DSP Solutions Portable Sound Plus Mini-FAQ [6/4/97]

Contents

1. What is the Portable Sound Plus ?
   1. Overview
   2. Technical Data
2. Portable Sound Plus and Windows 3.1/95
3. Portable Sound Plus and Games
   1. What’s the trouble with games
   2. Games under Dos
   3. Games under Windows 95 Dos
   4. List of games
4. The Portable Sound Plus and Iomega Zip drive (// version)

1 What is the Portable Sound Plus ?

1.1 Overview

The Portable Sound Plus is a 16-bit sound card which plugs into the parallel port of a computer. It’s great for laptops without a PCMCIA port, or if you don’t want to draw your battery power with a PCMCIA card. It has good powerful speaker, so you don’t have to put on headphones to hear sound, that’s nice. But keep in mind that it’s a little bulky.

It’s made of 2 units, the main one which plugs into the parallel port and has audio line-in, stereo audio line-out, a plug for the second unit and a plug for the power supply. And the second one which plugs into the first one and which has a speaker and omnidirectionnal microphone along with volume control and a plug for headphones (mono only) as well as room for 6 AA batteries (It lasts easily 3 to 4 hours with rechargeable batteries).

The first unit has a passthrough for the printer too. I like the sound quality of the device.

You can get the latest drivers for it from Dsp Solutions ftp site. Dsp Solutions have also a Web Page or from my web space here.

1.2 Technical Data

The Portable Sound Plus has 16bit 44Khz stereo sound (so it’s cd quality) and Adlib music. It can record only at 14-bit 11 Khz mono though. Note that under Windows you can’t have 16 bit sound and Adlib music at the same time but if you use the Wav&Midi drivers, you can get 8 bit 22Khz sound and Adlib music at the same time (ie like a regular soundblaster).

2 Portable Sound Plus and Windows 3.1/95

The Portable Sound Plus has good drivers for Windows and Windows 95, which are regularly updated. To have Midi and Wave played simulteanously you must use the Wav&Midi drivers under Windows 3.1. It is best not to use Windows 3.1 drivers under Windows 95 (for example if you installed Windows 95 over an old copy of Windows 3.1).

The very latest Windows 95 drivers are beta version 4.05, and printing works ok with or without the portable sound plus plugged. The docs even say that it can work full duplex with 11 Khz recording (for example for internet phone) but I haven’t been able to make it work yet. It can also record now at 22 Khz instead of 11 Khz, it works with doom music and sound, and even the gameboy emulator for dos work with it although it needs a specific Yamaha YM3812 chip for sound !

Note that Real Audio works fine with the Portable Sound Plus.

What is interesting is a lot more games can work with the Portable Sound Plus when running those under Windows 95. It does work at a lesser extend under Windows 3.1.

3 Portable Sound Plus and Games

3.1 What’s the trouble with games

Most of the following games, except if stated otherwise, need Windows 95 to work. You should also use the latest Windows 95 drivers, the version 4.05 beta. You can get them on my Web Page or on Dsp Solutions Web site. You can perhaps make them work under Windows 3.1 with a dos prompt with all the best settings in the .pif file.

Let me explain it, the parallel port is very different from the DMA needed for Soundblaster emulation and the emulator bmaster supplied with the device can’t work with games with dos-extenders (ie all recent games).

But Windows 95 emulates in a dos box all the DMA stuff and so on, so a fair amount of the recent games work with sound under Windows 95 because their dos-extender is now more and more often compatible with Windows 95 (well thank you Bill Gates) which is on the majority of pcs sold nowadays.

So there is roughly three periods, old games which didn’t need protected mode which would work with bmaster supplied with the portable sound plus (which is a sort of dos-extender stuff), more recent games which need protected mode but don’t work under windows (their dos-extender clash with the one of windows or the Portable Sound Plus’s bmaster, so you can’t get sound with those games). And new games which work under dos under Windows 95, so the latter can fairly often trick them into believing there is a soundblaster card in the computer thanks to the Win 95 Portable Sound Plus drivers (that’s really an impressive achievement from Dsp Solution’s people).

3.2 Games under Dos (old games)

You must load a program (bmaster, last version is 2.07) to get any sound out of a game. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with almost all games with dos-extenders (ie all recent games). Note that for some games that use Soundblaster I/O mode instead of DMA, you might need a powerful computer (I have a 486-75 laptop which is fine).

Some games i personnally tested are : Might and Magic Series, Raiden, Master of Magic, Wolfenstein 3D.

But a fair amount of the games with dos-extenders can be made to work under Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1), see next.

3.3 Games under Windows 95 Dos (new games)

With the latest drivers, all the games i tested which did work under a dos prompt under Windows 95 on my laptop worked with the device. (That is almost all the games you can pick on a recent issue of PC Gamer).

As the game is run under Windows 95, you’ll need enough ram and processing power because of Windows 95 overhead, and soundblaster emulation overhead. I’ve found that with very recent games like Toshinden or Duke Nukem, the graphics are smoother if you turn off midi music while still keeping sb sound.

Of course i don’t have enough money to purchase all the games to test them, so often, it would be the demo version on cd-roms of magazines such as PC Gamer which work with it.

Most of the games use now Miles Audio interface to determine audio (which work ok under windows 95) or HMA Audio interface which doesn’t (at least on my configuration). If you have a game with HMA do the following: boot under dos, run setup for audio and enter the soundblaster emulation parameters (without testing). Then reboot under Windows 95 and the game will hopefully work ok with sound. Note that a fair amount of games now use only sound for both sound fx and music and not midi (adlib) music.

3.4 List of Games

Doom			Works ok with sound and music. Need at least Windows
			95 drivers version beta 4.00.
Master of Magic		Works ok under dos, but needs a powerful processor
			for emulation

Duke Nukem 3D Sh.	Works ok with sound and music

Descent	Demo		Works ok with sound and music

Descent 2 Demo		Works ok with sound and music

Toshinden Demo		Works ok with sound

Witchaven		Works ok with sound and music

Tekwar			Works ok with sound and music

Command & Conquer	Works ok with sound

Screamer		Works ok with sound and music

Warcraft 2		Works ok with sound and music

Rayman			Works ok with sound, the program will exit twice to
			Windows 95 when you set the sound but just click ok and
			continue to execute it.

Destruction Derby	Seems to work ok with sound, but some GPFs occur when
			you exit.

4 The Portable Sound Plus and Iomega Zip drive (// version)

Well, I have bought an Iomega Zip drive on the parallel port, and of course it conflicts with the Portable Sound Plus.

But it is possible to use them both if you make sure you -never- use them at the same time.

The best setting is to put first the Iomega Zip drive (and to load its windows 95 driver first), better have problems with sound rather than a corrupt Zip disk. Then it should work ok if you follow the above rule, but as soon as you use both you either got a warning from the Dsp audio driver (doesn’t matter) or the computer hangs (much more trouble ...).