I have been lazy and just wired the + pin to positive or negative rail next to it. There may be slightly higher power consumption but the end result is still same, no more oscillating noise generator 🤣

The list could be expanded with the information that all SB16s have problem with SB Pro compatibility. With normal SB16s playing sound in mono, but Vibra chips playing stereo but in reverse. Don't know if the AWE64 plays in stereo too.

It's not much of a practical issue, though. Essentially, games that lacked SB16 stereo support didn't use stereo.

firage wrote on 2023-03-05, 22:02:

It's not much of a practical issue, though. Essentially, games that lacked SB16 stereo support didn't use stereo.

Is that true? Then why did so many games that didn't support the SB16 still have separate "Sound Blaster" and "Sound Blaster Pro" options to choose from in their install/setup programs? Also, I recently took a look at the AIL/32 driver sources that John Miles released some years back. These drivers were used in a number of protected mode games such as Simcity 2000, and in the sources you could clearly see that there was code for stereo support for sound cards that supported them, but these drivers did yet not support the Sound Blaster 16.

digger wrote on 2023-03-07, 01:11:

firage wrote on 2023-03-05, 22:02:

It's not much of a practical issue, though. Essentially, games that lacked SB16 stereo support didn't use stereo.

Is that true?

of course not 😀
I suspect SB16/SBpro incompatibility was deliberate on Creative part as some sort of "clever" gimmick to screw clone makers and gain more ammunition for even more stupid baseless lawsuits.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-03-07, 10:35:

digger wrote on 2023-03-07, 01:11:

firage wrote on 2023-03-05, 22:02:

It's not much of a practical issue, though. Essentially, games that lacked SB16 stereo support didn't use stereo.

Is that true?

of course not 😀
I suspect SB16/SBpro incompatibility was deliberate on Creative part as some sort of "clever" gimmick to screw clone makers and gain more ammunition for even more stupid baseless lawsuits.

This.

Sounds like another round of game patching...
From what I recall, SB16 basically needs a different DSP command to play stereo. The SB Pro had DSP 3.x, which supported PCM 'high speed' commands, where the SB16 has DSP 4.x which does not support these commands, but instead has new PCM commands that support both 8-bit and 16-bit mono and stereo. They just work slightly differently.
Should not be too hard to patch a game with SB Pro support for SB16.

Related to SBPro compatibility, there was an attempt to implement it for SB16-based sound cards with MIDIto TSR. However, it has issues dealing with left/right channel swapping with certain software (early demoscene stuff for example).

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-03-07, 10:35:

of course not 😀
I suspect SB16/SBpro incompatibility was deliberate on Creative part as some sort of "clever" gimmick to screw clone makers and gain more ammunition for even more stupid baseless lawsuits.

I find that hard to believe. There were already quite some games on the market with Sound Blaster Pro (and OPL3) support when the SB16 came out, and being forced to fall back to older mono Sound Blaster compatibility with OPL2 mode FM synthesis put it at a disadvantage compared to competing stereo sound cards that also had wide game support, or did have proper Sound Blaster Pro compatibility. Ideally, you want each newer generation of your product to be fully downwards compatible with each previous version, to capitalize on the level of industry support that you've established with those older products. Just like how VGA graphics cards also offered EGA compatibility, instead of supporting only CGA mode as a fallback. (Actually this was the case with MCGA, but I digress.)

I believe I read somewhere that Creative was freaked out by the fact that Media Vision had beat them to the 16-bit market with the Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and rushed the Sound Blaster 16 into production while the originally intended full downward compatibility with the Sound Blaster Pro was still unfinished. This would also explain the various other bugs and deficiencies of the Sound Blaster 16 card. Knowing the overrated quality of Creative Labs' products, this seems like a much more plausible explanation to me.

Remember Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

(Not that Creative Labs was not a malicious company, by the way...)

digger wrote on 2023-03-07, 01:11:

firage wrote on 2023-03-05, 22:02:

It's not much of a practical issue, though. Essentially, games that lacked SB16 stereo support didn't use stereo.

Is that true? Then why did so many games that didn't support the SB16 still have separate "Sound Blaster" and "Sound Blaster Pro" options to choose from in their install/setup programs? Also, I recently took a look at the AIL/32 driver sources that John Miles released some years back. These drivers were used in a number of protected mode games such as Simcity 2000, and in the sources you could clearly see that there was code for stereo support for sound cards that supported them, but these drivers did yet not support the Sound Blaster 16.

Just the existence of an SB Pro setup option has not meant the game uses the specific stereo mode that SB16 lacks, or an SB Pro mode at all.

SimCity 2000 has an SB16 setup option which uses the SB Pro driver; doesn't seem to have stereo effects with either sound card in DOSBox.

I recall one example of missing stereo, which Joseph_Joestar reported on a couple of years back -- Aladdin. Working around the detection issue, you could force full SB16 quality, though.

My vote is on that Creative intentionally decided not to support SB Pro in stereo. There is a good reason not to.

SB Pro stereo support is a mess. You have a mono DSP and then mixer is hacked to throw every other byte left and right. So you program the DSP to play 44KHz mono sound if you want 22KHz stereo. And to make things worse, the DSP is so weak that this is done in "high speed" mode. That means that the DSP cannot respond to commands since every bit of processing power is needed for playback.

It is a problem that stereo playback must be enabled from mixer. Some games forgot the mixer on stereo mode. When you play some SB 1.x or 2.x game after that, the game properly resets the DSP but doesn't even know that there is a mixer (since old Sound Blasters do not have one) so they cannot put the mixer to back mono mode. So what happens is that the mixer left on stereo mode halves the sampling rate. This is a problem with SB Pro and clones but does not affect SB16 because it does not support the mixer stereo hack.

SB16 has a proper programming interface: you program sampling rate (in sane format unlike SB and SB Pro) and then simply tell it to play 8 or 16 bit in mono or stereo. I'm sure Creative knew full well that there was no games that used stereo samples when SB16 was released. So it sure made things easier for them and it was in their best interest that SB 16 programming interface would be supported as soon as possible.

I'm sure they could have supported SB Pro if they wanted to. It would had required extra effort and even the mixer bug could have been fixed if DSP reset would have reset the stereo bit in mixer. But why would they have done so? It was completely unnecessary (and they sure had much more important fixing to do).

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-03-07, 14:31:

Related to SBPro compatibility, there was an attempt to implement it for SB16-based sound cards with MIDIto TSR. However, it has issues dealing with left/right channel swapping with certain software (early demoscene stuff for example).

Ah yes, that was pretty much what I was thinking about, except for patching it directly into the game's sound driver rather than using a TSR with virtual port IO.
But yea, for 386+, this is a fine solution I guess.