Specifications

converter 1.5

2000 - 2005 urr Sound Technologies Inc.
89
When I try to run converter under Windows Millenium Edition, WindowsXP, or various flavours of
Windows NT (including Windows2000), it doesn’t work.
After testing, it has been determined that converter won’t function under these platforms, due to the
fact that these versions of Windows use a DOS emulator which does not permit any program to
communicate directly with the computer’s hardware. Since converter is almost entirely based on direct
hardware communication specifically for performance benefits, it obviously will not get along with any of
these Windows platforms. However, assuming you have supported hardware, all is not lost – simply
create a bootable floppy disk using the self-extracting boot floppy creator in the converter .zip archive,
and configure it for your computer’s soundcard. By using a bootable floppy disk you don’t need to
worry about incompatibilities with your version of Windows since DOS is loaded right from the floppy.
For more information see the appendix on creating a bootable DOS floppy disk.
hardware / interface issues
My Roland MPU-401 (or compatible) is detected and initialized by converter, however no midi
data is received by the software!
This means you have specified the incorrect interrupt (IRQ) for the card in the
hardware.cfg
file. If the
IRQ setting in
hardware.cfg
is known to be correct, another hardware device installed in your
computer may be using the same IRQ number. Try configuring your MPU-401 to use a different IRQ
number, or locate the conflicting piece of hardware and re-configure it.
My SoundBlaster card is found and initialized, but audio input stops a few buffer frames after a
signal is fed into the card!
This was originally an issue on the development machine, where the AWE64 was configured to use
DMA channel 0 as its 8-bit DMA channel. Channel 0 is not typically recommended for use by
peripherals, as historically this channel has been used for motherboard memory refresh cycles, and
while that may no longer be the case on certain motherboards, and the SoundBlaster configuration
utility may claim that the channel is free to be used, it may in fact be used by another device on the
motherboard. In short, the DMA controller is re-programmed by that other device, taking control from
converter and the SoundBlaster card, and stopping audio data input. During development, it was
possible to ‘force’ this situation to work by re-programming the DMA controller chip each time an
interrupt occurred from a complete buffer transfer, but this created significantly decreased system
performance and also resulted in lost samples. The solution is to configure the card to use another
DMA channel that is actually free – try channel 1 or 3.
I get a message saying “Mouse not found” when I try to enable the mouse input in converter!
This error message occurs when converter didn’t detect a mouse or functioning mouse driver when it
was initially booted up. Make sure that you have a valid non-USB pointing device plugged into either
the serial or PS/2 port, and an appropriate DOS mouse driver is loaded prior to running converter.