ASP/CSP Upgrade Chip for SB16 & AWE32

[Great Hierophant]

I have heard that there was a special chip to upgrade early versions of the SB 16 and the SB AWE32, variously called the Advanced Signal Processor or CSP.  It used Q-Sound technology, seen in arcade machines, and was a very capable chip in its own right.  Unfortunately, not many games supported it, but did any?  Also, most Sound Blaster 16s have a socket instead of a chip, but apparently some cards have the soldered to the board.  Which CT models are known to have them integrated?  Finally, is the chip available from any source (other than discarded boards?)

[BlueMax]

I had one.  The SB16 SCSI-2 was an example of one that did.

Nothing used it.

[apeman]

I also had the SB 16 ASP, the only thing I remember that used the chip was some software for text to speech that came with the card...

[Cloudschatze]

Unfortunately, not many games supported it, but did any?

TFX supports QSound via the ASP/CSP.

I just got through testing with a non-patched, diskette version of the game. The CSP manager needs to be loaded, and WFM0001A.CSP should be present in "%sound%"\CSP for it to work.

Whew, old thread revival...   

[Amigaz]

Unfortunately, not many games supported it, but did any?

TFX supports QSound via the ASP/CSP.

I just got through testing with a non-patched, diskette version of the game. The CSP manager needs to be loaded, and WFM0001A.CSP should be present in "%sound%"\CSP for it to work.

Whew, old thread revival...   

What difference did it make? 

[Great Hierophant]

Unfortunately, not many games supported it, but did any?

TFX supports QSound via the ASP/CSP.

I just got through testing with a non-patched, diskette version of the game. The CSP manager needs to be loaded, and WFM0001A.CSP should be present in "%sound%"\CSP for it to work.

Whew, old thread revival...   

What difference did it make? 

Yeah, share your wisdom with us!

[Cloudschatze]

TFX

TFX - with CSP/QSound

"Six thawsund feet." YEE-HAW

[Amigaz]

TFX

TFX - with CSP/QSound

"Six thawsund feet." YEE-HAW

Wow, the thunder sounded way better qith the QSP/ASP

[jharris01]

The stereo panning effects as well. Bullets going left and right! (ha ha ) I always wondered if there were any games out there that used the ASP in those SB16s that had them. Nice find.

[petieken]

Old topic revival

Are there any other games besides TFX that effectively used the ASP/CSP? Maybe someone encountered one in the meantime...

[TheMAN]

necroing again...
I didn't even know there was even a game that supported the chip... now I have to go find it! nobody bought the SDK for the ASP chip because it was too expensive and the license was so restrictive... creative was very secretive about this chip and even QSound Labs was frustrated at helping Creative make the drivers for it... that's why it's half broken!

I made do with using the drivers in DOS and also hacked together myself drivers so that it worked in 95... games DID sound better with it, even if I wasn't getting the full potential of QSound (like I said... it's half broken)

for 9x, what I did was copied the ACV and CSP files from the latest drivers (revision 16 last time I checked), installed the OLDER revision 5 drivers (which didn't support full duplex or direct sound IIRC... but rev 5 drivers were the last ones to properly run the ASP chip and thus allow QSound... rev 6 was when they started the Aureal 3D sound nonsense)... then the QSound Control Panel app (which is 16bit and get only by installing the CSPU drivers) MUST be running minimized in the background for it to work under windows... default settings do not work, you must set the settings to maximum pan

after doing that, QSound worked both under windows and playing DOS games through windows
strangely enough, running the QSound Control Panel app itself also allowed QSound to work under NT (I believe those ACV/CSP files also needed to be copied over)



in any case, I don't know exactly what creative did to kill the QSound functionality in the revision 6 and newer 9x drivers... I tried the newer ones and it just didn't work/sound right, so I always stuck to the revision 5 drivers which didn't have any stability issues whatsoever

call me OCD, but I demand to be able to use something I spent my hard earned money on... creative not letting me use the ASP chip with newer drivers that broke it and very little documentation (which forced users to figure things out) was very aggravating... what's the point of having the chip if you can't use it (I did buy the very rare and expensive ASP addon upgrade package too, which eventually made its home in an unused brand new CT1779)?

And no, Text to Speech doesn't need the chip... this was demonstrated quite well with the later "value" SB16s which didn't have this chip... it worked even with the Vibra16 cards... VoiceAssist works fine without the chip also... the only thing that really used the chip and needed it was QSound and the hardware compression/decompression of those obsolete sound codecs