Dual sound card advice

[hunterjwizzard]

Long ago I failed to go back for Madam Zeroni after carrying the pig up the mountain, and to make a long story short I can't use Creative Labs Sound Cards under windows 98 on my via Pentium III. I know this story sounds far-fetched but trust me, a gypsey curse is the ONLY explanation for my problems. This is science.

Anyway, my solution to this problem for running DOS games is to use 2 sound cards. I'll use my fancy PCI Gamersound for more recent games(think 1998+) that support PCI sound cards ok. And then I'll drop in an ISA card for the older games and run it through the line-in on the new card. I'm looking at maybe a Yamaha YMF718 or YMF719, but I don't want to spend a whole ton of money.

First off - does this plan make any sense? And second, can anyone recommend a better non-creative-labs card somewhere in the $20-50 range?

Alternatively if anyone's got a really good exorcist I'm willing to give that a shot. But I may be done with Creative Labs cards forever.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Just out of curiosity, what is the chipset of your motherboard? I had no particular problems I remember using an AWE32 with an Intel 440BX chipset; a dual-CPU one. Anyway, on that machine I had both the AWE32 and an Ensonic AudioPCI installed for a while; chaining them together did work, but it creates annoyances like needing to initialize the mixer of the card closer to the speaker to be able to hear the daisy chained one.

Eventually I gave up on the AWE32 because I wasn't running enough stuff that really needed bare DOS anymore and eliminating ISA cards from your system can noticably speed things up. (You're getting ALL the wait states whenever your system has to stop and spoon-feed that 8 mhz parasite.)

 

[Eudimorphodon]

... Agh, wait. I just realized in the Windows 98 thread it was a Sound Blaster *Live* you were trying to use on your box, not an ISA card? I think I must have gotten crossed wires with your Pentium I build thread. If that's the case then, well... I repeat, what is the chipset of your motherboard? The Soundblaster Live *hates* VIA chipset motherboards. Supposedly even the follow-up Audigy has problems. You definitely need a different card for that situation.

FWIW, when you're talking about DOS support you're not missing much without the Live. It really isn't much if any more compatible with DOS than any other PCI sound card. (It literally uses the same emulation software as the older Ensonic AudioPCI; to be fair, it's reasonably decent as these TSRs go, but it's not bare metal support, not even remotely.)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Just out of curiosity, what is the chipset of your motherboard?

VIA VT82C694X (Apollo Pro 133A), its a Tyan Trinisty S1854/400

... Agh, wait. I just realized in the Windows 98 thread it was a Sound Blaster *Live* you were trying to use on your box, not an ISA card?

Correct. And an SB Audigy, Audigy 2, different Life, and SB16 ISA that have all not worked properly in this machine. Hence my sincerest belief in some sort of paranormal explanation and/or curse.

I have not started trying to get the AWE32 working on the P1 yet. Expect that to be an adventure.

FWIW, when you're talking about DOS support you're not missing much without the Live.

Yes. But my Gamersound Fortismo II has no DOS support to speak of. Hence my idea to use 2 sound cards, but neither of them be a Creative Labs because see "gypsey curse" above.

I'm not 100% sure dual sound cards is the "best" solution but I've seen others do it and it seems like a laugh.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

VIA VT82C694X (Apollo Pro 133A), its a Tyan Trinisty S1854/400

Yeah, so there's your problem. Anything PCI from Creative, just scratch it right off your list...

I guess FWWIW I think they *did* release a version of that "4 in 1" driver set that at least *tried* to paper over the problem by tweaking some chipset registers, you could try building up the machine *without* the Live installed, get it up to the latest 4-in-1 and other patches, and see what happens, but I'm pretty sure you're still going to see problems. There's a reason why you had to pry BX chipsets from a lot of gamer's cold dead fingers at the end of the Pentium III era.

Correct. And an SB Audigy, Audigy 2, different Life, and SB16 ISA that have all not worked properly in this machine. Hence my sincerest belief in some sort of paranormal explanation and/or curse.

For all the PCI stuff we know what's up, but I can't think of a good reason why the SB16 is giving you problems. I know people slag ISA PnP a lot, but my AWE32 was the PnP model (which made it essentially an SB16 PnP with the EMU8000 tacked on) and it never gave me any particular grief. I have to wonder if you'll have problems with *any* ISA sound card that emulates a Soundblaster if the board doesn't like this one.

(* EDIT: FWIW, I'm not sure I'd vouch for the ISA implementation on the Via Apollo being that great. That thing I said about ISA slowing everything down; I had an Athlon based system with a VIA chipset that had a single lonely ISA slot, and for a couple months I kept the ISA SCSI controller I used to drive a flatbed scanner in there. It "worked", but when the scanner was running the machine would "hiccup", IE, mouse pointer freezing repeatedly, etc. I don't remember that happening when scanning with my previous machine equipped with the same SCSI card, and when I replaced the card with a PCI Adaptec 2940 that fell off a truck the bad behavior went away.)

Yes. But my Gamersound Fortismo II has no DOS support to speak of. Hence my idea to use 2 sound cards, but neither of them be a Creative Labs because see "gypsey curse" above.

For a single card you might do worse than an Ensoniq AudioPCI. They used to be dirt common and cheap (Creative kept selling variants of the chip as the ES1370/1371/etc, often in integrated variants, for quite a long time after they acquired Ensoniq) and it uses the same DOS compatibility layer as the Live. If "bare metal" Soundblaster compatibility isn't an absolute requirement it might be a cheap date. Granted I have no idea what people are selling them for *now*.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

For all the PCI stuff we know what's up, but I can't think of a good reason why the SB16 is giving you problems.

No one ever could. Even you helped me try and figure it out at times. I could get wav and MP3 to play on it but not MIDI. I'm not gonna try anymore.

I have to wonder if you'll have problems with *any* ISA sound card that emulates a Soundblaster if the board doesn't like this one.

I only own 2 ISA sound cards, the SB16 and an AWE32 which I have not tested at all. I kind of want to save the AWE32 for my P1 build where it is now. I'd frankly rather pick up a none-creativelabs card rather than try it. I *hope* its just CL cards specifically and that some kind of genuine OPL3 will do the job.

I figure, if it doesn't work, it can't possibly hurt to have an extra ISA sound card in the bin... right?

 

[Eudimorphodon]

VIA VT82C694X (Apollo Pro 133A), its a Tyan Trinisty S1854/400

Looking up the docs for this board it’s a real shame it’s not the “A” version with a built in Ensonic ES1373 AC’97 codec. Perfectly good sound chip there.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Looking up the docs for this board it’s a real shame it’s not the “A” version with a built in Ensonic ES1373 AC’97 codec. Perfectly good sound chip there.

You know, its kind of funny, but I did not understand onboard sound cards could be "good" until relatively recently. One of my other retro machines is an old PIII Dell. The day I brought it home from the thrift store I laughed at the onboard sound card and declared "I must put a real card in there!"

Turns out the damn thing's got a genuine OPL3 chip onboard.

Back in the day I would never have bought a board with onboard sound if I could possibly avoid it. I did get this one second-hand, but it not having onboard sound was a selling point back then. I'm starting to re-think my stance on that, but also this board has extreme sentimental value.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I guess what makes a "good" sound card was evolving really rapidly in the late 90's into the early 2000's.

In the DOS era soundcards were largely judged on the quality of their music synth hardware, because that's how you *did* video game sound at the time. (I mean, sure, 16 bit sound samples are "better" than 8 bit samples and there were quality differences at the analog level, but let's face it, for digital samples of a gun going "pewpew" or whatever it isn't going to make that much difference.) This made sense because a 386 or 486 wasn't really powerful enough (and the ISA bus didn't have enough bandwidth) to rely on CPU help with wavetable sound. But once you get into the faster Pentium/Pentium II era with PCI it dawned on the computer manufacturers that hardware synths weren't really necessary anymore; PCI is more than an order of magnitude faster than ISA and has really good mechanisms for DMA'ing straight from RAM. This plus the massive increase in CPU power meant that you could do software-assisted synth with a pretty trivial CPU hit, and that's the philosophy behind chips like the Ensonic and other AC'97-style codecs. Obviously ditching the dedicated hardware comes with a cost in terms of backwards compatibility, but again, if your CPU is five times faster than what most DOS games actually need then as long as you can make a suitably convincing software emulator (with hardware assists like NMI traps) it made sense to ditch all that unnecessary junk.

FWIW, it's worth noting that the Commodore Amiga, a machine that gets a lot of respect for how good its sound *and music* capabilities were, didn't have a hardware synth. It just had a ton of DMA bandwidth paired with a chip that could independantly stream digital samples from RAM and apply modifiers like AM ring modulation. This is exactly how the integrated codecs they started slapping on motherboards in the late 90's work. It's a system that ran fine with a 7 mhz 68000 back in 1985, so it's no surprise that it rose from the dead once PC architecture made it possible again.

 

[Zare]

My opinion on what makes a good soundcard primarily deals with latency and snr. You know, the basic 'what makes this audio system good' criteria. Features are their own thing - I don't find some PCI card worse than some ISA card because it lacks DOS support. It is what it is, and should be judged in those brackets.

You know, its kind of funny, but I did not understand onboard sound cards could be "good" until relatively recently.

Turns out the damn thing's got a genuine OPL3 chip onboard.

You understood correctly.

A "genuine OPL3 chip" is worth few bucks and it's just a backward compatibility gizmo. A welcome one yeah, but doesn't take away from the fact that all onboard cards are crap. (Some have ton of features tho)

 

[Eudimorphodon]

A welcome one yeah, but doesn't take away from the fact that all onboard cards are crap.

I'm not sure how that follows, really? I will grant that a lot of onboard sound implementations suffer from poor analog engineering (IE, I think we've all experienced the joy of having a machine where on top of a bad underlying hum you can actually *hear* things like moving the mouse around because the audio path is so poorly shielded) I wouldn't say *all* suffer from that. Or, at least I wouldn't make a blanket statement that just because you pitched the sound chip onto a separate card it's going to necessarily be better, I've had the unfortunate luck of dealing with soundcards that seem like they must have intentionally built an antenna into the PCB traces for them to pick up so much noise.

 

[MiaM]

Semi-relevant tangent:
I have no experience with the AWE32, but back in the days I tried three different sound cards at the same time in a P-II 440BX computer running Win98. I could run three copies of Winamp, playing a different mp3 file on each card.

 

[Plasma]

For a single card you might do worse than an Ensoniq AudioPCI. They used to be dirt common and cheap (Creative kept selling variants of the chip as the ES1370/1371/etc, often in integrated variants, for quite a long time after they acquired Ensoniq) and it uses the same DOS compatibility layer as the Live. If "bare metal" Soundblaster compatibility isn't an absolute requirement it might be a cheap date. Granted I have no idea what people are selling them for *now*.

AudioPCI is not great for DOS games. They have no OPL synth, nor any sort of reasonable emulation (e.g. ESS). Instead, they use the wavetable to provide an "approximation" which almost always sounds like complete trash. The drivers also require EMM386.

For a PCI sound card that works well with DOS games, I always recommend the ESS Solo-1 (ES1938S). But if the machine has an ISA slot, it might be easier just use an ISA sound card with a driver that has DirectSound support.

Two sound cards together is possible (I have done three before), but you need to carefully manage resources to make sure they aren't conflicting.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

So what do y'all like for a nice compatible none Creative Labs ISA card? I may even do everything on that if I find one I like. I just want to be able to play some of my DOS games on this system.

I'm building a separate machine for real serious DOSing. I'm just looking at like circa 1997ish games that play fine under '98 but don't quite handle the PCI soundcard.

 

[Plasma]

Yamaha YMF-718/719 based cards are pretty good. ESS 1868/1869 are also decent, but I'm not sure about DirectSound support.

 

[Zare]

I'm not sure how that follows, really? I will grant that a lot of onboard sound implementations suffer from poor analog engineering (IE, I think we've all experienced the joy of having a machine where on top of a bad underlying hum you can actually *hear* things like moving the mouse around because the audio path is so poorly shielded) I wouldn't say *all* suffer from that. Or, at least I wouldn't make a blanket statement that just because you pitched the sound chip onto a separate card it's going to necessarily be better, I've had the unfortunate luck of dealing with soundcards that seem like they must have intentionally built an antenna into the PCB traces for them to pick up so much noise.

Maybe you mistook my gist about being interference related. While this is also a big thing, it wasn't. It is about basic signal to noise ratio of analogue audio lines on such cheap solutions.

I don't want to drag this into a long audio related discussion if not needed, look it like this - there is a big market of discrete interfaces of all categories. Usually they run at ~30 euro per channel. A cheap but good stereo out, for driving a discrete headphone-amp combination in most cases used, is about 50e. A proper 2+2 interface with stereo in/out is a bit north of 100e.

 

[Svenska]

So what do y'all like for a nice compatible none Creative Labs ISA card? I may even do everything on that if I find one I like. I just want to be able to play some of my DOS games on this system.

A friend has a fair amount of Creative cards, and many of them have pretty bad audio quality - and some clone cards are great.

I've got an OPTi 82C929A-based card with really good audio quality (very low noise) in my Pentium build, but the drivers are a bit finicky. It is software-configured (but not PnP) and either compatible with the Sound Blaster Pro (8-bit audio) or Windows Sound System (16-bit audio). Comes with a perfect OPL3 clone. In DOS, I run it in SBPro mode together with the stock Sound Blaster drivers in Windows 3.1. The Windows 95 drivers use it in WSS mode for better audio quality. In a previous life, it also hosted a 2x Panasonic CD-ROM drive on a 486.

I'm using an ESS 688 AudioDrive in my 286 build. The audio chip predates ESFM, so the card comes with another perfect OPL3 clone. Very compatible card, but lower audio quality than the OPTi (otherwise it would have been in the Pentium). The DOS drivers initialize the card, and I'm using the stock Sound Blaster drivers in Windows 3.1 (doesn't really matter much on a 286).

Previously, I've used a CT4170 in the 286, together with UNISOUND. Worked well overall, but Windows 3.1 tended to freeze when playing audio. Tried different drivers and ended up replacing it with the ESS card. It has better audio quality anyway.

There is also an Aztec card. I tried its built-in 28.8k modem and crashed the remote BBS multiple times. Couldn't get audio to work reliably either, but that may be me being stupid with its drivers. Didn't bother too much due to the other cards working flawlessly.

Additionally, I've got a few PCI boards. One is an AudioPCI ES1370, the others I won't be able to check for a few years. They are nothing special and served me well for anything Windows.

You know, its kind of funny, but I did not understand onboard sound cards could be "good" until relatively recently.

Later systems had AC'97 followed by HDA (still today). As long as their analog circuitry is good enough, they serve for anything using Windows or Linux. Driver support is good, too. Older systems just embedded the same sound chips as external sound cards, so compatibility is equal to those - which includes perfect DOS and Windows compatibility. Audio quality depends on the board and varies wildly.

On the other hand, I always thought the strange "ARK Logic 2000PV" graphics card in my Pentium was absolute trash. Turns out it's one of the fastest 2D accelerators at the time...

 

[Zare]

Some Creative cards are very bad with noise. I have one very noisy AWE64 Value.

I don't think ARK2000 is an accelerator? E.g. it is just a bitbanging VGA card, albeit a very fast one and very compatible on VGA register level.

 

[Svenska]

I don't think ARK2000 is an accelerator?

They are full 2D accelerators, see the XFree86 note [here]. The 2000MI (MPEG-1) and 2000MT (MPEG-1/2) even contain hardware video decoders.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I'll start looking at yamahas then.