Cool! The EMU8000 is also supported by a couple of MOD trackers. Impulse Tracker, most famously.
Others are AMP for Windows or AWEamp et cetera ..

The AWE64 is a great card. Clean output that is far better than earlier generations of Sound Blasters and native SB16 / AWE32 compatibility is perfect for Pentium-era DOS systems.

My favorite DOS sound card setup is pairing an AWE64 Gold with a Gravis Ultrasound Extreme. It's like having four sound cards. The GUS Extreme covers SB Pro compatibility (via its ESS1688 chip) and native GUS support. And the AWE64 handles SB16 and AWE32 support.

I also agree that genuine OPL isn't really that needed if one is primarily using either General MIDI or CD audio for music. Genuine OPL support makes more sense for late 80s or early 90s gaming, but by the time Pentiums were a thing, digital audio was supplanting the need for it.

the ct4500 was my primary card back in the day. after a decade i eventually upgraded it to a ct4540 which was a slight, but noticable improvement. currently i'm using an azt-2320 card which is not dissimilar to the awe64, sans the sb16 support (although replacing it with sbpro, wss and probably licensed yamaha opl3). it's also dirt cheap and, next to the opti, one of the most prevalent isa cards on ebay. i'm using an oem of the aztech waverider 32 platinum so maybe the build quality is higher for a (1 step down from) flagship model, but most other people report good results across the board.

btw, i'm planning on starting the dig soon...got it installed and all ready to go. it's one of the few lucasarts games i never got around to playing.

Agree this card is often overlooked. Everyone raves about the Gold but end of the day it's still a noisy ISA card and not that much better then the value, definitely not worth the price difference anyway.
If I compare OPL and CQM side by side then yes typically OPL is the better sounding but if I'm just playing a game I don't really notice the difference.

Aside from CQM FM synth, I like the AWE64 too for being the most bugfree SB16-based sound card, having good sound quality and the EMU8K being quite more useful in Windows with the ability to load SF2 SoundFonts especially when the amount of RAM is upgraded from 512KB (or 4MB in the case of the AWE64 Gold).

Yeah, for a late era DOS, early era Win9x machine, the CT4500 is awesome. Most games supported AWE, so you don't have to put up with CQM. It sounds good enough in DirectX games. Lack of EAX begins to hurt it getting into 1998/1999 games.

Still, whatever you do, don't listen to E1M1 with CQM. That track really brings out the worst in CQM, and sounds downright chirpy compared to how it's supposed to sound.

There is one more Creative card with basically same component base, but with few added extra features - SB32 PNP (CT3670)
It comes with standard SIMM slots instead of AWE64 expensive SIMCONN. Not that relevant for pure DOS gaming but it will add extra feature to play around with soundbanks in Win9x. It also comes with extra IDE header.

Namrok wrote on 2023-02-24, 18:46:

Yeah, for a late era DOS, early era Win9x machine, the CT4500 is awesome. Most games supported AWE, so you don't have to put up with CQM. It sounds good enough in DirectX games. Lack of EAX begins to hurt it getting into 1998/1999 games.

Still, whatever you do, don't listen to E1M1 with CQM. That track really brings out the worst in CQM, and sounds downright chirpy compared to how it's supposed to sound.

It really does, Doom does not like the CQM. I like the OPL music, and the AWE support is good too. But now that I have played through allot of Doom using the Roland, it’s honestly hard to go back to anything other than the native sound canvas sound. Doom was the game that really convinced me that it was worth the hassle to setup a midi box.

Once you have played DOOM on a Korg NS5R it's hard to go back to anything else.