? {pyramid sun}!pacbell! /popeye@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Karl Richard Buck) (07/01/90)
mholtz@sactoh0.UUCP (Mark A. Holtz) writes: >I just have a few questions about the Sound Blaster. >* Can you hook up two joysticks to the Sound Blaster? No, but you can disable the joystick port and put in a seperate joystick card. >* Do I have to load up a special driver to get Adlib compatibility? No, at least not for games. I only know of one program that specifically requires you to load a sound driver, and that is the playrol program (plays .rol files). -- 731 Moro popeye@matt.ksu.ksu.edu Manhattan, KS 66502 popeye@ksuvm.ksu.edu (913)537-3666 kxb@phobos.cis.ksu.edu
dmorin@wpi.wpi.edu (Duane D Morin) (07/11/90)
I would like to add what I consider a very important question to the list of CMS questions: How dependent on RAM is the digitizing section of the board? I have only a 640K machine, and I want to be able to sample at least a few seconds of data for various sound effects. Can I do this? Do I need to keep my sounds in memory or do they get sent off to hard disk? Should I just scrap the deal and wait till I get a 2meg 286? DDM
huffman@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Bill Huffman) (07/12/90)
In article <13958@wpi.wpi.edu> dmorin@wpi.wpi.edu (Duane D Morin) writes: >I would like to add what I consider a very important question to the list >of CMS questions: How dependent on RAM is the digitizing section of the >board? I have only a 640K machine, and I want to be able to sample at >least a few seconds of data for various sound effects. Can I do this? >Do I need to keep my sounds in memory or do they get sent off to hard disk? >Should I just scrap the deal and wait till I get a 2meg 286? The sampling rates on the Sound Blaster you can choose from are 4000 to about 12000 per second. Each sample takes 1 byte. At 8000/sec it has very good quality. 6000 sounds almost as good. You should be able to sample over 30 seconds easy. After recording you can compress the data and write it out to disk. There is a utility that will combine sound files. Another utility can be called by a batch control string (for example) and "play" a sound file. I don't think the program uses extended or expanded memory, so the extra memory probably wouldn't help much.
zech@leadsv.UUCP (Bill Zech) (07/12/90)
In article <13958@wpi.wpi.edu> dmorin@wpi.wpi.edu (Duane D Morin) writes: >I would like to add what I consider a very important question to the list >of CMS questions: How dependent on RAM is the digitizing section of the >board? I have only a 640K machine, and I want to be able to sample at >least a few seconds of data for various sound effects. Can I do this? >Do I need to keep my sounds in memory or do they get sent off to hard disk? >Should I just scrap the deal and wait till I get a 2meg 286? > >DDM The Sound Blaster uses a DMA channel to drive the DSP chip. DMA is simplest when it talks to RAM below the one meg line, so a 640K system is fine. DMA is transfered in blocks up to 64K. That's about 64,000 samples at 8-bit resolution, more if you have compressed the data using the ADPCM (?) compression the SB suports in its DSP chip. Lots of digital sound files sound OK at about 11,000 samples/sec (you can vary the speed, of course), so one full size DMA block can give you about 5-6 seconds. When an end of DMA transfer is detected by the DSP chip, it can interrupt the PC on one of 4 IRQ lines. The PC software (VOXKIT, etc.) may then reprogram the DMA controller to transfer starting with a new block. This can be done as often as you have memory and/or can fill it. The SB and DMA channel do not support double buffering (ping-pong, if you will), so at the end of each block you will experience a small glitch while you start up the next block. In practice, I have not found this to be noticable. Note that the IRQ line is only used in conjunction with the DSP chip. It is *not* used in playing music with either the Adlib or CMS music channels. I have converted various sound files from the MAC world to .VOC files for the SB, and they sound fine. There are quite a few located on CIS. For a variety of music files, sound effects, lines from movies and TV programs, try the MACFUN forum on CIS, and also check the IBMNEW/music forum on CIS. There is lots of stuff there. I got a bunch this morning. - Bill CIS 73547,1034