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First post, by blaker1983

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Hey guys, I'm new here and I've lurked a while.

I finally have a question about something that is annoying me. I have a few "legacy" computers but my main one is a P3 1ghz (working on underclocking it) though I have a Ensoniq AudioPCI. The soundcard works fine but say I have a game that uses Adlib only, i.e. one of my favorites, F117A Stealth Fighter 2.0. The game obviously has played on a SB compatible card on my old systems back in the day with no problem. - What's going on is, if I use adlib, it obviously plays using the midi soundfonts or whatever and it sounds like garbage. All the sounds are played but are deafening because of it's use of the midi. Is there any way around this? I've tried disabling the legacy audio support so it runs just SB, but when I go to dos, the soundcard doesn't load the drivers so i cant use it. Should i just ditch this card and get a SB Live or a AWE or something?

Reply 1 of 3, by swaaye

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AudioPCI will never do quality OPL2/3 emulation. Nor will Live or Audigy. They all use a similar DOS driver to emulate an ISA sound card. The earlier versions use the MIDI synth and sound terrible while later versions do a bad attempt at OPL3 synthesis.

The best option for DOS games is to use an ISA card with an OPL3 chip onboard. I also consider ESS ISA cards a good choice (ES1688 or later) and they are cheap. Not all SB16/AWExx cards have a real OPL3 chip but they are all still much better than a Creative PCI card's emulation.

Reply 2 of 3, by Mau1wurf1977

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If your mainboard has ISA slots, yes, ditch the PCI card and get an ISA one.

My website with reviews, demos, drivers, tutorials and more...
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Reply 3 of 3, by ratfink

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You could also try a Yamaha pci card - some of these have opl3 fm synth built in [eg those with a ymf724 chip but there may be others]. And you get xg-midi as well on some of them [slightly cut down from db50xg implementation but not sure that will show in games].

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