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Sound Blaster MCV
@5084.ADF
- Creative Labs, Inc. - SOUND BLASTER/MCV
@5103.ADF -
Creative Labs SOUND BLASTER PRO MCV CT5330
sbpmwu.exe
Win
3.1 drivers for SB/SB Pro MCV
sbpmdu.exe
DOS Drivers for SB/SB Pro MCV
NT support- Creative's site sez
"NO" to NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 BUT.. HERE
OS/2 No drivers at Creative Labs
Link to Creative Lab's Download site HERE
Use to find SB utilities
SB Pro MCV
SB MCV
Design Considerations
Empirical Evidence
SB Pro MCV ADF
SB MCV ADF
Hardware Info
SBPro MCV
(CT5330) Original image from Niels
C. Grønlund
CD IN CD Audio
JP1 JY_EN Joystick Enable
JP3 AUDIO_PWD on-card audio amp
JP4 RSPK_EN PC Speaker enable
PC SPK
P2 VR AN7809
U1 Creative CT1341V301
U2 Creative CT1336A |
U3 Creative CT1345
U5 Yamaha YMF262-M
U16 Creative CT5335-127
U24 Motorola LS175
U25 Motorola LS74A
U26 Motorola LS32
U2x ST TDA7284
X1 12.000
MHz xtal |
Peter said:
RSPRG_EN should be a jumper to
enable the "PC Speaker" on machines that can share the speaker among PC
("Beep-beep") and Soundcard. Default is "jumper set".
AUDIO PWD enables the power to
the on-card audio amplifier.
SB MCV (CT5320)
JP1 Unk
JP2 IRQ
JP3 DRQ1
JP4 Joystick Enable
JP5 16 / 32 bit bus
U9 Chips P82C612 |
U15 Creative CT1321V200
U16 Yamaha YM3812
U23 OR gate See "U23
Variants"
P1 MIDI
S2 Mic
Y1 12.??? MHz xtal |
Thanks to Sandy over in PS/55 land for the original image.
JP5 Jumper
>"On the Sound Blaster MCV Card the shunt across the JP5 Jumper is
required only for system such as Model 70 and 80 which have higher I/O
channel transfer rate. REMOVE the shunt across JP5 Jumper, if you
have a PS/2 system with a slower I/O transfer rate such as PS/2 Model 50
and 55."
Darius Vaskelis replies
Apparently the Sound Blaster/MCV originally had the PS/2
Models 50, 50Z, 55SX, 60, and 65SX in mind. It turns out it didn't
work in PS/2s that had a 32-bit bus. So, they modified the original
design, but made it a jumper on the adapter itself. If you run it
in a 16-bit machine, you are supposed to break the solder connection before
trying to use the adapter. Otherwise you'll get unpredictable results.
U23 Variants
Oliver Kluge originally posted as Subject: Re: Here's some info on
MCA SoundBlaster
While all audio-related parts of the card work wonderfully
in my IBM PS/2 Model 80 (16 MHz 386, 1 wait state), the joystick interface
chokes! I debugged the board with an oscilloscope, finding that the IO
interface circuitry on the Soundblaster are too slow to follow a 16 MHz
CPU!!!!!
Creative Lab provided a jumper J5 to initiate a Card Channel Ready
(CD CHREADY) signal to the bus signalling to the bus that the card will
take some more time to process the operation. This really works and makes
the joystick interface work flawlessly. However, the Soundblaster fails
to release this line timely to not disturb basic system operations, so
unpredictable system crashes
occur randomly within 0-3 minutes!
This malfunction probably stems from the fact that CL eqipped
the joystick interface part (not the audio part!) with Low-Power Schottky
(LS) TTLs that might be too slow, especially if your machine is faster
than my 16 MHz 1 wait. As any other MCA board manufacturer does, CL is
best advised to use only Advanced Low-Power Schottky (ALS) or Fast
(F) in the future. Perhaps the PCB layout needs better design.
This is obviously a design fault by the Creative Lab EE
designers. This has to be considered a serious bug in the ciruitry of the
board. Obviously they have failed to recognize that a Micro Channel runs
at much higher clock speeds than normal AT busses and failed to use the
proper TTL IC family for this task (Low Power Schottky (LS) is just not
fast enough, compared to Advanced Low Power Schottky (ALS) Advanced Schottky
or Fast (AS or F). I am sending a fax to Creative Lab suggesting them to
stop delivery of the board until the bug is fixed.
If a 74 LS 32 is soldered in there, try getting Creative
support to fix it.. If there are 74 ALS 32, 74 F 32 or 74 AS 32, the board
should run o.k.
And here is how to solve the proble if you already bought
one, it does not run the joystick AND IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCED IN HANDLING
TTL IC !!! Apply all the usual precautions against static electricity.
Carefully de-solder U23 (74 LS 32) using a vacuum solder pump. Solder in
a 74 F 32 or 74 ALS 32. This should be it.
Design
Considerations
>Is the MCA Creative Soundblaster (Pro) a useble
soundcard, MIDI W95/98 e.g.?
From Peter
Yes - from the principle.
However the card technically bases
on the old 8-bit ISA (!!) card, roughly conversed to MCA and originally
designed for Stage I and II MCA (80286 and low-end 80386 machines). They
tend to cause bus timeout errors on faster machines ... and since you mentioned
Win98 (which won't work properly on most PS/2) these will be your prefered
machines I guess.
Best recommendation: do yourself
a favour, forget the SB MCV and buy a ChipChat or SoundPiper card. They
have been designed and tested to work with the better PS/2.
>My nephew has a Soundblaster Pro running in a
76 Lacuna with DX2/66, Win95 fat16. Clean sound. Can't think of a solution,
if timings is the problem.
Peter Wendt opines:
I would guess that it is a problem
with the relatively low DMA clock on the "older designs" PS/2s. The Lacuna
supports synchro-stream and can run DMA at much higher rates for the individual
DMA-request - the 9595-xMx is an old planar with a 10MHz DMA IIRC - which
keeps the time-slices for the "lower" DMAs a bit short. The SB is known
for holding its IRQ and DMA for extended cycles - which ends in bus timeouts
(and error 107 or blue screens) or choppy sound. The "original Soundblaster"
use the old 8-bit ISA designs, which are not just racers from the bus interface
anyway. And -obviously- a bit off-MCA-standards in their circuit design.
I had that with the Pro MCV2 as
well ... until I decided to remove the card. The Reply Vibra suffers the
same symptom - if you run them with the original SB-drivers. With the updated
versions it runs much better. Have one in my 9595-S20 "aol-gate"
along with a Pentium-133 just now.
Nontheless the sound is a bit choppy
when many tasks run at the same time -
particularly at Windows startup. Sounds odd.
So it is a basic design problem of the SB-compatible cards based on ISA
technology. (As is the MCV2, Pro MCV/2 and the Reply Vibra-16 as well).
Empirical
Evidence
William Walsh wrote:
I have had no problem with my MCV Pro for the short time
that I used it with Win95 and my 9595-0MT with P66 complex. It worked great
there
Ezoto said:
I use the MCV Pro in my 9595 with Win NT 3.51. I
just use the drivers that came with the NT cd and it works fine.
AOX MCMaster and SB Pro
Due to my experiences with said Model 80 and AOX (now
Kingston) CPU boards I am of the opinion that the SBPROMCV is indeed borderline
hardware. But after much digging I appear to have found success.
Hint: I had to change the AOX boards "flush mode" to mode
1 or 2 which changes the way the AOX board's cache is flushed. This has
resulted in much better sound from the sound blaster - including it being
able to find its DMA channel!!? So, it would appear that you have to treat
the
SBPMCV as something like a bus mastering device due to its extreme
timing sensitivities, when using it in conjunction with other devices eg
Kingston boards and SCSI controllers.
Speakers Activate when Printing
>I also have an interesting "thing" happening with the soundblaster
pro driver. When ever my
printer starts to print the speakers are activated!
That's easy! The standard IRQ for the Sound Blaster
(7, I beleive) is the same as for LPT1. DOS doesn't use the printer
interrupt, but multitasking systems (such as OS/2 and Unix) do use them.
Thus, you have an IRQ problem. The simple solution is to move the Sound
Blaster to another interrupt. Of course, if you're out of interrupts
(which can easily happen with a fully loaded system), you're out of luck.
Bus Timout under Windows 3.1
Some of the PS/2 system may encounter a "BUS
TIME-OUT" error when starting Windows in enhance mode after bootup.
We have included a driver "VDMAD.386" to counteract
this problem. The program "WINSETUP.EXE"
will copy this driver to your Windows \SYSTEM
sub-directory and change the following line under
the [386Enh] section in your SYSTEM.INI file.
[386Enh]
; change
this line
DEVICE=*VDMAD
; to this
line
DEVICE=VDMAD.386
NOTE ====
If your PS/2 system uses the basic 8237 DMA
controller (not the extended 82037 DMA controller),
you MUST manually add the line "MCADMA=off" to the [386Enh]
section in your SYSTEM.INI file. e.g
[386Enh]
MCADMA=off
Currently, we have identified that the
PS/2 system model 57 is using the basic 8237 DMA controller
while systems such as model 60, 70 ,80 and 90 are using the
extended 82037 DMA controller.
If you have difficulty implementing the
above procedure, please change the line "DEVICE=VDMAD.386"
back to "DEVICE=*VDMAD" and follows the steps to
start Windows in enhance mode.
a. Start Windows in standard mode first by
entering "WIN /S" from the DOS prompt.
b. Exit from Windows.
c. Start Windows in enhance mode as usual
by entering "WIN" at the DOS prompt.
SBPRO MCV and Audiovation Coexistence
>Has anyone gotten the SB Pro MCV and Audiovation/A to coexist in a
PS/2? I'm running a 9577 and I can't seem to get the little (*) to go away
in the ref partition.
Yes, it works ... after patching the ADF file. What's conflicting
is the addresses of the game port, defined in both ADF's as fixed resources
and therefore the conflict cannot be managed by the POS itself. If you
choose to keep the game port on the SBPro, just as I did, your Audiovation
ADF file @8FD6.ADF should look like the end of this message.
Alain
Also, does anyone have a copy of FORPS2.EXE, the program that can modify
other programs to work with SB/MCV?
There were some bad ADF files distributed with some SB Pro MCV cards.
They wer missing some 'h's in the ADF file, causing incorrect address configurations.
AdapterId
5103h Creative Labs, Inc. - SOUND BLASTER PRO MCV CT5330
Base I/O Address
<"220 Hex"
(io 0220h-022fh 0230h-0237h 0200h-0207h 0380h-038fh)>
"240 Hex" (io 0240h-024fh 0250h-0257h
0200h-0207h 0380h-038fh)
DMA channel
< "DMA 1">,
0, 3
Interrupt
<"IRQ7 selected ">,
5. 3
AdapterId 5084h
"Creative Labs, Inc. - SOUND BLASTER/MCV"
I/O Address used
<"220 Hex" ( io 0220h-022Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)>
"230 Hex" (io 0230h-023Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)
"240 Hex" (io 0240h-024Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)
"250 Hex" (io 0250h-025Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)
"260 Hex" (io 0260h-026Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)
"210 Hex" (io 0210h-021Fh
0338h-0339h, arb 1)
Hardware
General Info
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General Hardware
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SB MCV (CT5320)
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SB Pro MCV (CT5330)
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General
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FM Synthesis
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Yes
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Yes
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Digitized Sound
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Yes
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Yes
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Stereo Power Amplifier
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No
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Yes
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Digital/Analog Mixer
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No
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Yes
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Plug and Play
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No
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No
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CD-ROM Interface
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None
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None
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Hardware Settings
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Interrupt (IRQ)
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3, 5, 7
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3, 5, 7
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8-bit DMA Channel
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1
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0, 1, 3
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16-bit DMA Channel
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N/A
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N/A
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Joystick I/O Address
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200
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200
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Audio I/O Address
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210, 220, 230,
240, 250, 260
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220, 240
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FM Synthesizer I/O Address
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388
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388
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External Connectors
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Mic-In
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X
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X
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Line In
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X
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X
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Line-Out
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X
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Speaker Out
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X
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Game/Joystick Port
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X
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X
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PC Speaker
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X
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CD-ROM Audio-In (SB Audio Socket)
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X
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9595 Main
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