MiSTer AO486 Core Part 4 – Sound and Music Setup

DOS, FPGA, How To, MiSTer, Posts, Retrocomputing, Retrogaming, Single-Board Computing

The MiSTer ao486 core is feature-packed when it comes to sound and music.

For sound, it has built-in Sound Blaster Pro and Sound Blaster 16 capability – the industry-standard for DOS gaming. On the music side, you have a choice of OPL2, OPL3 and CM/S synth.

Sound Blaster Settings

The default settings are:

Port/Address 220
IRQ 5
DMA (Low/8-bit) 1
DMA (High/16-bit) 5

Many games can auto-detect these settings, but others read resource information from the BLASTER environment variable. To get this configured:

  1. From the DOS command prompt, type edit C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT. An editor application will open. Add the following line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT:
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6
  1. Hit Alt+F,S to save the file, then Alt+F,X to exit

Music and Synth

ao486 supports the following synths:

AdLib was the de facto synth standard in the DOS-gaming era. By comparison very few games support CM/S audio – you can leave it disabled.

Settings are configured in the MiSTer Audio & Video menu, which you can access by hitting Windows Key + F12, then selecting Audio & Video:

For game setup:

  • OPL2/3 can be accessed on the Sound Blaster ports (220-223 and 228-229 for OPL2 only), but it’s recommended to use the AdLib ports 388-38B instead
  • If CM/S audio is enabled, it prevents OPL2/3 access on ports 220-223. However 388-38B still work

That’s it for sound setup.

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