dosgamer wrote:

As I recall, even late CD-ROM based games like Half-Life used 22050 Hz 8-bit samples (probably mostly to save RAM/reduce loading times from disk).

There was no shortage of CD-ROM games where the action was considerably slower and thus much less concern about loading from the disk.

For some strange reason Legend's adventure games, like Companions of Xanth and Superhero League of Hoboken, come to mind. (I assume we're not counting games like the CD port of Loom, which uses redbook audio.)

dosgamer wrote:

I've been reading a bunch of threads about what the ideal sound card for DOS games is and the argument that keeps popping up against the SBPro is that it's an 8-bit card and that you want an SB16 to get "16-bit sound"

Well, yes, most games did use 22Khz/8bit samples. But that's just part of the story.
16bit cards do really shine when it comes to mixing.. So whenever more than one 8bit sample is played at once, a 16bit card is helpful.

Jo22 wrote:

dosgamer wrote:

I've been reading a bunch of threads about what the ideal sound card for DOS games is and the argument that keeps popping up against the SBPro is that it's an 8-bit card and that you want an SB16 to get "16-bit sound"

Well, yes, most games did use 22Khz/8bit samples. But that's just part of the story.
16bit cards do really shine when it comes to mixing.. So whenever more than one 8bit sample is played at once, a 16bit card is helpful.

Interesting point. But I see a few problems with this. In DOS games, the mixing is done in software by the game itself (with some games you can choose how many sounds will be played at once, with more sounds increasing the CPU load), so that has nothing to do with the sound card. For that to have an effect, the game would have to do the mixing in 16 bits internally and then resample to 8 bits on the fly. But that would mean a huge speed penalty for users of 8-bit cards. I don't think it worked that way. But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Also to consider is that a lot of card that are recomended here, and that are SB Pro 2 compatible, do support 16 bit through other means such as WSS in DOS and through the Windows driver. The Audician 32 Plus is a good example.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Also to consider is that a lot of card that are recomended here, and that are SB Pro 2 compatible, do support 16 bit through other means such as WSS in DOS and through the Windows driver. The Audician 32 Plus is a good example.

I think the same applies for games and ISA/PCI sound cards that support Ensoniq Soundscape and ESS Audiodrive, but WSS is company independent. Does it exist a list of WSS compatible cards?

ESS is a good point, a lot of games support it directly indeed.

In a previous discussion wasn't it concluded that that 16-bit "high DMA" made a big difference in some games?

The Crusader games from Origin used the full capabilities of the SB16 for mixing and (in the case of No Regret) higher resolution samples.

Sound effects in Tempest 2000 also seems to require high Dma, as I couldn't get it working on all my sb pro compatible cards, except one that
has a Diamond DT197A30 chip on it and supports high dma.

Some more discussion regarding this topic can be found here:

16 bit sound in DOS games, was that 'a thing'?

dosgamer wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

dosgamer wrote:

I've been reading a bunch of threads about what the ideal sound card for DOS games is and the argument that keeps popping up against the SBPro is that it's an 8-bit card and that you want an SB16 to get "16-bit sound"

Well, yes, most games did use 22Khz/8bit samples. But that's just part of the story.
16bit cards do really shine when it comes to mixing.. So whenever more than one 8bit sample is played at once, a 16bit card is helpful.

Interesting point. But I see a few problems with this. In DOS games, the mixing is done in software by the game itself (with some games you can choose how many sounds will be played at once, with more sounds increasing the CPU load), so that has nothing to do with the sound card. For that to have an effect, the game would have to do the mixing in 16 bits internally and then resample to 8 bits on the fly. But that would mean a huge speed penalty for users of 8-bit cards. I don't think it worked that way. But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I would think a game would select the best/fastest mixing code based on the card properties, sample properties and user settings. And I think using 16 bits internally is not a huge speed penalty at all and it results to better quality, than going through the trouble of making sure summing two or more 8-bit values will never exceed 8-bit result. For instance, in x86 assembly language, multiplying 8-bit number with anything (to get volume, gain or attenuation) automatically ends up being a 16-bit number anyway. Throwing away the unused 8 bits is fast and easy, and there is no resampling (which means changing of sampling rate). But that's just my view how it works; I really haven't been reading source code of games that software mix the audio, just some mixing codes of some audio libraries and it was a long time ago.