ALS4000 or Solo 1e? \ VOGONS

ALS4000 or Solo 1e?

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First post, by senrew

Posted on 2013-02-19, 22:30

senrew Offline

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Shuffled around some parts into my machines and am left with a bit of a dilemma. In my DOS machine, the only sound card I have now is my SB16. It's got the hanging note bug. My XR385 is just sitting here lonely. I rummaged through my remaining parts bin and pulled out a Solo 1e (1946s) and a generic ALS4k board. I figure I can relegate the SB16 to just being a carrier for the midi daughtercard for the time being (until I get another SB16 to sit along with it, or one without the bug). In the meantime, I need some kind of primary digital audio card.

Of these two, which one does best for DOS only use? I know the ALS4k is supposed to have pretty good SBPro emulation, and honestly, I'm good with that. I'm really not sure how many of my games really use 16-bit sound. FM is of no concern since the MIDI card will be taking care of all music duties. If I really want FM for some reason I can just switch to the other card for that in the game setup.

So...suggestions?

Halcyon: PC Chips M525, P100, 64MB, Millenium 1, Voodoo1, AWE64, DVD, Win95B

Reply 1 of 5, by fillosaurus

Posted on 2013-02-19, 23:07

fillosaurus Offline

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I cannot offer a definitive answer, just some suggestions and hearsay;
ALS4k might be SB16 compatible; older ISA cards, like ALS100/100+/120/200 were. I never had a 4k, so I am not certain about compatibility.
Don't know much about Solo 1946, but Solo 1938, IMO, has the best SB Pro compatibility of all PCI soundcards; I even found it better than many ISA cards. I considered using one instead of a Yamaha OPL3-SAx, in my jack-of-all-trades box (the one in my sig), alongside a better EAX/A3D card. And I think I will, because the Yamaha based cards are also WSS compatible, and that means 1 IRQ and 1 DMA wasted for a worthless standard few games support.

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 2 of 5, by pyrogx

Posted on 2013-02-20, 08:57

pyrogx Offline

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fillosaurus wrote:

Don't know much about Solo 1946, but Solo 1938, IMO, has the best SB Pro compatibility of all PCI soundcards; I even found it better than many ISA cards.

I have both cards (ALS4k and Solo1) and I can confirm that. The ALS card is good regarding compatibility, but the Solo1 has an even better SBPro compatibility and a very good OPL3 emulation.