Feedback on ICH6 compatibility (Latitude X1)

[megatron-uk]

Have just installed the latest 1.7 release on an old Dell Latitude X1 - a pre-netbook sub-notebook design.

CPU: 1.1GHz Pentium-M
RAM: 1280MB DDR2-400
Chipset: Intel 915GM

It uses a SigmaTel audio codec of some description.

So far I've had reasonable success with it:

Title	Variant	Blaster	vsbhda	vsbhda16	FM	Digital	Notes
Xargon		A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes	Yes	Most effects are FM and quite loud, digital fx can be heard but drowned out by loud FM.
Prince of Persia	prince adlib	A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes		FM music and effects.
Prince of Persia	prince sblast	A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	No	No	When started with “sblast” arg, no FM and no Digital FX – reverts to PC speaker.
Wolfenstein 3D		A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes	Yes	Start with 32MB EMS
Blake Stone – Aliens of Gold		A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes	Yes	The “setblast” config tool detects sounds fine. Tests okay. Music and digital FX perfect in game.
Blake Stone – Planet Strike		A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes	Yes	The “setblast” config tool detects sounds fine. Tests okay. Music and digital FX perfect in game.
Doom	The Ultimate Doom v1.9	A220 I7 D1 T3 P330	Yes		Yes	Yes	Music and digital FX working well but volume is odd – anything other than /vol9 is whisper quiet. Set /vol9 and then use the in-game volume slider to turn effects almost all of the way down.
Duke Nukem 3D	Atomic Edition v1.4	A220 I7 D1 T3 P330	Yes		Yes	Partial	The “setup” tool correctly plays back music and digital FX on the centre channel, but left and right channels are silent.
Prince of Persia 2		A220 I7 D1 T3 P330		Yes	Yes	Yes	Select SB Pro mode. Ear splitting loud.

The main issue I've found is volume control. In almost all games I've tested so far, at anything less that /VOL9 it is whisper quiet - as in needing to put your ear to the speaker to hear anything. At /VOL9 the output seems to be jump to ear-splitting, speaker-distorting volumes.

This can be resolved with titles that have in-game mixers; Doom for example, use /VOL9 and then in the mixer set the sound effects down to one or two notches above minimum and it's fine. Xargon on the other hand has really loud FM music and effects with drown out the digital playback.

One oddity I've encountered so far is with Duke3d - the setup tool (configured for SB Pro) correctly plays back music and effects, but the effects are only on the centre channel. When the setup tool plays back 'Left' and 'Right' channel effects the sound is absent.

Also with Prince of Persia (original release, with the gblast driver file) I can only get it to work with prince adlib, when I try sblast it reverts to PC speaker audio. Tried a few different IRQ settings, and they made no difference.

[megatron-uk]

Can also confirm that SF2 works on the same machine and is perfectly fast enough for the mixing.

Have tried 8MB (8MBGMSFX.SF2), ~20MB (AIRFONT_320_NEO.SF2) and 32MB (JNSGM2.SF2 - my favourite so far and quite balanced sounding) soundfonts and they are fine. I haven't tried anything bigger/more complex as I'm really IO starved on the tiny little 1.8" pata drive on this notebook.

Doom and Duke3d both play midi back okay, and the (apparent) speed of the game doesn't appear to be impacted negatively.

[Baron-von-Riedesel]

Thanks for feedback!

Does ICH6 support HDA or AC'97? IIRC it can be switched - in the BIOS? - between those "modes". So what exactly does VSBHDA display on startup?

[megatron-uk]

Being a Dell there's almost nothing in the BIOS in the way of options - so it's whatever Dell hardwire in the BIOS for IRQ's, PCI device settings etc:

Fortunately, it seems to work reasonably well with whatever the BIOS is set up to do.
The only issue I've found on this machine is when I load the Broadcom packet driver (an ODI 'shim' - B57.COM) and have VSBHDA loaded at the same time. I find FTP transfers using MTCP are really flaky.
However, that's easy to work around - I just boot to an alternate autoexec entry that skips loading VSBHDA entirely and instead only loads the Broadcom driver and MTCP; it's rock solid then.

Output from VSBHDA (32bit), and the contents of my (slightly modified) start32.bat:

I load start32.bat at boot by default, but have start16.bat as well as start16m.bat and start32m.bat in my path (same contents as in start32 and start16, but they load a soundfont as well). I figured protected mode without MIDI/GM/Soundfont was a reasonable boot-time default.

[megatron-uk]

I seem to be able to use VSBHDA with IRQ 2, 5 and 7 equally well on this machine - so that at least gives me a little bit of flexibility with troublesome games.

[Baron-von-Riedesel]

Ok, "ICH6" displayed by VSBHDA tells that it's AC'97. I guess HDA mode cannot be set in the BIOS, but has to be hard-wired.

The way the volumes are set in AC'97 is standardized. I will have to check if there's a problem.

[megatron-uk]

The various /VOL parameters at 6, 7, or 8 amount to "whisper", "whisper", "whisper", and then /VOL9 is "FULLL BLAAAAST!" 📢 😀

At first I thought the setup was broken, as with the default (is it /VOL7 ?) I got what I thought was no output - it was so quiet it was drowned out by the noise of my room fan!

What a fantastic achievement though - to previously have this level of sound quality on a mobile device took hunting down various legacy laptops with discrete ESS or Yamaha chips and my Roland SCP-55 pcmcia card.... which even being hardware didn't play nicely in all situations.

Having a mountain of extra choices of machines, and the software synth capability on top is amazing.