Overlooked awesome XG Midi/FM PCI sound chip: YMF7xx???

[Mike 01Hawk]

I'm really REALLY surprised there wasn't THAT much talk about these chips!!! :smt102

I was at the local computer wholesale joint over the weekend rumaging thru their old sound card bin.  Well I happen to find myself staring at a few PCI sound cards with the well known XG label on the main chip. None of them had header boards though (which is what I was looking for), but I figured.. for $3.. heck.. why not give it a try?

Here she is nestled in my new Dell GXpro


Closeup of the flavor of my chip YMF724:


I spent all afternoon being a Google Ninja :smt027 and found quite a bit of goodness for these chips!  Basically it's a flavor of the famous DB50XG  with 2meg wavetable (can be expanded) and Roland GS Emulation + a BUTT load of Legacy Support!  Genuine OPL3 FM synth on a chip!!! Hardware Sound Blaster Pro compatibility (22 kHz 8-bit Stereo).  Heck, even a MPU-401 in UART flavor :smt004 :smt004 :smt004

What was GREAT for my application was I got BOTH General Midi and Sound Blaster support working for DOOM in Win98se!!! :smt020 :smt026 :smt020

Come to find out there's even a nice Wiki for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YMF7xx

On the Wiki there's a HUGE PDF about the chip, and a link to this awesome customizer called PowerYMF that can load up extended wavetable banks! http://www.yohng.com/powerymf/

And here's the site for the drivers from Yamaha themselves, I had to use the WDM drivers to get the FM Sound Effects to work in Doom:
http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/us/support/downloads.html

So, anyway.. I'm doing the happy dance, playing the 2005 Comparison Midi ( http://66.49.226.244/digital/miscellaneous/compare2005/compare2005_gm.mid ) and it sounded decent, even the 2005 "Allstars" Midi ( http://queststudios.com/quest/midi/allstars.mid ) sounded good.  I guess nothing other than Roland can make that nice applause sound right though eh?  

Anyway there's even this SWEET XG file called "Gentle Love" ( http://www.yohng.com/powerymf/files/gentlelove.mid ) that you can get from PowerYMF, I was blown away to say the least when you could hear the guitarist make the sound of fingers gliding on the strings (I don't know the proper term for it).

Well.. I guess all can't be well though, I started to mess around with some other Midis.. and well.. playing T7G samples on this was well... for a lack of a better word... crap! :smt090

Oh well.. can't have everything I guess?  I guess the T7G sucking was because of the XG? These chips support General Midi Level 1 though?!.  However, I'm running the WDM versions of the driver, and I hear that Yamaha messed up the WDM versions so.. maybe it might just be a driver issue.

I did a quick Ebay search and there were quite a few that could be had for cheap! (under $10 shipped).  

I almost feel like I should go back to that Wholesale store and 'rescue' the other 3 or 4 YMF7xx sound cards I saw!

This place seriously had like 100 or so PCI sound cards, butt load of AWE64s, the XGs, a few Vortex2 (I got one myself for.. drumroll.. another $3 ), some SBLives!, all kinds.  I coulda had them for $3 a pop. Hmmm... maybe I should ask the dude if I could buy the whole lot up (kidding) ? I started talking Roland talk with him and he was clueless though  Oh well, that's another thread.

Here's a stupid question, could I get Doom Sound Effects to work with Non-WDM drivers?  I see that there is a "MS-DOS" driver version available, might have to try that out.

If this card works with native DOS, man, this could be a poor man's sound card crutch!!!  :smt055

[HondaSiR]

I had one of those cards some years back...a YMF-744B-V to be exact. Sold it for $9.99 in ebay to a guy in Europe. Wasn't impressed with its MIDI sounds, a DB50XG or SW60XG will easily outperform it due to their superior hardware synthesis. And being a PCI, those YMF cards won't work in pure DOS.

[Mike 01Hawk]

Hmpfh... Honda, you more a gamer or a composer/music listener?

[shad0wfax]

Yamaha YMF 724/744 chipsets are quite interesting and good sounding (a cheap alternative to a real DB50XG/MU50 and the like), but they have at least two serious problems, and this explains (at least in part) why they're so cheap now. 1) One main problem is drivers. Especially Win 2000/XP support is poor and there are many problems in any modern setup to make them work properly. 2) Another problem has been pointed out by Honda: as they're PCI cards they're not really DOS-compatible.

This makes those cards to be in a "no man's land" between vintage and modern setups, causing problems in either systems. And if you're really interested in XG, you'll always prefer some kind of "real XG hardware (DB50XG, SW60XG, MU10, MU15, MU50 and the like). They sound better and they are also quite cheap these days.

[glendower]

Whao... the SW1000XG doesn't apparently do fretnoise! DB50 does... I'm more than a tad shocked. I'll keep digging through the sounds, but i sure don't see it!

I'm going to have to stop looking for ways to be disappointed  :oops:  The first time I played that gentlelove.mid the guitar fret noise was replaced with piano sounds... I couldn't find fret noise in XGWorks so I assumed that it wasn't there... now it's working properly.

Anyway, to be on topic, I have a card with the 724 chip on it. It didn't last long but I wanted to give it a shot. I thought that it would be a replacement for one of my 'real' xg cards... but after using DB50XG and a couple of SW60XGs, it was a bit disappointing, so it was swapped back for a SW60 and a different digital card. I think it's in my brother's computer right now :>

[Rhizome]

I have 2 of these type of chips (one being the YMF744 and the other being a YMF724). I currently use the YMF724 in this PC for it's XG synthesizer (since the Audigy's MIDI synthesizer is poor).

Strangely enough, the Pentium 2 system I have for legacy sound cards has a YMF724 onboard! Best onboard audio I'll admit  :wink:

[HondaSiR]

Hmpfh... Honda, you more a gamer or a composer/music listener?

I'm more of a gamer...well...was a gamer since I'm not playing any games as of late.

[Mike 01Hawk]

Well, I thought w/ the dos drivers it would work in plain dos.  I'm having problems though.

Anyone wanna lend a hand? (this is dos mode in win98se)

[runderwo]

The YMF chips are DOS compatible with a full set of onboard legacy hardware.  They also support both D-DMA and PC/PCI protocols.  If your motherboard has a SB-Link connector, you can read the datasheet of the YMF chips and hook the chip directly up to that if the board includes no PC/PCI header.  Fortunately, yours does but you have not hooked it up.   Some mainboards have no PC/PCI header, again it is possible to read the southbridge datasheet and wire the sound card directly to the south bridge.

[Laust]

How do you propose hooking something up directly to a BGA chip?

[runderwo]

Many times the pins are routed somewhere on the board and a header is simply not installed.

I have several PCI motherboards with non-BGA south bridges, so you could go that route too, using wire-wrap wire and careful soldering.