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HD + AC97 audio & beyond the 137GB/128GiB barrier


tillewolle

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On 1/12/2020 at 2:15 AM, loblo said:

Set midiconfig to 1 and run DOSBox with the \LISTMIDI argument and see which device is selected, if it's not the right one, set it to 2, etc, till you find it.

MIXER /LISTMIDI gives me

0 "Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth"

no matter if I set midiconfig to 0, 1 or 2. Munt is running. Started it manually

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Is the mt32emu driver installed properly? Is it working or at least listed in Control Panel Audio Properties?

Is standalone Munt working? In my past experience QT apps don't work well if at all with Midi on 9x.

You could try to use the 9x compatible Munt VSTi by connecting it to DOSBox with a 9x compatible virtual Midi cable and a 9x compatible VST Host.

DOSBox > Midi Yoke > VSTHost with Munt VSTi > Audio Out

http://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#munt_vsti
http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http://www.midiox.com/myoke.htm
https://www.hermannseib.com/english/vsthost.htm

I pretty much guarantee this will work if properly configured.


 

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I tried CHAMP-Ms-Pac-em 1996 and I get an error in SBEMUL.SYS, it appears that it is not compatible with WinME sound when setup with its automated configuration setup. It is a remake of Ms. Pacman 1982. Someone has rebuild the original to a 32 bit program in 2007 available here https://www.classic-retro-games.com/games/maze/ms-pacman-415 . In what looks like an inbuilt window called Free Download there is at the bottom, Download now: Ms Pacman, click on that.
 

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Wizardry 8 is DRM free (not sure though mine was from Steam, Sir Tech went out of business, demo available) and runs with Miles sound system files. It always had a problem on exit that disables Direct Draw and is not KernelEx related. Wondering if Win98 has same problem, that is, after game is exited other games can not be played unless restarting Windows.
 

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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On 1/23/2020 at 2:04 PM, Goodmaneuver said:

Wizardry 8 is DRM free (not sure though mine was from Steam, Sir Tech went out of business, demo available) and runs with Miles sound system files. It always had a problem on exit that disables Direct Draw and is not KernelEx related. Wondering if Win98 has same problem, that is, after game is exited other games can not be played unless restarting Windows.
 

Will try that. Also got a Roland TR-8 MIDI drum device. Any chances to get it to work with Win98?

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Roland TR-8 MIDI drum device: if it pugs into a game port there should be no problems, if it is USB then drivers will usually be required of which I do not think they would cater for Win98.

>"When I used the realtime DOS, software did not have sound on my newer hardware!" Found here. https://msfn.org/board/topic/177150-is-me-really-that-bad/?do=findComment&comment=1146687

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 8 months later...
On 12/21/2019 at 2:45 AM, Goodmaneuver said:

...Believe what you want about the 32GB limit on USB with WinME unaltered....

Since you reminded me of this thread elsewhere, I realized I forgot to post this screenshot that I took back then for this purpose. There is no such limit.

128GBUSB.bmp

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If you use WinME straight out of the box there is a 32GB limit on USB without updating the USB drivers. The internal native drivers had this limit that is why I said the SYS files need to be updated in earlier post but I wanted to change wording a bit on the particular post you have shown as it is not that good. I tried the early pure ME build and I know that 32GB was the limit but it is not an important issue.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
typo
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Goodmaneuver said:
> If you use WinME straight out of the box there is a 32GB limit on USB without updating the USB drivers.
> The internal native drivers had this limit that is why I said the SYS files need to be updated in earlier post
> but I wanted to change wording a bit on the particular post you have shown as it is not that good.
> I tried the early pure ME build and I know that 32GB was the limit but it is not an important issue.

I'm on 98SE, and installed a few updates over the years, but not sure anymore which exactly, and no clue what those mean especially for such potentially deadly HDD-size or partition-size limits. Fixed or not? No clue, an abolute killer prob for backups :( My old internal HDDs were partitioned ages ago to 80GB, and those work fine. But I keep reading USB is independent, that special drivers matter. Either drivers on system, or independant drivers in current usb-device firmware... As additional killer prob have read about some deadly BUG when the HDD was partitioned on XP (?) and later used on Vista/Win7 (? not sure anymore about details, would need to look it up again), and guess depending on used tools...
I could live with max130GB per partition on one of those giant brandnew USB-HDDs (500mb-2TB), partitioned on a newer system and then used for backups on 98SE, but 32gb is almost nothing. Main riddles:

=> What happens when writing "too much" to a huge USB-disk?? Which was partitioned with some tool on a NOT updated XP-SP3 or early Vista or Win7? Perhaps data on this complete partition lost? Or possibly even complete HDD with all partitions lost??

=> Would I even notice data are lost after writing "too much"? Any error message? Before or only after too late? Or just silently messed, and some data still work, but all 'overflow' will be lost?

=> Mainly: is there any chance to check *beforehand* if USB-HDD partitions are "too big"??
.

Edited by siria
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22 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

If you use WinME straight out of the box there is a 32GB limit on USB without updating the USB drivers. The internal native drivers had this limit that is why I said the SYS files need to be updated in earlier post but I wanted to change wording a bit on the particular post you have shown as it is not that good. I tried the early pure ME build and I know that 32GB was the limit but it is not an important issue.

Updating which USB drivers, specifically? The only drivers directly associated with USB storage are USBSTOR.SYS and USBMPHLP.PDR. Neither of these has ever received an "update" of any kind from Microsoft for Windows ME.

Both of these files are directly used, UNMODIFIED,* in NUSB for Windows 98.
* = USBMPHLP.PDR requires a "downversion" patch to allow it to load under 98. This has no effect whatsoever on the rest of the code.

As far as I know, you are the only person to ever make such a claim about this "32GB USB limit." If there were such a limit, it would have been widely reported by now.

15 hours ago, siria said:

=> What happens when writing "too much" to a huge USB-disk?? Which was partitioned with some tool on a NOT updated XP-SP3 or early Vista or Win7? Perhaps data on this complete partition lost? Or possibly even complete HDD with all partitions lost??

=> Would I even notice data are lost after writing "too much"? Any error message? Before or only after too late? Or just silently messed, and some data still work, but all 'overflow' will be lost?

=> Mainly: is there any chance to check *beforehand* if USB-HDD partitions are "too big"??
.

If I had the time to dig through the forum, and through all of the correspondence I exchanged with rloew over the years, I'm sure I could find some more specific numbers. So the following is strictly my opinion, based on some experience and a lot of communication with the "expert" so to speak. So, YMMV.

In short I would not worry about any FAT32 partition 450GB or smaller over USB, and even that number is only because IIRC he said somewhere that SCANDISK would choke at somewhere around 470GB. (USBSTOR.SYS/USBMPHLP.PDR do not suffer from a ~137GB limit as ESDI_506.PDR does) If you don't plan to use 9x SCANDISK or DEFRAG on the partition, then that number can be pushed up close to 1TB. At/around 1TB there is another bug in VFAT.VXD, which rloew also had a patch for, but I would probably not venture into this territory without the entire TBPLUS package, which unfortunately only exists for 98SE (and not for 95, 98FE, or ME).

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Win98 would not encounter any limit as third party drivers had to be installed and NUSB updates were used. Any partition manager with an interface would be OK for checking the USB drive. If all is good the partition should show as it should be but my 2TB Fat32 external drive writes to every part of the disc without error but still has a partition error with Paragon 6 or 8: - 6 says unknown with 185GB free and 8 says invalid partition. I could have suggested it was because of the age of the partition managers but Manager 5.6 (6) on Win7 does not have the error with 2TB Fat32 but 6 does not work with GPT discs. Paragon 8 does know about GPT. Have to write to Paragon for old software I believe but it will be your personal key to use and not just for one hard drive. If the drive cannot be fully accessed then you probably will know about it as Windows may not report size correctly from the drive shortcut/icon if it made one. If Windows does not know the drive format correctly then there will most likely data loss if written to. I run with the 2TB external drive as removable so that a disc check does not occur. It was just preference I have done a disk check before and OK; the time taken is usually related to the number of files the disc has.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
Paragon 9 does not work with Win9x.
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5 hours ago, LoneCrusader said:

Updating which USB drivers, specifically?

The USB hub drivers could make a difference and the USB host controller driver. All I know is on a machine I plugged in a pure Win98 system disk. It did not work the USB drives until I installed NUSB. I got a surprise that it recognized discs greater than 32GB. I had run with this limit on WinME for several years. When using WinME SP1/2 update; USBHUB.sys is updated and I had no trouble working a 1TB external USB drive with USB1 from the SIS 5597/98 board. WinME uses USBNTMAP.sys and USBMPHLP.pdr on my system at the moment.
 

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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