tpowell.ca wrote:

Just made some audio captures of the line-out from the card. Seems the card outputs up to 11kHz (with a 22kHz sample sourcefile) […]
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Just made some audio captures of the line-out from the card.
Seems the card outputs up to 11kHz (with a 22kHz sample sourcefile) and then, like on the SB16 cards there is a brickwall/lowpass filter kicking in.
On the FM output, there is NO filter and the output is steady up to 22kHz with no dropoff.

I'm liking this card more and more with the exception of the DOS drivers which suck ballz. 😀

Very cool.

What's bad about the DOS drivers? I like knowing what I'm getting into beforehand. 😉

aquishix wrote:

tpowell.ca wrote:

Just made some audio captures of the line-out from the card. Seems the card outputs up to 11kHz (with a 22kHz sample sourcefile) […]
Show full quote

Just made some audio captures of the line-out from the card.
Seems the card outputs up to 11kHz (with a 22kHz sample sourcefile) and then, like on the SB16 cards there is a brickwall/lowpass filter kicking in.
On the FM output, there is NO filter and the output is steady up to 22kHz with no dropoff.

I'm liking this card more and more with the exception of the DOS drivers which suck ballz. 😀

Very cool.

What's bad about the DOS drivers? I like knowing what I'm getting into beforehand. 😉

I'll have to go see what my AUTOEXEC.BAT looks like but the drivers from the Vogons drivers archive didn't work for me straight out-of-the-box.
The configuration tool (ESSCFG.EXE) worked fine, detected and configured the card, but ES968.COM which it added to my CONFIG.SYS failed to detect the card.
The configuration tool allows for a non-interactive mode to basically set the card parameters in DOS (such as autoexec), but would freeze my machine if I tried to configure the card completely in one shot. Multiple calls to set different parameters does work (eg: call1:baseport, dma. call2:irq,mpu,joy)
Without the driver in CONFIG.SYS loaded, the ESS mixer (ESSVOL.EXE) doesn't work, but I found a command-line SoundBlaster mixer for the SBPro that does, so its a non-issue ...now.

Maybe there are better drivers out there, but either way at least it works now. It just required lots of testing, rebooting and swearing.

I got lucky, and was able to order:

* a Sound Blaster Pro compatible card (based on the OPTi 82C928)
* another true Sound Blaster Pro 2 -- identical to my other one -- CT1600
* another true Gravis Ultrasound Classic -- Rev 3.73 (my other one is a Rev 3.74)

Also, I was also able to get a PnP Vibra card (a CT2890 w/ true OPL) to work in my 486 system. But the high DMA is malfunctioning, so I'm going to create a separate thread to talk about that.

The only question I have left for this thread is whether or not it makes sense for the PII system to have a Sound Blaster Pro 2 installed in it in addition to the Vibra I have set aside for it (a CT2940 w/ true OPL). If so, I'm going to have to either shuffle cards around inside that system all the time when I want to play specific games, or I'm going to have to find a PCI sound card that plays nice in DOS in order to free up one of the ISA slots. I was happy originally that this PII's motherboard has 3 ISA slots in it, but now I'm feeling the need for 4 slots.

It really burns that Creative did all that crap to their SB16 cards back in the 90s but never made one that was fully backwards compatible with Sound Blaster Pro. That decision of theirs has generated untold misery for those of us that I want to have it all in one system.

aquishix wrote:

I got lucky, and was able to order: […]
Show full quote

I got lucky, and was able to order:

* a Sound Blaster Pro compatible card (based on the OPTi 82C928)
* another true Sound Blaster Pro 2 -- identical to my other one -- CT1600
* another true Gravis Ultrasound Classic -- Rev 3.73 (my other one is a Rev 3.74)

Also, I was also able to get a PnP Vibra card (a CT2890 w/ true OPL) to work in my 486 system. But the high DMA is malfunctioning, so I'm going to create a separate thread to talk about that.

The only question I have left for this thread is whether or not it makes sense for the PII system to have a Sound Blaster Pro 2 installed in it in addition to the Vibra I have set aside for it (a CT2940 w/ true OPL). If so, I'm going to have to either shuffle cards around inside that system all the time when I want to play specific games, or I'm going to have to find a PCI sound card that plays nice in DOS in order to free up one of the ISA slots. I was happy originally that this PII's motherboard has 3 ISA slots in it, but now I'm feeling the need for 4 slots.

It really burns that Creative did all that crap to their SB16 cards back in the 90s but never made one that was fully backwards compatible with Sound Blaster Pro. That decision of theirs has generated untold misery for those of us that I want to have it all in one system.

Nice!
Well, on a PII system, I'd say you'd be hard pressed to have games that use an SBPro in stereo that would also play nice with the monumental CPU speed increase from a 386/486 (being what most likely the game was designed for).
I would skip the SBPro on such a system and go with a PCI sound card with the Vibra.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Nice!
Well, on a PII system, I'd say you'd be hard pressed to have games that use an SBPro in stereo that would also play nice with the monumental CPU speed increase from a 386/486 (being what most likely the game was designed for).
I would skip the SBPro on such a system and go with a PCI sound card with the Vibra.

I should've been clearer -- I meant *replacing* the ViBRA with a PCI card. With only 3 ISA slots, and 2 of them being taken up with the HardMPU and the GUS, that 3rd slot either has to be a ViBRA ISA card or a SBPro, but not both can be present.

My whole intention by picking the 386DX40, 486DX2-66, and the PII-350 is to cover the entire range of post-XT games of the DOS era. It certainly seems like the only possibilities that I'm missing are the need for a 286 system of some kind and possibly a Pentium system. But I'm not aware of any games that would require one of those two systems instead of working well with one of the 3 I already have slated.

Are you? (Ignoring the sound card considerations, and focusing purely on CPU/overall system performance.)

aquishix wrote:

I should've been clearer -- I meant *replacing* the ViBRA with a PCI card. With only 3 ISA slots, and 2 of them being taken up with the HardMPU and the GUS, that 3rd slot either has to be a ViBRA ISA card or a SBPro, but not both can be present.

My whole intention by picking the 386DX40, 486DX2-66, and the PII-350 is to cover the entire range of post-XT games of the DOS era. It certainly seems like the only possibilities that I'm missing are the need for a 286 system of some kind and possibly a Pentium system. But I'm not aware of any games that would require one of those two systems instead of working well with one of the 3 I already have slated.

Are you? (Ignoring the sound card considerations, and focusing purely on CPU/overall system performance.)

Nope.
But that is a delema.

I will admit that on my K6-III+ system (which I guess is like your PII system), I have 3 soundcards and no HardMPU.
I put an AWE32, GUS Pnp and a PCI Vortex2 (for Windows 98 only) in that machine to cover all my bases for mid to late 90s games.
The AWE32 with SoftMPU worked perfectly in every game I have tried, or was not needed at all with more modern ones (Doom, Duke3d...).

The HardMPU went into my 486DX4 with my GUS classic and the SBPro clone. In this case, the GUS and SB cards not having an MPU-401 compatible port made the MPU card mandatory.