fillosaurus wrote:

I have one of these. Very temperamental card. Although in theory it has DOS compatibility, only once I managed to get sound from […]
Show full quote

I have one of these. Very temperamental card. Although in theory it has DOS compatibility, only once I managed to get sound from it in pure DOS. About 2 years ago. And I can't remember how. But I remember I had only SB DAC, no OPL and no GM.
In Windows 98SE I had no SB compatibility with VxD drivers. Well... As far as I remember WDM drivers have no SB emulation? Guess I was wrong.
As soon as I installed WDM drivers I had perfect SB&GM compatibility.

Interesting chipset, had a lot of promise. Too bad Philips abandoned it, and left the drivers with a lot of bugs.

Did you have one of these? did you manage to make it work in DOS?

Just out of curiosity, did Philips incorporate an OPL3 clone in this card?

Dunno. Did not test OPL3 yet, only SB DAC and GM. "Your soundcard works perfectly".
This was supposed to be a SB Live! killer, and it had the potential. Too bad it was sidelined by Philips. Even the included .dls sounds good.
And in Windows it really shows its potential. Tested it with Unreal.
Sounds better than my A3D 1.0 cards, than SB Live! or nVidia SoundStorm. Might be that Qsound thing Philips had.

Philips built a line of cards out of a couple revisions of the VLSI Thunderbird 128 chip. They have nice features for DirectSound/DS3D but yeah Philips quickly lost interest in the market. I used to have the Philips Seismic Edge PSC704 model of the family. I don't think I ever tried it in DOS.

I also own one of those cards (PSC705) but I have nothing but trouble with it. It - sort of - works in DOS, but the drivers are very buggy and crash with an awful lot of games. When it works, SBPro emulation is okay, the OPL emulation and the wavetable do not produce decent sound. The OPL output also always had a highly pitched noise attached to it. Things got a bit better when the card got an exclusive interrupt, preferably the same as the emulated SBPro.
The card didn't do better for me in Windows as well:
First, it didn't like my Voodoo3.
Second, it didn't like my EWS64.
Third, it didn't like sharing any interrupts with another PCI card.
Eventually I got it working without crashing Windows every time, but I was not too impressed by the output quality and the positional audio features...
So in the end I replaced that thing with a Vortex2, which works much better.