After all these years, are there any further opinions on the Acer S23? In another thread somebody claimed this card was noisy.
I have one of these coming my way (I think), and mine is rather interesting as it lacks the amplifier and associated components.
I currently run the YMF-718. It's pretty good, but I remember the Crystal software being a little more refined.

I can't recall a discussion on it being noisy, in fact, I can't recall anyone testing the Acer S23 but me. So I am curious as to how it will work for you.
This is a recent writeup I made about this card, from 486 VLB UMC-Chipset, what is it? 2016-3-02.

gerwin wrote:

Sound Blaster Pro and Windows Sound System. The usual shared setup where WSS has the same IRQ/DMA and Mixer as the SBPro. SBPro […]
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gdjacobs wrote:

How's the compatibility with the Magic S23?

Sound Blaster Pro and Windows Sound System. The usual shared setup where WSS has the same IRQ/DMA and Mixer as the SBPro. SBPro compatibility is solid, so is WSS. FM and MPU-401 work well too. Windows 9x drivers are nice and simple, with proper DosBox sound support.

• Some things to consider:
• It is a PnP card, and I found it hard to get it on IRQ 7 unless I use the Resource.exe tool, to adjust the PnP info header of the card.
• Tyrian expects WSS to be on the the classic DMA 0 and IRQ 5 IIRC, no way to configure. This game gives WSS a bad rep.
• Allegro-Library based DOS games with SBPro at 22kHz do not work properly with it. They need their exe patched so that the value for 45454 (Hz) becomes 43478 (Hz), then they work fine.
• Unlike the Sound Blaster the WSS should be unmuted when starting a game, then muted at exit. Nice idea to get 100% silence. But games often don't mute at exit. MPXplay does not unmute the WSS at startup, unless you pass the -scv 100 parameter. In SBPro mode this is of no concern.
• When closing some games, they leave the card in a state where the WSS-mode sampling rate or DMA buffer is messed up. This can be fixed using my homebrew CSreset tool.
• Acer Magic S23 was also sold as Philips PCA70PS.

I recently picked up an example of the card described by the OP – the Crystal CS4232-KQ based ‘Magic S23’. I’ve been very happy with my existing CS4232 based card, which is a Magic S23A (branded as an ‘AOpen AW32 Pro’). But where the AW32 Pro uses Crystal’s FM synth approximation via its onboard CS9233 wavetable chipset, the Magic S23 has a real OPL3 and a wavetable header - enough added value to justify the $5 purchase price I thought.

To my surprise it worked pretty seamlessly with my existing driver install – Windows 95 needed some help finding the existing drivers, but once directed to them it was just a case of correcting a few wonky PnP resource selections and everything works well. The OPL3 implementation is bright and clear and having flexibility around the wavetable is a win, although in saying that I’ve installed a daughterboard based on the same 1MB CS9233 chipset that the AW32 Pro uses for now – I really like the sound of it for late 90’s gaming.

I saw that one after it sold. It must not have been up for sale for very long, because I check multiple times daily.

I have had issues with CS4232 cards not able to play as a WSS device in DOS. My CS4232 has great noise characteristics compared to most cards I'm familiar with and is only let down by the sub-par OPL3 implementation on the FM/3D effects companion chip, so it's got a lot going for it. It might be worth revisiting the configuration down the road.

It would be interesting to see what the output filter implementation is as well.

As a WSS device these cards seem solid as long as they're in the right system - my S23A has speed issues in my PIII 1GHz for example, but has been great in my P166MMX.

This Magic S23 is really impressing as a DOS gaming card. Having such a nice sounding OPL3 alongside a bug free waveable header on a full height card feels a bit luxurious and it all sounds so damn nice - the levels are perfect by default and the clarity and stereo separation of the FX output are something to behold. DOOM never sounded so good!

Hello there,

Sorry for necroposting but since I found this thread, I've been looking for an Acer Magic S23 and I recently found a couple. However I'm blocked with a really annoying issue.

Upon testing, everything seems OK except for one thing: whenever I do a warm-reboot (ctrl-alt-del or restart in Win98), I get stuck with a black screen until shutdown.
Both S23 behave with that same problem: so chances are that the soundcards aren't any bad (plus they work fine despite that). Other PnP ISA cards I've tried such as the Yamaha OPL3-SAx do not have that issue.
I was about to give up until I found a post from gerwin in that thread speaking about a bootup issue being fixed by replacing the C92 10uF 16V capacitor with a 2.2uF one. That may be completely out of the subject, but I though why not try that. So I did (used a 2.2uF 50V capacitor). Unfortunately, that didn't changed anything (still same reboot issue, though the card was still working as before).

I tried other things such as underclocking the motherboard FSB and increasing the I/O recovery time in the BIOS but to no avail.
My config is based on an Asus P5A-B rev 1.03 (BIOS rev 1011 Beta 005) with an AMD K6-2 533 and 128 MB of RAM.

Would anybody have any idea of what might be causing that issue? Could there be some kind of incompatibility between my system and that specific card?

Thanks in advance.