The strange thing is, even though I find CPUs with the Netburst architecture to be useless, I personally think that other CPUs made around the same time (such as Athlon XPs, early Athlon 64s, and Pentium Ms) actually still work fine for day to day use (such as surfing the web, writing documents, etc). I mean, I wouldn't take an Athlon XP over a Core i7, but I would definitely take it over a Pentium 4.

Never understood the hate of PCI audio cards. In my 3DFX Voodoo1/Rendition Verite V2200 rig for older Glide games I've always used a SoundBlaster Live. The DOS drivers Ensoniq developed are fantastic and I've not had a single issue using them with DOS games such as Carmageddon etc. That and the fact that the AWE64 is a noisy card, I wouldn't bother with it myself. Still have a couple of em floating around 😜

Well, there is a certain amount of bullshit around alot of these topics so it's best not to believe everything you read, even on vogons. For one thing some people love a bandwagon to jump on, and for another some people insist on spouting even if they know nothing [not that they necessarily admit that], etc. Not meaning to offend anyone, this is a really good forum though if the cap fits wear it 😉.

But it's best to take what you see here as advice but not the gospel truth, do your own trials and find what's best for you. And try to discern who the experts are and why they are saying what they say. Usually it comes down to horses for courses.

fwiw, I only use ISA cards if there's some reason to want a particular authentic noise for some old game [and that's only because I find playing with old h/w addictive, nostalgic etc]. If I could control my habit, I'd use dosbox and kick this crap into the undergrowth 😜.

RichB93 wrote:

Never understood the hate of PCI audio cards. In my 3DFX Voodoo1/Rendition Verite V2200 rig for older Glide games I've always used a SoundBlaster Live. The DOS drivers Ensoniq developed are fantastic and I've not had a single issue using them with DOS games such as Carmageddon etc. That and the fact that the AWE64 is a noisy card, I wouldn't bother with it myself. Still have a couple of em floating around 😜

About sound cards, the thing I have been wondering about for a long time now is:What benefits do ISA sound cards have vs PCI sound cards apart from the wider variety of sound architectures (meaning you have more choice) and the possibility to add a daughterboard (meaning you uhm..have even more choice 😜 )?

I know the earliest PCI cards used a lot of software emulation (to call it that way) instead of using real hardware chips, but otoh I also heard that having an ISA card in your system slows the PCI bus down?

Looking at that, would it make sense to put a PCI sound card in a Socket 3 hotrod using Windows 9x?

Tetrium wrote:

About sound cards, the thing I have been wondering about for a long time now is:What benefits do ISA sound cards have vs PCI sou […]
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RichB93 wrote:

Never understood the hate of PCI audio cards. In my 3DFX Voodoo1/Rendition Verite V2200 rig for older Glide games I've always used a SoundBlaster Live. The DOS drivers Ensoniq developed are fantastic and I've not had a single issue using them with DOS games such as Carmageddon etc. That and the fact that the AWE64 is a noisy card, I wouldn't bother with it myself. Still have a couple of em floating around 😜

About sound cards, the thing I have been wondering about for a long time now is:What benefits do ISA sound cards have vs PCI sound cards apart from the wider variety of sound architectures (meaning you have more choice) and the possibility to add a daughterboard (meaning you uhm..have even more choice 😜 )?

I know the earliest PCI cards used a lot of software emulation (to call it that way) instead of using real hardware chips, but otoh I also heard that having an ISA card in your system slows the PCI bus down?

Looking at that, would it make sense to put a PCI sound card in a Socket 3 hotrod using Windows 9x?

True. The only ISA card I use now is a TerraTec EWS64 simply for the Dream 9407 MIDI on it. Regarding PCI soundcards on older platforms: If it works, go for it I'd say. Problem is though that older boards tend to have problematic PCI I believe. And this could have a knock on effect on other devices possibly, but I'm not sure.

Tetrium wrote:

I know the earliest PCI cards used a lot of software emulation (to call it that way) instead of using real hardware chips, but otoh I also heard that having an ISA card in your system slows the PCI bus down?

Looking at that, would it make sense to put a PCI sound card in a Socket 3 hotrod using Windows 9x?

Socket 3 / 486 PCI chipsets tend to have rather awful PCI performance and CPU utilization so PCI cards don't really benefit the platform much.

I wouldn't say that the earliest PCI sound cards are all dumb codecs. For example the original Diamond Monster Sound had the first hardware DirectSound3D / A3D implementation and hardware mixing using a Analog Devices DSP. The MX200 version even has a fantastic MIDI DB attached. They only do DOS support in a 9x DOS box though.

swaaye wrote:

Socket 3 / 486 PCI chipsets tend to have rather awful PCI performance and CPU utilization so PCI cards don't really benefit the platform much.

I wouldn't say that the earliest PCI sound cards are all dumb codecs. For example the original Diamond Monster Sound had the first hardware DirectSound3D / A3D implementation and hardware mixing using a Analog Devices DSP. The MX200 version even has a fantastic MIDI DB attached. They only do DOS support in a 9x DOS box though.

The PCI performance sounds like an issue indeed. Would this result in stottering/slowdowns while gaming?

Tetrium wrote:

The PCI performance sounds like an issue indeed. Would this result in stottering/slowdowns while gaming?

I remember Live slowing down faster PCs with this in DOS games with occassional stutter, nevermind the 486...

Also the Live! is a terrible choice for DOS games - no sound blaster effects support for Sierra SCI games, and there's also the ASS sound system reverb echo crash (aka the Duke3D / Blood / Shadow Warrior Live crash)

The DOS drivers that most PCI cards use are essentially ISA sound card emulators so yeah they probably have significant CPU usage. But considering people were using these with CPUs like Pentium 3 and Athlon that's a secondary concern.

The topic is Windows 9x games though.

Tetrium wrote:

The PCI performance sounds like an issue indeed. Would this result in stottering/slowdowns while gaming?

PCI simply does not have the same benefits for 486s because of subpar chipsets and CPUs that are already the main bottleneck in most cases anyway.

I have used AWE64 or AWE64 gold in as many computers as I could. I no stranger to setting things up, but I had some Live! PCI cards but could never even get those to work right! I have some sound blaster 16 PCI cards which are okay - but IMHO if you're going to be running DOS games, even if that isn't the computer's whole function, use an ISA sound card.

I scored a Hercules GameTheatre XP for my Win98 box. It's got enough inputs to connect ALL my retro PCs to one single set of speakers, AND the driver disk includes a copy of the Yamaha XG wavetable synth.