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Does anyone know of a way to get the music for the Crystal Dream demo to play on a SoundBlaster 16? It only has options of choosing SoundBlaster or SoundBlaster Pro. Selecting these options gives the error "Could not find output device". Does the demo access the hardware directly and therefore the hardware needs to actually be there, not just a compatible device? Any ideas?

Thanks

I have also a SB16 (clone) and there is no sound with it. But what's up with building a cheap DAC for the printer port? I have one since the early 90s and it sounds better than the old SB cards :)

Good idea. I didn't know that they sounded that good. I'll give it a try.

...researching...

I think that I will build the simpler circuit, without any ICs - maybe the fancier stereo one later. The only difference between the various circuits that I've found are the resistor values. Do you have any insight into what the correct values should be? It seems like they need to be pretty accurate since they should be 1% tollerance.

Thanks

Links to LTP DACs:
The Crystal Dream demo readme
http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/dacs.html
http://kiarchive.relcom.ru/pub/msdos/hardware/doc/soundcard/dac/covox.zip
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/ROot/phil/hypertexte/gamesound/pcsound-main.html

Triton's "Crystal Dream", the first one? Yes, there are problems running it on a sb-board, strange enough. But once, many years ago, I managed to get sound out of my soundblaster.. I used a emulator, which could emulate one soundcard on another, including LPT DAC's on a SB, if I'm not completely wrong. I think the emulator was called something like "remus". You have to run it in pure dos, no v86-mode, so unload that emm386 and try. Good luck =)

Sweet! Thanks a lot for the tip fox. Remus works great once you've found the right settings. Here is what I did to get it to work with Crystal Dream (1st one by Triton) on an SB16:

Get Remus:
http://sorry.vse.cz/dimension/rdos/remus/

Load Remus:
remus.exe sblr /p220 ston /p378

Load Crystal Dream:
crystal.exe
3 - Sound player, STEREO
1 - LPT1
3 - 16 kHz - Anything higher than 16kHz and it won't run properly.

The above config works perfectly on a P133 (What I'm using)

"Good idea. I didn't know that they sounded that good."

Not too surprising =) Early SB replay code was simply horrible -if it didn't crash, it sucked so much you wished it did. Creative was not very generous with info on their cards back then, and the hardware was blessed with inferior DACs to finish it off (raise your hand if you ever heard of shielding plates for Soundblaster cards). Those DAC thingies we're pretty nifty in comparison -either you built them yourself or bought them from conventions for hardly €18 with a bunch of software to make 'em shine. That price was considered a ripoff, but they were simply awesome. Go for those links a build one anyway, for oldskool's sake!! =)

Crystal Dreams works even with 286/10/VGA/SB!

(That said, the link above 404s on web.archive.org as well, even at times way before the link was posted here.)

Found this ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/resources/code/utils/remus04e.zip

The original SB detection routines are broken and don't work properly on faster PCs (even with a real SB).
Patched binaries can be found here: http://bohemiq.scali.eu.org/crystfix.zip
Worked for me anyway, on a 486DX2-80 with SB Pro.
Might fix problems for others as well.

so finally Crystal Dreams works even with 286/10/VGA/SB!

Last time I heard, Crystal Dreams works even with 286/10/VGA/SB!

Last time I heard, this thread had been dead for 11 years.

A kid that was born when this thread was made could now make a demo and own the shit out of everybody! :O

Think about that!

*thinking*

as long as his demo works with 286/10/VGA/SB!!!

*calculating*