It's not a card in that case. It's a chipset.

If it has a docking station you could try shoving your favorite ISA sound card in that, but at that point it's not really a laptop anymore 😀

Thanks for the fast reply 😜 In your opinion, how decent is the es1869 compared to the sb16, or do you not know?

If your laptop supports PCMCIA you could try that PCMCIA Sound Cards

Danfun64 wrote:

Thanks for the fast reply 😜 In your opinion, how decent is the es1869 compared to the sb16, or do you not know?

ESS Audiodrive chips are good DOS options. ES1869 is a SBPro2 compatible chip in DOS. Its FM synth is very similar to OPL3.

Some late DOS games support Audiodrive natively and I think that allows 16 bit digital audio like a SB16. 16 bit support isn't super important for DOS games though as not many use high quality samples anyway.

Recordings
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/uc37ntgrkgxh … Card_Recordings

It supports PCMCIA, but I have the slot occupied with an ethernet adapter. I should probably get a USB hub and a usb-ethernet adapter for my sole USB port on that laptop (yes, it's new enough to have a USB port.)

When I used my old laptop with Boom, the sound effects seem lower quality compared to modern source ports (even chocolate doom) or running Boom in Dosbox. If I did get a PCMCIA sound card, I would prefer it to have HQ sound effect support.

Danfun64 wrote:

When I used my old laptop with Boom, the sound effects seem lower quality compared to modern source ports (even chocolate doom) or running Boom in Dosbox. If I did get a PCMCIA sound card, I would prefer it to have HQ sound effect support.

For DOS games the ES1869 emulates a SBPro2, meaning digital sound effects will run at 8-bit, 22.05 kHz stereo (or 44.1 kHz mono). In Windows, the ES1869 is a 16-bit, 48 KHz audio chip. So if you can run a Windows 9x port of Doom it should sound as good as a SB16. This is assuming the notebook's implementation of the audio chip isn't particularly poor quality and that could be the actual issue here.

There is a thread on here that looked at PCMCIA sound cards (search should find it).

So, what PCMCIA card do you recommend for 16-bit sound effects on DOS?

swaaye wrote:

This is assuming the notebook's implementation of the audio chip isn't particularly poor quality and that could be the actual issue here.

I've had issues with some ESS chipsets running sound quality at half frequency than requested in DOS before.

There are USB soundcard options, but those won't provide DOS compatibility, and also may not be superior to the built in sound device.

kolano wrote:

There are USB soundcard options, but those won't provide DOS compatibility

I specifically want 16-bit sound effects with DOS compatibility. Even if I did know about USB sound cards, they have no relavence to my issue.

Danfun64 wrote:

So, what PCMCIA card do you recommend for 16-bit sound effects on DOS?

New Media's Wavjammer or Sound/SCSI card, but not all DOS games support them directly.

Get a desktop PC.