I like mine rather much. Getting the driver for it can be kinda dodge.. and it has limited support in XP. I play a lot of UT99 and I think the A3D enhancements are really neat. I haven't personally messed with it in DOS yet, but it is generally agreed that it has excellent SB Pro support. It it also supports a MIDI daughterboard and MPU-401 interface. Very usefully in a system that lacks ISA slots.

Here is the resource:
http://members.optushome.com.au/kirben/vortex2.html

Excellent webpage. *went ahead and bought the two Mx300s he was looking at*

Is the MPU-401 in this board an emulated (a la Creative's cards) or a real port? Or only Roland cards have native MPU-401 support?

The MPU port works fine in my experience, much better than the buggy Creative ISA card MPU ports. But since it's a PCI card, you need the card's ISA emulation driver running as with any other PCI card. The MPU port does work on port 330 in plain DOS and Windows with the driver loaded. And the card has very clean output compared to Creative ISA cards w/ headers.

The Vortex cards are good cards. I think they are a bit overblown on the A3D stuff, but it is pretty neat in some games.

Of the dual for "best PCI sound card for DOS", it usually comes between the Aureal Vortex2 series and the Ensoniq AudioPCI.

Me?.... I'd take the Aureal cards hands down. It's wavetable (external header) implementation and clarity are top notch. The Aureal SQ2500 was the best of the best.

I'm really feeling good about buying these two cards then. Too bad I want get them until the sixth of Feburary. 🙁

One is going to go into my XP machine, the main comp, and the other is going to go my fast 98 machine, the 1.4Ghz Tualatin.

Uh, XP machine? Why?

If you want to run a Vortex 2 in XP, the driver options are very limited. There are no good official drivers. MS actually reworked the source code for them when XP first came out. The drivers that XP has built-in do have hardware acceleration. Don't update them off of Windows Update though because those remove the acceleration. I imagine they did that because the drivers are undoubtedly not perfect and they weren't going to become Aureal's new free driver update company.

Aureal was dead before XP was finished...

Well, I got them today, tracked down the appropriate drives and the verdict it....

They suck. Buffer problems on the XP machine, making music sound broken up and distorted. On the 9x machine, it makes a piss ton of noise, much more so than the AWE32. Adtracker sounds likes it;s playing back at 11050hz, not all instruments seem to play right.

Avoid avoid avoid!

Noise? I've never heard noise from a Vortex card. They don't have the absolute best audio quality (compared to Live! / Audigy), but they are definitely much better than any ISA Creative card.

What chipset does your motherboard use?

Moogle! wrote:

Well, I got them today, tracked down the appropriate drives and the verdict it....

They suck. Buffer problems on the XP machine, making music sound broken up and distorted. On the 9x machine, it makes a piss ton of noise, much more so than the AWE32. Adtracker sounds likes it;s playing back at 11050hz, not all instruments seem to play right.

Avoid avoid avoid!

Something is seriously wrong with your setup then. They sound great (not only for their time, but in absolute terms)

Their FM synthesis is awful, otherwise they are brilliant.

ratfink wrote:

Their FM synthesis is awful, otherwise they are brilliant.

That's cuz it is emulated in software, I imagine. Software that had to run on a PC from 1997-1999 or so.

I've heard much better emulation. I had an AOPEN 320 something or other that was excellent. Adlib Tracker worked, and so did The Incredible Machine, which is very finicky.

I'm still playing with the card, so we'll see.

Moogle! wrote:

I've heard much better emulation. I had an AOPEN 320 something or other that was excellent. Adlib Tracker worked, and so did The Incredible Machine, which is very finicky.

You should hear what a Ensoniq Soundscape sounds like doing it's FM emu. They remapped FM to the wavetable or something. It sounds just shockingly awful.

Really though, I don't think I've ever even tried FM on the Vortex line. If I want FM, I use a SB card or DOSBOX. I'm much more into trying out wavetable cards and also want super clean digital audio. Vortex is a great host for a daughtercard. Better than any Creative card is.

Biggest disappointment for me about the Vortex cards is that they can't do SB16. Only SBPro. That sucks for later DOS games that can do 48 KHz 16-bit audio with a few CFG tweaks. Funny thing though is that it still sounds better than a real SB16, in my experience. Ensoniq Soundscape running 48KHz 16-bit blows everything else I've used out of the water, however. Crystal clear, great stereo sep.. And then the Vortex + Roland DB are crystal clear too, routed to the Aux/CD in on the Soundscape. Running a DB on a SB16 really hurts the audio quality, beyond just the noise from the card.

I need to get myself an equalizer though.

The noise I'm hearing is the system noise, like hard drive access and stuff like that.

Well, I've got the proper Monster Sound Drivers, screwed down the soundcard, turned down the stereo volume and turned up the soundcard, and it actually sounds pretty good.

Fm emulation still sucks though. Talk about a fly in the ointment. Another thing I noticed is that you can't stread CD audio data straight across the system. The option is greyed out in media properties.

The onboard MIDI is simply the best I've heard in years. <3

I'm glad to hear that your slowly getting your issues worked out. The one problem I had was the sound simply stopping in XP after a certain amount of time. I did find a fix at the link I mentioned above. If your still hearing the system noises you can try to move it to a different slot. I have also found that having the case competely put together makes a difference too.

Sha-freaking-zamm bitches, cut the PCI latency timer down from 64 to 32, and now the Vortex in the XP machine is sounding much better.

Oh joy. Good 'ol PCI latency issues. 😀