                Empire Deluxe Sound Card Support

November 19, 1993


    With Version 3.11a, we have added support for a number of newer Sound
Cards for both Sound Effects (digital audio) and Music.  The following will
describe some of the additions:

    Support has been added for cards based on the ARIA chipset, from Sierra
Semiconductor.  This chipset provides for General Midi-compatible music.
Most of these cards offer SoundBlaster-compatible digital sound capability.
Users of these sound cards should select the "Sound Blaster Clone" selection
for Sound Effects, and "ARIA chipset" for Music within the Empire Deluxe
EConfig program.

    Creative Labs SoundBlaster line has expanded.  We now have included
support for the SB-16 (with or without the ASP or CSP addon), and for the
WaveBlaster daughterboard (an add-on for the SB-16).  While the WaveBlaster
worked well with the previous versions of Empire Deluxe in it's Roland MT-32
emulation mode, this required you to remember to run the "wbmode" command to
set the WaveBlaster into MT32 mode.  Now with the WaveBlaster option for
music, Empire Deluxe will play music on the WB using its default General Midi
configuration.

    It is becoming obvious that General MIDI is becoming the standard for
computer music.  Previous versions of Empire Deluxe were based on the older
MT32 standard.  While this support has been retained, we have also added
support for the newer standard, and have added selections in the Music
drivers for the Roland Sound Canvas as well as a generic "MPU401 General
MIDI", which supports a number of newer cards that provide this standard.

    The Turtle Beach MultiSound is a high-end (i.e., expensive) sound card
designed primarily for the Windows environment.  We now have drivers that
support this card in the DOS environment.  However, the music driver assumes
that the correct patches have been downloaded to the card - we are using the
"General MIDI" patch set.  Consult the documentation that comes with your
MultiSound for information on downloading patches to the card.

    The Windows Sound System from Microsoft is now supported.  There are no
special considerations for this card.

    We now support the Gravis Ultrasound in its native (non-emulation) mode,
using the Ultramid driver (included with Empire Deluxe).  The good news is
that this sounds very good (much better than when running with SBOS).  The
bad news is that this Ultramid driver uses up approx. 56000 bytes of
conventional memory, which is a limited resource.  Consequently, you are more
likely to receive a "Short on Memory, Terminating Sound" error message in
Empire Deluxe.  Unfortunately, we cannot reclaim and reuse the memory taken
up by Ultramid, as this is loaded prior to Empire Deluxe's running.

    If you have selected the Ultrasound for your Sound Effects and Music
drivers (in the EConfig program), you MUST run the supplied GRAVIS.BAT file
INSTEAD of the "EMPIRE" program, or you will not get any sound.  This batch
file will load the Ultramid TSR, start up the Empire Deluxe program, and then
remove the TSR from memory when you Quit Empire.

