(from Rich Heimlich)

WOW, I must say I wish I saw this a lot sooner when you guys were still
discussing this. A friend pointed me to this thread. Thanks for the kind words and MANY thanks for the last patch set overview I did as I actually had lost it and meant to track it down. Now I have it again.

In my view the "best" ISA sound card was the ONLY one I ever allowed my name to appear on as a recommendation to users (including the Sound Blaster's) and that's the Ensoniq Soundscape Elite. It did pretty much everything well with very few trade-offs. Wonderful SB support, solid AdLib support, one of the very best patch sets out there (and just 2MB if memory serves), etc.

It got a 7.9 in my overview but it was right at the top of products that supported the Sound Blaster. The Tropez nipped it but back then we were willing to put up with a few annoyances you wouldn't want to bother with today. The Elite just worked.

There was a Crystal Lake card with a really solid CS-4232 (the 140 if memory serves .... later a 4280 but they might not have even made retail) that was tremendous but almost no one saw one so I never got around to really recommending it before the whole market evaporated.

RAM on an ISA card was entirely a waste of resources as far as the user community was concerned. Almost no one ever used the RAM put on the cards that had it.

All of this said, I agree most with swaaye. There was no perfect ISA card for many reasons. Many of us ran multiple cards (I used to, quite normally, run five different cards in my rig for a while).

FORGET clean audio out of ANYTHING Creative from the 90's. Just not going to happen. They didn't believe in filtering (too expensive) and just thought no one cared so they never bothered to try to make it clean.

Sorry to get to this, again, so late but it's still great to see. One of these days I have some stories to share about Creative and some things they did but I'm sort of waiting for a few people to pass on before I spill the beans. Hoping I'm still around after that to tell it.

Nice to hear from you again.

I wonder whats your recommendation nowadays, when the cards are rather cheap if you can get one. Also memory upgrade is not much of a problem.
f.e. a EWS64XL using the not so official Roland SC soundfont for Dream based cards. (the one Dream got a lawsuit from Roland)

I've had an unavoidable noise floor coming from the CS4231, and CS4232 and CS4248 chipsets. Noise is the big no-no for the crystal semiconductor cards

Agrajag27 wrote:

One of these days I have some stories to share about Creative and some things they did but I'm sort of waiting for a few people to pass on before I spill the beans. Hoping I'm still around after that to tell it.

You can just as well spill the beans as an unknown member. We're all gonna catch it, and nothing must point to you 😊

I have a wavetable daughterboard that has the same as the adlib asb 64, cs9233 and cs8905, and another three, all the same, that have cs4110 and 9331/sam 9203 dream. From what I remember of looking this up, dream is the copyright notice for the company that created the patch set.

elianda wrote:

On the more professional cards like EWS64 or Maxisound 64 there is a CS4236

I have a Maxi Sound 64 (ISA) but it uses an ESS 1868F chip and not the CS4236 as you mentioned. My one also includes an onboard 2mb Dream wavetable which i have expanded to 18mb using the simm slot.

The Maxi Sound has good compatibility for SB Pro, Adlib, Roland Sound Canvas and General Midi but at the expense of too much conventional memory if it is used in Dos 😒

It seems the main goal here is the best DOS-based card for legacy game play. In that arena the toughest thing, of course, if finding a machine that even has an ISA slot or keeping an older setup going.

For current cards, like the rest of the industry, I've gotten away from it a bit. X-Fi solutions are about it for gamers if they want things like the most current flavors of EAX (really nice in some FPS games like GRAW2 but those are in the minority).

I've been making due with Auzentech cards but there you have to deal with driver issues that take forever to get resolved.

Sadly, the only music I play on my PC these days are FLAC files and the like so things like patch sets don't matter for me any longer.

I suppose the CT2940 has the hanging notes bug, so even if its output is clean, its of no real use in my opinion, right? Creative's MPU implementation is just flawed... Early non-PNP SB16 which don't have that bug are noisy as hell by the way.

Another problem is that Creative's SB16 and newer cards are not Sound Blaster Pro compatible (only Sound Blaster). Third party cards (e.g. Crystal based) on the other hand are never SB16 compatible and the only way of getting 16-bit mixing out of these is via WSS, which did never entirely work for me as of now. Tyrian is always a good means of proving a third party soundcard incompatible. :-)

Correct me if I am wrong, but from my experience I deduce that every card has its downsides and there just is no perfect soundcard - afterall it's all half-baked consumer crap, worst of all Creative. That's also of course, why emulation sometimes works even better than the real thing.

locutus

Frankly I'm a bit surprised that in 2009 we still haven't found the Valhalla of emulation yet. The digital end is pretty straight-forward and emulating an AdLib one would think would be quite possible.

So I guess my question is, is it that the emulation is that difficult or is it that not enough people, with the talent to knock the doors off this, really care about it today?

leileilol wrote:

I've had an unavoidable noise floor coming from the CS4231, and CS4232 and CS4248 chipsets. Noise is the big no-no for the crystal semiconductor cards

Odd... these chipsets usually come through the quality tests with high ratings: PCAVTech Sound Card Technical Benchmarks Test Summary

Locutus wrote:

I suppose the CT2940 has the hanging notes bugThird party cards (e.g. Crystal based) on the other hand are never SB16 compatible

Usually not, but there are some exceptions: Sound Blaster 16 Clones The CMI8330 is my latest installment. I like it for now. But unfortunately havent been able to play around with my retro computer for the past six weeks now 😳 ...

Agrajag27 wrote:

(from Rich Heimlich) WOW, I must say I wish I saw this a lot sooner when you guys were still discussing this. A friend pointed […]
Show full quote

(from Rich Heimlich)
WOW, I must say I wish I saw this a lot sooner when you guys were still
discussing this. A friend pointed me to this thread. Thanks for the kind words and MANY thanks for the last patch set overview I did as I actually had lost it and meant to track it down. Now I have it again.........
.......... Sorry to get to this, again, so late but it's still great to see. One of these days I have some stories to share about Creative and some things they did but I'm sort of waiting for a few people to pass on before I spill the beans. Hoping I'm still around after that to tell it.

Wow, I never expected you to show up, it is an honour! I look forward to you spilling some beans 😉. Even though ISA soundcards are no longer marketing, as in the time you were writing about them, but are now mostly surplus garbage with a certain nostalgia.

Agrajag27 wrote:

Frankly I'm a bit surprised that in 2009 we still haven't found the Valhalla of emulation yet. The digital end is pretty straight-forward and emulating an AdLib one would think would be quite possible.

So I guess my question is, is it that the emulation is that difficult or is it that not enough people, with the talent to knock the doors off this, really care about it today?

There is DosBox, the full Dos Gaming system emulator. Its Adlib emulation is told to be good. It requires a very fast system to play the later dos games though. Also hardware enthousiasts would miss the feeling of tweaking an actual DOS system. But for all others DosBox is usually the way to go in 2009.
Also there is AdPlug which just plays Adlib music files, optionally through emulation.
As for a Dos TSR that emulates a soundcard regardless of hardware; I don't know any. There is VDMsound for windows though, but quite a few dos games cannot run properly from within windows.

Wow, I never expected you to show up, it is an honour! I look forward to you spilling some beans Wink. Even though ISA soundcards are no longer marketing, as in the time you were writing about them, but are now mostly surplus garbage with a certain nostalgia.

Thanks! Glad to find a place where people care about this still. But stop knocking my museum collection! Hehehe. My closet is filled with a lot of this stuff.

I'm very familiar with DOSBox and VDMSound but neither really work as well as I'd expect. Take a look at MAME as an example. In some cases they've cleanly emulated games that have several complex audio chips on them and they run like butter on an average system (other examples are also easy to find where the game can't even run with sound).

I'd like to finally get Master of Orion and Railroad Tycoon running well, with sound, again. MOO I actually removed a couple years ago when it refused to run at all under XP for some reason. Still have RRT though.

Agrajag27 wrote:

For current cards, like the rest of the industry, I've gotten away from it a bit. X-Fi solutions are about it for gamers if they want things like the most current flavors of EAX (really nice in some FPS games like GRAW2 but those are in the minority).

I've been making due with Auzentech cards but there you have to deal with driver issues that take forever to get resolved.

Not to stray off-topic, but personally I wrote off Auzentech after they decided to license Creative chips to put on their cards. I bought an Asus Xonar DX, which has DDL encoding and modern EAX emulation and was quite impressed with it (using a laptop at the moment though so I miss it). The system building guides on the hardware review sites have been pushing the Asus Xonar cards a lot lately since the new audio architecture in Vista/Win7 knocked Creative down a peg.

IMO, though, on-board Realtek sound is good enough for everyone except the few of us who want to hook up digital 5.1 speakers via an optical or coax cable and get 5.1 sound from games.

The Xonar series are excellent cards but it's not EAX compliant on anything beyond EAX 2.0.

What they've done beyond 2.0 is sort of similar to what Alchemy does. They're essentially emulating EAX and the results are very hit-and-miss. We tested this out heavily not that long ago when doing an audio benchmarking tool for Etymotic Research.

Agrajag27 wrote:

The Xonar series are excellent cards but it's not EAX compliant on anything beyond EAX 2.0.

What they've done beyond 2.0 is sort of similar to what Alchemy does. They're essentially emulating EAX and the results are very hit-and-miss. We tested this out heavily not that long ago when doing an audio benchmarking tool for Etymotic Research.

Indeed, and I did say their modern EAX support was emulated (which is to be expected since they're not licensing EAX from Creative, which would be the only way to make it truly "compliant"). Fortunately EAX has lost a lot of relevance over the past several years (at least in the PC gaming area) due to a multitude of factors, so it's not the main selling point of a sound card these days for games.

What's really interesting is that even OpenAL isn't catching on, which doesn't sadden me too much since Creative took it under it's wing so that they could add a bunch of hooks for EAX stuff in order to be able to market their cards as having "better OpenAL support than everyone else".

I really hate when hardware and/or software companies try to use proprietary APIs to lock in customers. It really overshadows anything that may have been good about them. Glide is my favorite example of an attempt at implementing that business philosophy, as it pretty much killed 3dfx once viable alternatives (Direct3D and OpenGL) became more widely supported.

Sorry, I missed you mentioning the emulation part. It did really lose ground and was really getting down to being useful in a few key FPS shooters. For those of us that play those it was a must. Now that they're going away it goes back to quality again. Sadly, it goes back to it now that few care.

I found EAX to be largely superficial even in shooters, since the positional stuff was done by DirectSound3D/OpenAL. In terms of games, EAX was pretty much an over-hyped set of reverberation effects layered on top of DS3D/OpenAL.

Take me with a grain of salt though, I soured towards Creative starting with the whole Aureal mess and never bought anything newer than the original SB Live series (and I didn't even bother using those after about 5 years ago).

Hey, don't get me wrong. I wrote the book and people think that means I was a big fan. I was just a capitalist. It's the only book that made sense to write from a remuneration standpoint. I soured towards them starting with Sound Blaster 16.

Ah, that book - I still have it on my shelf. I remember buying it on impulse when I was around 15 and being disappointed that it didn't have more on the programming side (specifically stuff that went beyond using drivers/utilities supplied by Creative). I later found some super-technical doc on OPL2 programming (probably this one http://www.oplx.com/opl2/docs/adlib_sb.txt) and was disappointed that it was way over my head 😀

What, may I ask, rubbed you the wrong way about the SB16?

The complete lack of any filtering for starters. It was one hell of a noisy card.

On the book, you have NO idea how hard it was to get the info in it that was in there for programming. Sim (the CEO) outright refused to allow ANY programming info in there at all feeling that it would negatively impact the sales of their SDK. We fought over this for quite a while and finally, using a loop-hole, I submitted the technical section as a final "edit" that didn't go through them. Needless to say they weren't too happy. I couldn't have put the book out with at least that much in it. However, the book was really aimed at average users. The chapters on the most basic things were, by far, the most popular.

Well you can have my personal thanks for the effort, and know that at least one person pretty much skipped straight to what programming info there was towards the back of the book 😀

I never heard of a Creative SDK (guess that means it failed, but it looks like the docs are now available online: http://www.phatcode.net/articles.php?id=243). I'm pretty sure that most companies either already had in-house solutions from scratch or were using HMI or MSS SDKs by that time, so I guess they were too late (or hoping to generate more developer support for the AWE32 maybe).