Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-05-24, 12:00:
Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-05-24, 11:46:
Tiido, find me a known game, that ES1xxx cards can not handle.
Rambo 3 doesn't play FM synth music on an ES1868F.
There's a report about it here and I have since confirmed this on my own card as well. It's a fairly old game, so I'm guessing it expects Creative's Adlib/FM synth driver or some such.
Judging from another thread that I can't seem to find right now, that seems to be a general problem with Taito ports from that era; some other games that had this issue were Bubble Bobble, Operation Wolf and Arkanoid. They most likely use the same audio driver that doesn't play well with ESS chips, but that's about all I found so far.
cde wrote on 2021-05-24, 11:29:The opamp is only one part of the equation. The filtering of electrical noise from the rest of the system, in particular CPU activity, is quite important. I'm not expert on the matter, but the simplest is to buy the card and return it if you think the noise is not acceptable. A good way of testing the noise level is cranking volume to the max while doing a CPU intensive task and listening with headphones (but be careful not to play actual sounds or you will damage your hearing).
About the hanging note bug, I am using the CT2290 with DSP 4.13 on an Athlon XP and I've never encountered the issue, which I believe happens with slower CPUs (but, YMMV). This card has very low noise and non reversed wavetable header.
Well, we aren't talking about extremely valuable hardware, so returning a card worth less than back and forth shipping would be a hilarious waste of everyone's money. But in the case of "computer thinking" noises, maybe I can get away with using ground loop insulators; I already have a couple that I could try, one of them was able to silence my fairly noisy SB Live (with the other one being more intended to lift ground loops from USB powered audio interfaces, but I may as well give it a shot too). That's why I'm more curious to know if the op amp is decent, as I might be more easily able to deal with a proper ground loop than with a poor op amp.
Oh, also: this sound card will run alongside a CT2230, which I am planning to use for exactly one thing, and that is authentic Yamaha FM synthesis with that model's specific sound signature. It's not really good for anything else, as it's got the single cycle DMA clicking bug and as I'm purchasing a secondary sound card specifically to prevent the hanging note bug (of course I trust you when you say you haven't had this issue, but I'd rather keep MIDI and SFX separate either way, mainly for making my life easier with mixing separate audio sources). Down the line, however, I am planning to use the SB16 to complement the ESS with a secondary wavetable: I am mainly looking at the McCake project, as my setup would be lacking a proper MT-32 implementation.
Finally, the reverse stereo point is no longer as important, since I'm planning to run the wavetable board using an external adapter; also, I am planning to get a Dreamblaster to begin with, which has an option to swap stereo channels anyway, so I should be golden.