Retro Review: Yamaha DB50XG - Part 2
15th September 2024
In Part 1, I introduced the Yamaha DB50XG MIDI daughterboard and we explored both the card itself and saw what other MIDI offerings used the same technology.
Here's the card again:
In this Part 2, I will get the daughterboard installed on a sound card and record a bunch of game audio being played in General MIDI format.
Hardware Installation
The DB50XG's manual actually mentions a number of sound cards that it will work with, but does mention its compatibility with any PC sound card with a "MIDI expansion port" (the Wave Blaster header). The cards listed are:
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16, 16 Basic, 16 ASP, 16 SCSI-2, 16 MULTICD
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32
- Aztech Sound Galaxy NX PRO 16 and NX PRO 16 Extra
- Televideo TeleSound Pro 16
- Reveal Sound FX 16
I won't be using any of these because there are cards with much better and cleaner audio output in my collection.
To this end, I have chosen the modern-day Orpheus 1 card, as it provides high quality audio output and has a dedicated MIDI-out socket. The onboard PC-MIDI isn't really needed here, as it only comes into play for early Roland MT-32 games which won't be part of my testing today - the focus is on General MIDI which came later and works with any game port/MIDI interface that can only handle "UART mode". I won't be making use of the S/PDIF output as I no longer have an audio amplifier that accepts a digital audio input.
The Orpheus has several jumpers that define whether its onboard PC-MIDI chip or the Crystal chip controls the wavetable connector, joystick interface and MIDI out jack. In my case, I have it set to PC-MIDI, which is the default if you opted for the PC-MIDI version of the Orpheus. The other set of jumpers controls the MIDI port address and IRQ, which are set to 330h and IRQ2.
Software Installation
For pure DOS use there's no specific software or drivers needed - just whatever the sound card itself requires. The Orpheus is initialised using the Unisound utility.
Testing
Unfortunately, I've hit a snag. The card was advertised as working and isn't. Sad to say, it's common and dare I say it expected, given the age of the hardware. I run into technical problems almost every week with this 30+ year old stuff, and I take really good care of my collection. Nothing is guaranteed.
I cannot get any MIDI output from this daughterboard at all. I've tried multiple host sound cards and they all work with my other MIDI daughterboards, meaning there's nothing wrong with my configuration. I've tried it on a PC running a Pentium 100 with the ISA bus at a cool 7.19 MHz, just in case it was a period-intolerant issue - same result.
I would end this article here, but I do have some recordings gathered over the years, so to try to close on a high note (pun intended), here's what the DB50XG sound like in a variety of games:
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