AOpen Aw32 Pro = Acer Magic S23A ? \ VOGONS

AOpen Aw32 Pro = Acer Magic S23A ?

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First post, by boxpressed

Posted on 2014-06-19, 22:09

boxpressed Offline

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I was hoping that someone knows whether these two are the exact same sound card. The card I have has "Magic S23A Board" markings on it. Yet, it is recognized in Windows as an Aw32 Pro. The reason I ask is that the drivers that Win98SE wants to load for the card keep crashing the system upon startup, and the only drivers that I can find are for the Acer Magic S23A and not the AOpen Aw32 Pro.

I did find some kind of update for the AOpen Aw32 Pro card, which may or may not fix the crashing problem.

I've read in other threads that this card is nothing special, although an earlier version used a real OPL3 and was a decent SBPro clone. Still, its sound is interesting, and I'd like to know how to get it to behave with Win98SE.

Reply 1 of 1, by gerwin

Posted on 2014-06-20, 23:35

gerwin Offline

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The Aopen AW32 Pro has a CS4232 main chip + CS9233 Wavetable set. So it is quite similar. Also reminds me a lot of the Terratec Maestro 32/96.

The CS9233 Midi Synthesizer has its own interface to the ISA bus, MPU-401 UART compatible. The chips on the left of the ISA-slot-notch belong to this synthesizer, with the exception of two IDE bus chips.

Whenever a card has a CS4235/36/37 chip, it has a OPL3 clone already integrated.
In case of the CS4232+CS9233 combo, there is no OPL3 functionality in the CS3232, but the CS9233 midi synthesizer can act as a weird OPL3 clone.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

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