retro games 100 wrote:

I've been looking through my vintage PC components, and found two interesting looking Turtle Beach ISA sound cards. One is a Tr […]
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I've been looking through my vintage PC components, and found two interesting looking Turtle Beach ISA sound cards. One is a Tropez Classic (I think), the other a Maui. Some questions please:

1) Do they work for DOS games? More specifically -

1a) can a DOS game access the wavetable ROM?
1b) can a DOS game access a "soundfont" in the RAM?

2) The Maui is a music only card, and so for the Tropez Classic card only, what is its Sound Blaster compatibility like? I notice, when reading Gerwin's very helpful sound cards .TXT file, that the Tropez Classic's spec is good - that is, it has OPTi 82C929a, CS4231, and OPL3.

Thanks a lot for any comments! 😀

Turtle Beach.JPG

1) Gerwin's file is pretty clear on this:

-56K and MultiSounds are non-gaming soundcards with drivers for MS Windows (3.11/95), and only few DOS utilities.

Otherwise, the cards behave like other cards with matching bus controllers from Opti or Crystal Semi with the Maui being MIDI only (but DOS compatible).

As far as MIDI support is concerned, the onboard wavetable listens to the MPU-401 interface, although IIRC configuration (including soundfont loading) has to be done via utilities included in the driver pack.

Nice, I am trying to find all those old turtle beach ISA sound cards for a 486 build.
I have a "Monte Carlo" only.

gdjacobs wrote:

1) Gerwin's file is pretty clear on this:

-56K and MultiSounds are non-gaming soundcards with drivers for MS Windows (3.11/95), and only few DOS utilities.

The question was not about 56K and MultiSound series, but about Tropez and Maui, which don't belong to MultiSound series (which consists of Classic, Tahiti, Monterey, Fiji and Pinnacle).

Maui and Tropez sound banks can be accessed from DOS, but no known games do that.

I owned a Maui as my first wavetable card back in the early 90s when they first released. I actually remembering using it on my old 286 back then. It was cool card but was GM only as I recall and I hated how long it took to load up the soundbank on it from the driver set each time I booted up the PC. I replaced it out about a year or so later with my SCB-55 and actually sold the Maui for like $50 just a few days later to another friend of mine. No idea what happened to it after that but I remember I was never happy with how it actually sounded on games that I could get it to work with. And I recall having quite a few issues getting it to work on most of the games. I also had it in a later 486sx build as well shortly before it was replaced with the SCB-55.