dJOS
Veteran Member
I thought I'd try an experiment using my Tandy 1000 EX, with one of my Edge-to-DB25 Printer adapters, to see if it worked with a Covox Speech Thing clone! :D
Programs like Modplay v2 actually recognise my stereo Covox clone properly. I still dont have enough CPU grunt to play mod files properly tho which is disappointing but not surprising.
Btw folks, I have successfully gotten it to play Sound FX, it just wont play MOD files in any recognisable way, likely due to the lack of horsepower in my EX.
Scali: Author may have been fibbing -- I don't think 7.16 MHz NEC V20 has enough power for 12 KHz...
I don't have a V20, but I do have an 8088 clone that can run at 7.16 and 9.54 MHz, and a CVX4.
I could give it a try and see where its limits are.
Covox will be slightly slower than PC speaker I suppose (you need to use out dx, al, so dx needs to be tied up, where PC speaker can be done with an immediate operand: out 42h, al).
In practice, out dx,al is faster. Single-byte opcode. So if GLX kept DX out of the loop, it will be faster.
You'll want to try Galaxy Player, it is by far the fastest MOD player for 8088-286 machines.
You can find it here: http://www.dcee.net/Files/Music/Player/glx212.arj
According to the author, he got 12 kHz mixing rate on his Covox with an 8 MHz turbo XT.
You might have some luck going slower than what you did with Galaxy Player in the video. Like, try 6 KHz.
Scali: Author may have been fibbing -- I don't think 7.16 MHz NEC V20 has enough power for 12 KHz...