So there's a fix about radeon 7200 agp being so slow with a pentium mmx?

I'm woking on a 486 at the moment and I've decided to run with an AWE64 Gold, paired with either an SW60XG or a RAP-10.

To be honest, wavetable daughterboards just require too much farting about.

By having a seperate card for your wavetable/MIDI you avoid a lot of this hassle.

And the CQM synth doesn't really sound that bad on the AWE64 especially if you use chorus/reverb.

I do have another machine with an SB Pro and an LAPC-I in it which I use for most games that sound best with a real OPL chip. But for later games that use wavetable I run them in this machine.

To be honest I quite like the sound of the RAP-10; I used to have an SC-55 but I think the RAP-10 sounds a bit better in most of the games I tried. I like the Yamaha sound as well on the SW60XG but it tends to be a bit heavier.

OPL3SAx hissing and popping? You must be running with the internal amplifier enabled disable it. I have several of these cards, and I think the audio quality is quite nice. I used it through an external amplifier, and I didn't get an audible hiss, hum or distortion. Ever tried hooking up an SB16 to a stereo amplifier? Worst. Combination. Ever.

DonutKing wrote:

By having a seperate card for your wavetable/MIDI you avoid a lot of this hassle.

And the CQM synth doesn't really sound that bad on the AWE64 especially if you use chorus/reverb.

Hey coming over to the dark side 🤣

The AWE64 Gold with external MIDI devices and SoftMPU401 if necessary is an AWESOME solution.

Yeah, I've been testing out all sorts of sound cards for a few years now. Quite frankly I don't think there is a single card that suits every scenario.

Nearly all the various SB compatible cards I tried had some weird quirk or another.

I used to be a big fan of the YMF718/9 cards but as bad mofo said even they aren't perfect, getting a DB into them is a pain and they are not 100% compatible with all games.I didn't have the driver problems he did though.

I honestly think you are better off with a sound blaster of some description with a standalone ISA Synth card or an external module.
plus, there are some games that sound pretty good with the AWE synth, like Tyrian. 😀

As for cracks and pops, I agree it's part of the experience if you're running a sound blaster through a pair of unpowered speakers. But when you spend money on a nice synth, and run them through some amplified speakers, the noise gets pretty annoying.

DonutKing wrote:

I used to be a big fan of the YMF718/9 cards but as bad mofo said even they aren't perfect, getting a DB into them is a pain and they are not 100% compatible with all games.I didn't have the driver problems he did though.

I wouldn't mind to build up a list of games that don't work properly with an OPL3-SAx card. The games badmofo mentioned worked perfectly on both my 386 and SS7 machines with YMF-71x cards.

I would like to test pretty much every game possible on OPL3-SAx cards, to check for compatibility/issues. I have yet to find a game that has issues with these cards. I guess issues might happen with different machines, and other people may not have problems on theirs.

I like the AWE64 Gold, it's a very good card, i have it on my system pretty much just for the AWE synth which i do agree sounds great on some games (Tyrian being the most obvious example). It sounds better than the GUS on Tyrian actually. It has a clean output and it's not a hissing and popping sound card. But FM? Seriously it sounds atrocious, reverb and chorus on or off, makes no diffeence to me. For people who actually enjoy FM synthesis the AWE64's are no go. I don't understand why Creative needed to cut a simple OPL3 chip from this card, it wouldn't make the circuit super expensive or anymore complicated, but whatever. For people who are not gonna use FM a lot it's pretty OK, but for me? Nahh... Even the Sound Galaxy card i have that does not sport a true OPL chip sounds better than the AWE64.

I guess it depends on taste and varies to each person. Some people love the AWE64's, others hate it, and it's pretty much the same with the OPL3-SAx cards. Hey at least the the latter has a wavetable connector, an using one of those raspberry PI cables makes it very easy to build a cable. I've done it with success.

I didn't know until recently that the YMF-715 (and up) chipsets could mix at 44KHz in Sound Blaster Pro. Being listening to some .MOD files on it and it sounds great.

With Duke Nukem 2 and Raptor some sounds simply won't play. For example, blasting a door in first level of DN2. My 386 and 486 both exhibit this behavior.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Duke Nukem II uses 8-bit to 3-bit or 8-bit to 2-bit ADPCM capabilities of the Sound Blaster cards for sound effects that the YMF cards do not emulate.

I'd hardly say the CQM on the AWE64 sounds atrocious. Granted, it is a personal choice, but honestly I think it gets a bit of a bad rap on this forum. Maybe not as good as real OPL, but not atrocious. There are various clone cards with their own implementation of FM synthesis, and they all sound different. Some people will say one or the other sounds better or worse than a real OPL chip.
Sound is so subjective, and different games were all written for different sound systems and sound best on different systems. It really depends on what games you are playing to determine what sounds best.

I tell you something 😀

In around 2002 I got a little Unisys 486 and it only holds a single ISA card that's rather short. I got an AWE64 card which fit nice. I never noticed a difference with the FM.

It was only much much later when I researched things on queststudios and VOGONS that I heard about the FM dilemma 😁

Yes there are differences but definitely not atrocious. FM sound on an Ensoniq card, now THAT is bad 🤣

carlostex wrote:

I didn't know until recently that the YMF-715 (and up) chipsets could mix at 44KHz in Sound Blaster Pro. Being listening to some .MOD files on it and it sounds great.

That's new to me. I'm pretty sure the SBPro2 interface is limited to 22kHz stereo, and 44k in mono. How did you test this?

badmojo wrote:

But my main issue is the mixer software, which is confusing at best.

I must agree here. It's best used on a set-and-forget basis. If you need to change settings often it's horrible to use.

Editing the ini file directly is even more confusing. How can you tell if you need to use a boolean, string, or number value for a specific setting? What do you use for boolean settings? ON/OFF, 1/0, YES/NO...? What's the difference between Config_PnPBIOS and Config_disable_PnPBIOS? Or OPL3=ON and DelFM=0? Even worse, SETUPSA appears to ignore most of the ini file and won't complain if you enter a wrong value.

carlostex wrote:

I don't understand why Creative needed to cut a simple OPL3 chip from this card, it wouldn't make the circuit super expensive or anymore complicated, but whatever.

Licensing fees obviously... cheaper to use an own integrated version than a licensed clone or real OPL3. I doubt the mainsteam was caring a lot about FM synthesis in 1996 anyway, some games like Descent sound like complete garbage on it regardless of hardware.

jwt27 wrote:

That's new to me. I'm pretty sure the SBPro2 interface is limited to 22kHz stereo, and 44k in mono. How did you test this?

SB Pro 2 maybe, but it seems the YMF-71x chipsets don't have this limitation.

I tried Inertia player and games that allow you to set the mixing speed. Whenever i do this with a real SB Pro, it doesn't work right. Mostly SB Pro 2 plays in slow motion.

When i tried this with the OPL3-SA cards, i first thought that i would get the same symptom. It actually played normal so i thought it was plaing in mono, despite the program stating it was playing with Stereo and mixing 44KHz. So i used my mixer and the L/R channels are not playing the same instruments, in other words it behaves just like other cards playing in Stereo like an Ultrasound i tested right away and the AWE 64. Games like Duke Nukem 3D seem to confirm this as well.

Might be a placebo effect, but it sounds better on my ears. And i don't think this is surprising at all, i don't see why a SB Pro clone can't mix at higher rate and retain compatibility.

DonutKing wrote:

I'd hardly say the CQM on the AWE64 sounds atrocious. Granted, it is a personal choice, but honestly I think it gets a bit of a bad rap on this forum. Maybe not as good as real OPL, but not atrocious. There are various clone cards with their own implementation of FM synthesis, and they all sound different. Some people will say one or the other sounds better or worse than a real OPL chip.
Sound is so subjective, and different games were all written for different sound systems and sound best on different systems. It really depends on what games you are playing to determine what sounds best.

I agree that is a personal choice, OK so maybe not atrocious in comparison with other cards that actually do worse, but it just sounds sterile to me. Granted, it's a very good card, but it's a shame that it's FM emulation sounds so thin and lifeless. I actually think DosBox OPL3 emulation sounds miles ahead. Reverb can make it sound prettier, makes the sound a bit more dreamy, but i can make it sound better using EQ on my mixer. Even so, for FM i prefer OPL3-SA. I have an AWE64 Gold on my system alongside a GUS and OPL3-SA, something i had more trouble with a real Sound Blaster Pro, Creative cards don't like to share a system with other Creative cards.

All in all, i don't agree the OPL3-SA cards and YMF-71x chipsets are awful like badmojo stated though i agree the software ain't the best and some settings are quite dubious. I might have to play around with the card, and find what some of those settings actually do.