Of course! The card should work with any game supporting the Adlib and very first Sound Blaster.

Your issues likely are somewhere else. Especially if you're using newer hardware with these old games, and / or running Windows 9x.

it is a pentium 2 and it does have win98 installed, but it boots to dos mode and hard drive volumes are formatted just for dos 6.22 originally.
Would it make the game work if I removed windows and and installed just dos 6.22?

Baoran wrote:

it is a pentium 2 and it does have win98 installed, but it boots to dos mode and hard drive volumes are formatted just for dos 6.22 originally.
Would it make the game work if I removed windows and and installed just dos 6.22?

I have the same sound card. My system lacks a HDD at the moment so I can't verify but if the game is looking for a regular SB it's probably looking at IRQ 7 and not seeing the card there (it loads as IRQ 5 default) so you may want to edit your SET BLASTER line in CONFIG.SYS to set the card as IRQ7 at startup. If that doesn't work try changing the card's Type setting to a regular SB or SB Pro..

So the older games don't care about the blaster variable and the card always needs to be in irc 7?

Some older Sierra titles were speed sensitive and wouldn't initialise the sound card on faster systems.
You could try the GoSierra patch.

If you're running from MS-DOS mode, then you need to make sure that CTCM is loaded in your Config.sys file as a device driver.
The DOS settings for the sound card is stored under your Windows folder in a file called "ctpnp.cfg".
This file will be updated every time you boot into Windows (unless you make the file read only).
As I recall, later Sierra titles (like the one you have) were OK with the sound card having an IRQ of 5 (however, older titles, like Space Quest 3, is expecting the IRQ to be at 7).
Make sure that the SET BLASTER environment variable is present in your Autoexec.bat file.
For an AWE64 the default parameters are: SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6

I am planning to build a slower system. Any idea how slow system those older titles need to be able to find the sound card?

Baoran wrote:

I am planning to build a slower system. Any idea how slow system those older titles need to be able to find the sound card?

Try the Gosierra patch. If that doesn't work, then you could try to slow down the PC by disabling the level 1 and/or the level 2 cache by using a utility like Setmul.

Baoran wrote:

I am planning to build a slower system. Any idea how slow system those older titles need to be able to find the sound card?

The system requirements for the games should give an idea on how slow the PC can be. Remember its not the speed that's at fault, if anything its the soundcard, and that's only cause the default resources are wrong and can be changed easy enough.

Most games are happy on faster though, I'm not big on Sierra titles, I think its only one of the Wing Commanders that have problems (out of the Sierra games anyway)

P2 with AWE64 makes a nice DOS/Win9x PC though. My Slot 1 P3 is easily my most versatile and used retro box

jesolo wrote:

If you're running from MS-DOS mode, then you need to make sure that CTCM is loaded in your Config.sys file as a device driver.

You don't have to do this in config.sys. All you need is to run ctcm in your autoexec.bat.
This way it'll only initialize the PnP card, without installing any resident TSR that eats your precious DOS memory.

You can also run aweutil /s /r:50 /c:50 to add some reverb and chorus MIDI effects. (adjust the numbers to your taste)

Other than software initialization, it's 100% compatible with SB16.

chinny22 wrote:

The system requirements for the games should give an idea on how slow the PC can be. Remember its not the speed that's at fault, […]
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Baoran wrote:

I am planning to build a slower system. Any idea how slow system those older titles need to be able to find the sound card?

The system requirements for the games should give an idea on how slow the PC can be. Remember its not the speed that's at fault, if anything its the soundcard, and that's only cause the default resources are wrong and can be changed easy enough.

Most games are happy on faster though, I'm not big on Sierra titles, I think its only one of the Wing Commanders that have problems (out of the Sierra games anyway)

P2 with AWE64 makes a nice DOS/Win9x PC though. My Slot 1 P3 is easily my most versatile and used retro box

Well, Wing Commander is an Origin title, for starters. WC1 is certainly speed sensitive, so throttling is advantageous for playing it. For Sierra games, the problem extends beyond sound card compatibility to the script interpreter itself. QFG3, for instance, is known to have a plethora of glitches when operating beyond 486 equivalent performance.