SB16 or AWE64! Ay? Even better.... ISA soundcard with wavetable header and Dreamblaster-S1.
Much the same price (looking at eBay). Much more fun, this way.
Get an ISA card with OPL, and without that hanging note bug. SB16 or SB-Pro standard's does not matter.
Well... It does if you are really picky. Just trying to say that the SB-Pro standard is ok enough.

Thinking like this, just opens op all sorts of possibly sollutions for you.
Back in the time of 1992/1994, my friends had SB16, if they were rich enough.
Most of my friends just stuck to that SB-Pro card. Was good enough back then.

If you are going for a SB16 card, then souce a Vibra16 with a real OPL chip.
It will not have hanging note bug, yet you will loose the treble and bass settings in
the control-panel-mixer. This is of no concern, if you route the sound throung amp's.
They have treble and bass, and you have direct controll when playing a game.

Yes simply connect a CD (or DVD) drive as slave and your good to go. You wont be able to boot off it but still helps for installing stuff.

AWE64 is a SB16 with a EMU chip so are quite similar

Main Advantages of SB16
Cheap and common
True OPL chip (depending on model)
No TSR drivers

Main disadvantages of SB16
Noisy
Hanging note bug (depending on model and only if using Midi device)

Main advantages of AWE64
Clean output.
EMU chip for enhanced music and loading soundfonts
No Hanging note bug
Main disadvantages of AWE64
Drivers need to loaded into memory
Fake OPL3 chip

If you find a card your thinking about getting, let us know the part number and we can give more of the pros and cons of that exact card.

Oh any chance of some pics?

chinny22 wrote:

Main disadvantages of AWE64
Drivers need to loaded into memory
Fake OPL3 chip

I would add to this:
MPU-401 emulation through the EMU chip in DOS is crap. You have to use Win9x if you want MIDI music through the AWE64, in my experience.

For your particular system I would recommend a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Unless you want high quality CD music, in which case get an SB16 for 16-bit, 44.1 kHz digital sound. But if you care more about that hanging note bug then get the Pro2. For games the Pro2 is 100% sufficient if you don't care about MIDI.

You might also look at the YMF-7xx series of cards from Yamaha. They had great SBPro compatibility, real OPL3 chip, and (this is where my memory gets fuzzy) MIDI chip built in? Someone help me out 🤣

In case you don't already know, here's a summary of why some of us place great stock in the real OPL3 chip:

OPL3 is Yamaha's FM synthesis chip, used for music in games. It supplanted the older OPL2 (Adlib) chip (used from SB1.0 to SBPro1) and was backwards compatible with it. The "fake" chip is CQM, Creative's cost-saving answer to OPL3. To many (including me) CQM sounds harsher and tinnier than OPL3. It's worse in some sound cards than in others, but in my AWE64 the difference is very noticeable. The OPL3 chip in my SB16 sounds deep and "righteous", so to speak. But if you don't care what your FM music sounds like then this point is moot 😎

I would add one more thing: Try to get a card which has jumpers onboard to set the IRQ, DMA, etc. settings, instead of a Plug and Play card which requires drivers in DOS to make it work. The drivers take up memory and can be problematic. The first plug and play cards were the later SB16's if I'm not mistaken, so that's another reason to get an SBPro2.

Question: Does CD music still play back at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz no matter what sound card you have, if you have the analog audio cable connected between the drive and the sound card?

Thanks for the replies, I'm thinking about going the route brostenen suggested with the Dreamblaster S1. I've been looking at Yamaha YMF7xx ISA cards as an alternative to SB16/AWE64. From what I've researched they have OPL3, but do they have general SB Pro support as well and is it good? If not I may just get an SB16 with OPL and without the hanging note bug. Is there any disadvantage to having the fake OPL in AWE64 and having to load the drivers in DOS? I imagine that could cause issues with some games, if they aren't too big a problem then I might do an AWE64, so I don't have to deal with the noise of an SB16.

Oh any chance of some pics?

Sure

jas4500 wrote:

Is there any disadvantage to having the fake OPL in AWE64 and having to load the drivers in DOS? I imagine that could cause issues with some games

Well, the drivers are just for the digital sound. The OPL3 chip doesn't need drivers, it just assigns itself to port 388 with or without drivers iirc. (someone correct me if this is wrong, maybe that's just how pnp SB16 acts)

Edit: That picture's cool; is that really Windows 95? I've noticed it's possible to install it with the Windows 3.1 interface...

keenmaster486 wrote:

Edit: That picture's cool; is that really Windows 95? I've noticed it's possible to install it with the Windows 3.1 interface...

That's the Computer setup interface, which I'm sure is based off of Windows 3.1. When you turn on the computer it gives you the option to boot into the computer setup or whatever OS is installed, in this case Windows 95. I've thought about maybe downgrading to Windows 3.1/DOS 6.22, which was the native OS of that computer. My grandfather got the computer in '95/'96 and upgraded it to Windows 95, it was originally a company computer from the place he worked at, when they upgraded to new computers they let the employees buy them. I think this computer is probably circa 1992-1994.

keenmaster486 wrote:

For your particular system I would recommend a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Unless you want high quality CD music, in which case get an SB16 for 16-bit, 44.1 kHz digital sound. But if you care more about that hanging note bug then get the Pro2. For games the Pro2 is 100% sufficient if you don't care about MIDI.

You might also look at the YMF-7xx series of cards from Yamaha. They had great SBPro compatibility, real OPL3 chip, and (this is where my memory gets fuzzy) MIDI chip built in? Someone help me out 🤣

That's good to hear, I too would like to know if it has a MIDI chip built in. So far I haven't been able to find an SBpro2 for a decent price, but there's a lot of Yamaha YMF-7xx cards out there that are quite cheap. Do the Yamaha cards do CD audio and how compatible are they with the "fussier" games like TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, etc?

YMF-71x cards do not have (by default) wavetable built in. This would require more chips.

Well bad news the hard drive just crashed. I went to turn it on today and got a "Disk Read Error I/O." I used a boot disk and it wouldn't even detect the hard drive. It could just be that the inside of the computer is very dirty or something came loose, but the hard drive is about 20 years old.

Does sound like it could be a dirty connection. Does the disk make any ominous sounds?

They die. 😀

And I would use a CF card in that machine btw.

So I opened up the computer today and cleaned it out, the power and IDE cables appeared to be in good condition. After I put it back together I booted it up and the hard drive still wouldn't work. I could hear it spinning while it was trying to boot, so I know now the hard drive needs to be replaced.

I looked online and noticed that FAT16 hard drives were awfully expensive. Is it possible to just get a cheap higher capacity hard drive with IDE and then will DOS or Windows 95 format 2-4GB of the hard drive?

I know Windows 98 works fine on my 2x 40GB IDE drives...but Windows 95? The last time I had a 1.6GB HDD on a Packard Bell with W95 on it, I had to do a 1.2GB partition, then a 2nd 400MB partition, otherwise Windows wouldn't boot. FAT16 and FAT32 are just partition formats. They are mostly independent of the drive hardware itself. Whatever OS you boot into should be able to format the drive however it needs. Your biggest concern will be - will the BIOS recognize the drive? THAT is what would worry me the most. And for us to answer that, we'd need to know the exact model of the motherboard. It's probably stamped somewhere on the MB.

So I was looking at eBay and found some 850mb hard drives for a decent price, they are used, but at least I won't need to worry about BIOs incompatibilities. Is there any particular brand that's better, like Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Conner, Quantum?

FFXIhealer wrote:

FAT16 and FAT32 are just partition formats. They are mostly independent of the drive hardware itself. Whatever OS you boot into should be able to format the drive however it needs.

Yep. But the original version of Win95 didn't knew of FAT32. Support for this was added a bit later. I also wasn't aware of this before Win98 was released.
I always thought Win95 (+DOS 7.0) was FAT16 only. FAT32 was something I considered to be Win98 exclusive feature for a long time.

jas4500 wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

Edit: That picture's cool; is that really Windows 95? I've noticed it's possible to install it with the Windows 3.1 interface...

That's the Computer setup interface, which I'm sure is based off of Windows 3.1. When you turn on the computer it gives you the option to boot into the computer setup or whatever OS is installed, in this case Windows 95 [..]

Hey, I had one of these Deskpro's, too! Please, don't forget to make a backup of that setup interface!
It's stored on a hidden partition on the original hdd. Somewhere in that BIOS utility is an option to create a backup.
You'll need 2 to 4 blank diskettes for this..

So yeah, you could use a newer disk and Windows 95 OSR2 for FAT32 support, and it might work. If you have any other IDE drives sitting around, hook them up and try setting them up as lower-capacity disks in the BIOS- it just might work. It has for me in the past even though I might only get 30% of the capacity or something.

486's have 2 main hard drive limits. 500MB and 8GB. We already know your good to go above 500MB. So I would look at drives under 8GB.
Saying that my 486 detects 8GB but wont boot, so limited to 6GB

Or you can use drive overlay software and use any drive. Phil did a video on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z15jdZEJiY

Problem with small capacity IDE drives is they will be very old so its a gamble on how long they will last, and at least on ebay always overpriced.Its why a lot of people are using CF cards instead.

If your keeping Fat16, Anything larger then 2GB will need to be partitioned. but then I like that better, say C:\ for OS D:\ for Data E:\Games as an example

chinny22 wrote:

486's have 2 main hard drive limits. 500MB and 8GB. We already know your good to go above 500MB. So I would look at drives under 8GB.
Saying that my 486 detects 8GB but wont boot, so limited to 6GB

That's exactly how my Socket 5 machine behaves 😜