I wonder if the OP is coming back..?

By the way, does anyone here know exactly when creative switched from SBINIT.COM to SBEINIT.COM ? Maybe that makes a difference.

Dominus wrote:

Sorry for this OT post, but please can the OP or a moderator fix the subject of this thread? It's driving me nuts whenever it shows up in new posts 😀

Dominus wrote:

Sorry for this OT post, but please can the OP or a moderator fix the subject of this thread? It's driving me nuts whenever it shows up in new posts 😀

Why, isn't every vogoners intimately familiar with the name SoundBALSTER?

🤣 Yes please change it!

Gotta admit they probably would of sold more if it was named that hah.
Especially with today's Z moniker.

archsan wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Sorry for this OT post, but please can the OP or a moderator fix the subject of this thread? It's driving me nuts whenever it shows up in new posts 😀

Why, isn't every vogoners intimately familiar with the name SoundBALSTER?

🤣 Yes please change it!

Done, though I had to touch every post in the thread. What a PITA. 🤣

OK, forget all this. I got a old PC today for $15.00 from the local used PC store. It has 2 ISA slots, and I just loaded windows 98SE on it. I have been researching all day regarding good DOS sound cards, mostly been sent back here. But I am still uncertain which to pick up on ebay. Anytime I find a non PnP card like the Sound Blaster AWE32 ct3900 its ridiculous expensive. Like $200.00 or more. All the good parts I find whether sound cards, or Voodoo II cards always end up being sold by this guy from Bulgaria on ebay. This guy must have bought every used PC from the 80's and 90's.

So I need recommendations on a good ISA sound card. I don't care what's the best. I just want something that..

1. is PnP since everyone seems to agree that's the route to go. I will learn to set it up.

2. Is ISA.

3. Will have high compatibility with DOS games. I am not using this for any gaming other than DOS and Win95 CD games that must be installed through DOS. Like doom, duke nukem, hexen, and various RPG's and spaceship shooters.

4. Something that is affordable. Like under $40.00

5. Has drivers readily available, preferably from the vogons driver page. Because I actually trust this site and am tired of dealing with the possibility of adware.

Does any of this sound possible?

This is a old machine I received. It is a old eMachines eTower 400i2
It has a old Celeron processor (400Mhz)
and about a 4 gig HD.

recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I already wasted money the first time around on the last PC when I accidentally picked up a Dell model sound blaster live! card. So I don't want to do that again.

jforrest1980 wrote:

OK, forget all this. I got a old PC today for $15.00 from the local used PC store. It has 2 ISA slots, and I just loaded windows […]
Show full quote

OK, forget all this. I got a old PC today for $15.00 from the local used PC store. It has 2 ISA slots, and I just loaded windows 98SE on it. I have been researching all day regarding good DOS sound cards, mostly been sent back here. But I am still uncertain which to pick up on ebay. Anytime I find a non PnP card like the Sound Blaster AWE32 ct3900 its ridiculous expensive. Like $200.00 or more. All the good parts I find whether sound cards, or Voodoo II cards always end up being sold by this guy from Bulgaria on ebay. This guy must have bought every used PC from the 80's and 90's.

So I need recommendations on a good ISA sound card. I don't care what's the best. I just want something that..

1. is PnP since everyone seems to agree that's the route to go. I will learn to set it up.

2. Is ISA.

3. Will have high compatibility with DOS games. I am not using this for any gaming other than DOS and Win95 CD games that must be installed through DOS. Like doom, duke nukem, hexen, and various RPG's and spaceship shooters.

4. Something that is affordable. Like under $40.00

5. Has drivers readily available, preferably from the vogons driver page. Because I actually trust this site and am tired of dealing with the possibility of adware.

Does any of this sound possible?

This is a old machine I received. It is a old eMachines eTower 400i2
It has a old Celeron processor (400Mhz)
and about a 4 gig HD.

recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I already wasted money the first time around on the last PC when I accidentally picked up a Dell model sound blaster live! card. So I don't want to do that again.

Sound Blaster 16. its not the best card but its the de facto standard for DOS. The ones with the Vibra chip and a real OPL FM chip are nice as there not to "noisy". There a dime a dozen, pretty much every game supports them and drivers are plenty full. There no frills and if you plan on using a midi device or daughter card with them eventually theirs the "hanging midi bug" that crops up from time to time but as I said it may be the simplest, cheapest and most compatible solution at least to start with.

PNP is fine, on a later mobo, but Jumpered is Good too, usually better a choice, if you got the choice.

ESS 1688/1868f they can be had for almost nothing, and are very good SB-PRO clones, and in windows with their older VXD July pre-1997 drivers sound absolutely wonderful for General Midi Playback in windows.
Like a Sega Genesis got merged with, a Sound Blaster 16.
But they Need to be paired with a PCI card like the live!, as they have problems with DX acceleration, in some games result in music and sounds being played at a slow tempo or.. for lack of a better word - wrong.

Yamaha 71x ISA cards are also excellent soundblaster clones, and since they are yamaha have the cleanest OPL-3 playback.
They have little trouble with games in 9x either.

Sound Blaster 16's can usually be found for little cost too, and of course they are gonna be highly compatible.
Some Sound Blaster Vibra's like the CT2800 model have the true Yamaha YMF-262 chip on it for opl-3 playback. They can be an ok choice, too.

Awe64's won't produce True opl-3 playback, and they sound different, but you get wavetable support.
Awe 32's vary drastically depending on the model, early ones are often super noisy but contain the YMF-262m Opl-3 chip, later ones are quieter and reduce the chip counts, the last model, if basically a Awe64 , with 30pin simms on it, so you can expand it to 32mb.
Those can be had for almost nothing, and are a very good choice if you want almost OPL-3 and good wavetable sound (soundfont's yay!) for cheap.

Heres an example of an older Awe32 Ct2760
I don't use this card much because it puts out noise on its MIDI and FM line, a weird warble like sound and its very annoying.
Even does this over its SPDIF OUT its very clear for just normal wave\PCM playback tho 😒 .
But it has the OPL-3 chip on it.

Heres an example of the Last 32's CT3670 You'll see its much more compact, but no yamaha chip.
These are very common on Ebay and amazon

And here is an example of an PNP ESS 1688f, and a normal Jumper-ed Sound Blaster 16 CT1740 Both of which are clear sounding cards.

You can also combine a ESS\SB16\32\Yamaha card with a sound module that plugs into the wavetable header, for GM playback too, but those modules can be difficult to find, and are almost never cheap.

I'm sure there are people here, who can add more examples.

Just realized I missed everything after the first page. For whatever reason, even though I have notifications set I never receive emails for replies to this topic. So I just get on here when I'm working on my PC.

For the record I ditched that SoundBlaster live! SB0 card I got off eBay. I found a EMU10K1 at that PC shop and that is what is installed in my PC. From what I read that SB0 model was probably pulled from a Dell and after a full day of looking online I gave up finding drivers that I could actually download.

So I installed the EMU10K1 and did use the MAME cabs website for the drivers. I removed and installed multiple times. Still no dice. I will see how this new pc works out after I get a cheap ISA card from the recommendations here.

I am hoping I can maybe install a new processor and another hard drive and run this with the live! as mentioned above and have a fairly decent pc for windows 98 and late dos gaming. Hopefully I can find a processor that is not Celeron and will fit the socket. Then I can piece apart that old PC and sell it on eBay.

So this PC has 2 ISA and 2 PCI slots. Which means I can only run 1 voodoo2 if I want to get a Live! in it.

This may sound dumb, but how do you go about jumping 2 sound cards? do you use those parallel cables? I have never done anything like that. But I can imagine if I am going to have to go behind the pc and physically remove the speakers from one card to another when I switch between DOS and windows games that is going to be a pain.

Line Out from One sound card to Line IN on the other for convince, won't work in dos tho unless you load the lives! tsr which defeats the point.
Just run them into a switch, and switch away, which is the best option, unless you want above to say play a game like Final Fantasy 7 with OPL-3 sound, but sound effects from the live! Use the first option for that.

The live! cd Plat 5.1 cd should work even if its not a plat; is hosted on vogons.
The New Creative Labs Sound Blaster Drivers Collection. (Updated 6th Jan. 2014)
Try downloading that installing it then, install the last vxd update from creatives website.
http://support.creative.com/downloads/welcome … erType=1#type_1

I will be picking up Final Fantasy VII at some point. Never played the PC version but beat the PS1 version a few times. Anyway I'm not going to be too picky. I can always find a way to install it on Windows 7 I'm sure if there's issues.

Is this what you are talking about?

http://www.amazon.com/Speaker-Headset-Switchi … splitter+switch

Nah those can cause sound issues.
Normal Mini-jack-to Mini-jack dub cable for sound-card to sound card.
http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-Dubbing-Android- … mini+jack+cable

Mini-jack to RCA cable
http://www.amazon.com/Dynex-Mini-Stereo-Audio … ck+to+rca+cable
to RCA switch, http://www.amazon.com/MT-VIKI-Splitter-Select … ords=RCA+switch
or an audio\video receiver.
http://www.amazon.com/Yamaha-RX-V475-5-1-Chan … yamaha+receiver

Avoid the Steam version of FF7\FF8
No midi music, you need the old CD releases.

AlphaWing wrote:

Avoid the Steam version of FF7\FF8
No midi music, you need the old CD releases.

Except authentic replacement music tracks are now widely available. But we've had this discussion before.

jforrest1980 wrote:

So I installed the EMU10K1 and did use the MAME cabs website for the drivers. I removed and installed multiple times. Still no dice. I will see how this new pc works out after I get a cheap ISA card from the recommendations here.

As has been mentioned, your autoexec.bat and config.sys settings may well be at fault.

But I can imagine if I am going to have to go behind the pc and physically remove the speakers from one card to another when I switch between DOS and windows games that is going to be a pain.

And none of this other stuff is a pain..?

Jorpho wrote:

AlphaWing wrote:

Avoid the Steam version of FF7\FF8
No midi music, you need the old CD releases.

Except authentic replacement music tracks are now widely available. But we've had this discussion before.

Don't want the music replaced... WANT THE MIDI MUSIC.
FF7 with FM synth playback is awesome. 😀

AlphaWing wrote:

Don't want the music replaced... WANT THE MIDI MUSIC.
FF7 with FM synth playback is awesome. 😀

You can replace it with music that SOUNDS EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE MIDI MUSIC. 😀

Jorpho wrote:

AlphaWing wrote:

Don't want the music replaced... WANT THE MIDI MUSIC.
FF7 with FM synth playback is awesome. 😀

You can replace it with music that SOUNDS EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE MIDI MUSIC. 😀

How? once its been converted to ogg, you can't manipulate it (well you can but do you want to manually re-record every song every time for a different sound?), So no sound fonts for a different sound, no quick switch to a software midi player like the XG player that comes with the originals, and no FM synth, which can sound wonderful on some cards. Like that ESS card in my pictures above.

AlphaWing wrote:

well you can but do you want to manually re-record every song every time for a different sound?

Why the heck not? If it hasn't been done already, it only has to be done once, and then everyone else can use the same batch of OGGs.

If for some reason you want each piece of music to sound different every time you play it, then I am simply baffled.

It is an RPG, theres only so many times you can play it the same way.
So yes I want it to sound different every time I do a play-through. That is the wonderful thing about the original PC port.
There are to many different sound cards, and many ways to make the game sound different! So you can do it that way if you want!

I've owned the PC port since it was released anyway, Its kinda beat up, now too 🤣.
I know you can mod the new version to use the midi music, but you have to have the old version to do that, turning it back into the original release... and that kinda defeats the point of the steam version working on newer hardware.

So I'd rather play the original release on my old hardware 😀
I can't understand accepting the game gimped in the sound department when its mostly about the music anyway!

ok, here are the sysconfig and autoexec.bat files I pulled off of DOS. Hopefully this is what You all meant when asking for these. I read in some documentation online that if I have Windows 95/98 that I should configure this through the windows command prompt "sysedit" I loaded that up and took pics but decided not to upload them because they said the same thing, except there were a few more pages of text. I also read that in sysconfig that to skip something I should type "REM" instead of deleting any text in case I need it again. But it fails to state if I use a space after REM. So I'm not sure if I did use this function if I would enter it as REM XXXX or REMXXXX. Hope that makes sense.

Here is an error I have been receiving, not a big deal thus far just annoying. Happens ever startup.

ADVANCED INF INSTALL

could not locate inf file "\DirectX.inf"

Anyway that's not a priority at the moment. I feel kind of bad asking so much. But here is where I was directed after researching online.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/177430

I think it's error #7 but I have tried re-install multiple times.

One thing at a time, please. You already bought up your directx.inf error in Re: Hexen issues in config Win 98SE ERROR KERNEL32.DLL and it is probably best to keep such discussion separate.

Anyway, you have EM386 loaded, so apparently that's not the problem. If you boot into DOS mode, do you see any messages related to the Sound Blaster drivers? To boot into DOS mode, tap F8 while your computer is starting up. (Ideally you should press it when the "Starting Windows 98..." message appears, but the timing is very difficult on a fast computer, so it's best to just keep tapping it repeatedly – as long as you don't tap it early enough that the BIOS startup intercepts it somehow.) Then select the appropriate option from the menu that appears.

jforrest1980 wrote:

I read in some documentation online that if I have Windows 95/98 that I should configure this through the windows command prompt "sysedit" I loaded that up and took pics but decided not to upload them because they said the same thing, except there were a few more pages of text.

sysedit is strictly a matter of convenience and is by no means necessary.

But it fails to state if I use a space after REM.

Yes, you need a space after REM.

I will check when I get off work tonight. I use a DOS boot disk I made when I built this PC to get into DOS. So I get in pretty easily. Off the top of my head I do not think It says anything. I distinctly remember it saying driver provided by oak technology, bit it says a lot of stuff and it goes fast.

Is there a way to slow down the boot screen so I can read everything?