dnewhous wrote:

The objective operating system would be Win 98SE, which appears to be the last to support ISA slots.

The OS doesn't care that much about ISA or PCI.
Windows XP should support SB16 out of the box IIRC. The earlier 8-bit Sound Blasters are not supported, also IIRC.
ISA video cards should work, too, although there is not much point to really do this.

Yeah, FF7 is one of those rare game that has native support for the Yamaha's XG format. But I think it's a WIndows game.

Another game - DOS game - that takes advantage of the XG format is Terra Nova by Looking Glass.

But coming back to the topic, there are many, many home/consumer/retail motherboards that had both AGP and ISA slots.

For DOS gaming though, ISA based Sound Cards are most suitable and ideal.

How far did bus combos go?

Was there ever a board with ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI?

bp

There were boards with VLB, ISA and PCI. And there are boards with AGP, PCI and PCIe. In these cases one of the buses is usually a poor imitation of the real thing, riding on some cheap bridge chip that has caveats.

I might as well chime in that if you know what industrial motherboards to look for, you can even get Pentium 4-era 845P and 875P-based motherboards with fully-functional ISA slots alongside AGP 8X.

My current retrogaming system is built around such a board; it's kinda funny to have a 3.2 GHz Gallatin (P4 Extreme Edition), 2 GB of DDR-400 and a GeForce 6800 Ultra in a system that can house an AWE32 or AWE64 Gold and boot Win98SE with no problems (RAM aside, but there are fixes for that).

That said, the reason I would even bother with an AWE32 in a system that normally has an Aureal Vortex2 card alongside it is twofold: SoundFont support, and I want to figure out how to test the ASP/CSP in TFX. The Vortex2's there mainly for Windows gaming with A3D.

Okay, and I just remembered the third reason: Vortex2 SB Pro emulation + Unofficial 98SE Service Pack = BSoD, without fail.

dnewhous wrote:

It has a custom soundfont for the soundblaster AWE series. It is not a DOS game.

You can load soundfonts on PCI SB Live cards.

And in the case of FFVII, there are fanmade patches readily available that will let you swap in the original, authentic Playstation soundtrack if you are so inclined – or anything else for that matter. If I'm not mistaken, there is at least no official way to get the original PC version to replicate One Winged Angel as it originally played on the Playstation.

I hate fanmade patches. The only mods that I've ever used on a game that didn't introduce their own bugs were from Baldurdash.

Well, maybe you've been using the wrong fanmade patches. 😁 I understand Square actually used some of the old mods when they made the Steam re-release. They've been out for years at this point. Just sayin'.

(Besides, you don't think switching to an entirely different motherboard with AGP and ISA won't somehow introduce more than its fair share of problems?)