SAAemu : The SAA1099 Soundchip Emulator
version 0.70, by © Aley Keprt, 1996-2002
<incl. the Sam Coupé music player SamPlay for Win32 and DOS>

portions © FMS 1996, portions © Dave Hooper 1999-2001

This is the official documentation for SAAemu, audio part of SamPlay, and possibly other programs based on this SAA1099 emulation library.

Contents:
1. Hardware And Software Requirements
2. Legal Stuff
3. About Sound Card Drivers
4. SamPlay - Generic Music Module Player
5. Known Problems
6. Using SAAemu In Your Own Programs
7. Not Implemented Features
8. Contacting The Author

1. Hardware And Software Requirements

To use SAAemu you need a PC AT 386+ computer with a soundcard. SAAemu supports several soundcards. It should be possible to port SAAemu to Linux or other platforms, but I haven’t tried it yet. SAAemu emulates the chip Philips SAA1099, so it doesn’t do anything else, and it is NOT a whole player. It is intended to be included in other programs (emulators or music players). This release runs on any Win32 system, so you need either of Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

2. Legal Stuff

You may give copies of this package to other people as long as no file is changed, added or removed. This program comes to you WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. No matter what happens, no matter how bad, I'm not going to be held responsible.
YOU MAY NOT CHARGE ANYTHING FOR THIS PACKAGE - DISTRIBUTORS WHO ARE INTERESTED IN THIS PROGRAM MUST WRITE TO ME FIRST AND HAVE MY APPROVAL! (Yeah, even by snail mail if you don't have e-mail access).
USE OF THIS PACKAGE COMMERCIALLY IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN WITHOUT WRITTEN AND SIGNED APPROVAL FROM ME. COMMERCIAL USE INVOLVES ANY USE OR SUPPORT THE SAAemu IN ANY OTHER PROGRAM, IN WHICH MONEY IS INVOLVED (SPECIFICALLY THE CREATION OF ANY MUSIC PLAYERS OR EMULATORS WHERE PAYMENT IS INVOLVED). THIS PACKAGE IS ONLY FREEWARE FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USE.

3. Sound Card Drivers

SAAemu 0.61 supports several kinds of soundcards. Available drivers are: OPL2 (AdLib, SoundBlaster MONO), OPL3 (SoundBlaster STEREO), GUS (Gravis Ultrasound), CMS (GameBlaster), HQ (generic hight quality digital audio driver).

notes:
Aztech Sound Galaxy: SAAemu is capable to produce the stereo sound on Sound Galaxy NX/16 series soundcards using OPL3 driver. If you encounter any problems, configure your soundcard as the regular ”Sound Blaster”. Note that SAAemu currently support mixer in SBPro mode only, so it doesn't work on some Aztech soundcard models.
Gravis UltraSound: SAAemu can play on GUS either directly using GF1 synthesizer or using SBOS (AdLib emulation). Obviously, the direct GF1 driver is better, and THIS IS THE BEST DRIVER of SAAemu.
AMD InterWave: InterWave is supported in GF1 mode, since the new features of InterWave (which aren‘t in regular GF1) are not necessary for SAAemu. Also, you NEED A RAM onboard to use InterWave driver.
HQ Digital Driver: New high quality digital audio driver uses standard Windows‘ soundcard (WAVE_MAPPER) to play digital audio on it. This driver uses Dave Hooper‘s SAAsound.dll emulation library. This is the only possible driver on Windows NT/2000/XP.
CMS: This is new special driver for CMS SoundBlaster and GameBlaster (both by Creative). This driver should provide the best quality, because CMS chips seem to be identical to SAA1099.

You can change the configuration in the audio/SAAemu.ini file.

4. SamPlay - Sam Coupé's Music Module Player

SamPlay is a program which allows you to play almost any tune from any Sam Coupé program. SamPlay is officialy the part of SAAemu package, but it is more than SAAemu itself. SamPlay consist of SAM32.EXE and some data files.

If you still don’t know what it does, type “SAA32 TUNES/TETRIS”, and you’ll hear the tune of the famous Tetris by Lord Insanity of The Lords. If you want more tunes, just copy the music files from your (original only :-) SamCoupé games to your hard drive. I’ve tested it with several tunes, i.e. Shanghai, Out Of Colour, Splat, Prince Of Perisa, Craft, Manic Miner, etc. If you encounter any problems with converting tunes to SamPlay, feel free to contact me (see the address below).

You can also download some nice tunes from the web. Go to the address listed below and follow the links.

You can find some tunes at http://www.keprt.cz/.

5. Known Problems

None at the time. :-)

6. Using SAAemu In Your Own Programs

SAAemu library for Win32 is included in SOURCE directory. The LIB file is for Visual C++.

7. Not Implemented Features

HQ Driver is almost perfect, the others have some limitations:
1. Envelopes aren’t emulated at all.
2. Envelope-ctrl is used only to override the channel-mask bit. (It implies that some tunes, e.g. TETRIS.SNG still plays, even you mask out all the channels.)
3. Noise generators aren’t emulated correctly on OPL2/3 sound drivers. This is due to OPL2/3 unability to play white noise.
4. New DirectSound driver is planned. It will use hardware accelerators (SoundBlaster 64PCI, 128, Live!, etc.). Besides this, I will decide DirectSound gate for the existing software HQ driver.

8. Contacting The Authors

Feel free to contact the authors and send them any comments (and money as well :-).
Any contributions are warmly welcomed. Let you show me I am doing a good thing.

SAAemu web site: http://www.keprt.cz/

e-mail addresses:
Aley Keprt, the author of SamPlay & SAAemu library: aley@keprt.cz
Dave Hooper, the author of SAAsound library: no-brain@mindless.com
FMS, the author of Z80 emulator: FMS@freeflight.com
David Gommeren, the author of Tetris: GommerD@interpac.be
František Fuka, the author of Shanghai music: fuka@fuxoft.cz