The data that can be flashed on these cards is not the firmware (which is integrated in the CT8903 chip), but the plug-and-play identification data in the EEPROM U21. The CT8903 is the same "digital-part of AWE32-in-one" chip that is also used on AWE64 cards, so the idea of converting that card into an AWE64 cards makes sense.

The key difference between the "32-voice" AWE32 and the "64-voice" AWE64 is not any hardware difference. The AWE32 wavetable synthesizer (the EMU8000 chip, which is integrated as part of the CT8903) has 32 logical voices, some of which are not available for music playback, but used for internal system purposes. This hardware synthesizer is identical on the AWE32 and the AWE64. The extra 32 voices of the AWE64 are due to Creative shipping a 32-voice software synthesizer using a method called "WaveGuide synthesis" (minimum system requirement: a Pentium processor). The software synthesizer can add 32 voices on top of the "32" hardware voices. As these two synthesizers are entirely different General MIDI synthesizers, the same instruments sound different on the AWE32 wavetable synthesizer and the WaveGuide synthesizer, so the voices do not get dynamically allocated to whatever synthesizer currently has spare voices, but you can set up a mapping what instruments should be played on which synthesizer.

I am not sure whether the WaveGuide software synthesizer software checks the device ID of the installed Soundblaster card for being "AWE64" branded, but it surely might do. In that case, the AWE64 card is a hardware dongle used to unlock the WaveGuide synthesizer, and reflashing your device identification data to that of an AWE64 card will allow the WaveGuide synthesizer to run on your system. As this card has not been sold as AWE64, Creative will also not have payed license fees for the WaveGuide synthesizer to Seer Systems, so its technically piracy to use that software with your AWE32 card. Apart from possibly unlocking the WaveGuide synthesizer, there is no advantage of changing the card identification data.

As you correctly state, the card identification data lists all the components of the cards. The card identification data of similar AWE64 cards do not include an IDE port, so the BIOS or operating system has no idea that there is an IDE on your card that could be enabled by configuring the Plug-and-Play interface correctly, and thus the IDE interface disappears. If you want to get rid of the IDE interface in the device manager, you might also want to use the AWE64 card identification data instead of the AWE32 card identification data.

Clear as mud! 🤔 I was just hoping it would be like unlocking some old gpus and give increased capabilities. Not important really, just a hope. Anyway I plan on maxing out it's ram and running it beside my audician 32 And my ra-30 midi. I don't care if the IDE is there or not in the particular system I have, since I have a SATA raid on top of my built-in drive controller.

sydres wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:38:

Clear as mud! 🤔 I was just hoping it would be like unlocking some old gpus and give increased capabilities.

Well, it actually is a good comparison: Just as GPU unlocks just permits the driver to things it wouldn't do without the unlock, without physically changing what the hardware can do, this is also what happens when you change the AWE32 identification data to the AWE64 identification data, you allow software to add 32 extra MIDI voices.

sydres wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:38:

Anyway I plan on maxing out it's ram and running it beside my audician 32 And my ra-30 midi. I don't care if the IDE is there or not in the particular system I have, since I have a SATA raid on top of my built-in drive controller.

So your system does not require the IDE port. The BIOS might insist on allocating an IRQ to it, causing it to be unavailable to PCI cards, so there could be more shared IRQs on the PCI bus, which might have slightly impact performance. If you flash the AWE64 identification data, the IDE port stays disabled, and no IRQ gets allocated to it.

While you can set in your BIOS which IRQs may be manually assigned to non-plug-and-play cards and which IRQs will be managed by the Plug and Play system of the BIOS, you can not tell the BIOS whether certain Plug-and-Play-IRQs should be allocated to ISA or PCI cards. As an IDE controller is considered a device possibly important for booting the system, the BIOS will go great lengths to try to reserve one of the BIOS-managed plug-and-play IRQs to the AWE32 IDE interface, taking this IRQ away from remaining IRQs that can be used for PCI cards, which are served from the same "Plug and Play IRQs" pool.

Good refresher, I was an IT major in college! Back then I learned on 486s and pentium I systems. But in the intervening years I ended up working in fine metals for the semiconductor industry and haven't had to worry about this stuff in decades. So you jogged my brain! I guess I didn't think about the IRQ stuff! if it becomes an issue I'll pull the SATA raid card and put the CF to ide back in.

Another question about the card. Was this an OEM model because the manual and cd don't look like any of the ones I ever got buying Creative products in the past? I've found other creative manuals that look like this one but most seem to be a bit more, dare I say stylish!

Thats how all my creative manuals look.
So probably not retail but maybe generic OEM from the good old days when each town had a local computer shop building beige PC's.

Not my town we had one store that had overpriced accessories and sold pirated copies of Windows and Office, and an Electronic Boutique that sold overpriced games and crappy video cards. Now that I think of it the pirated software got them sued out of existence

sydres wrote on 2024-03-14, 00:10:

Not my town we had one store that had overpriced accessories and sold pirated copies of Windows and Office, and an Electronic Boutique that sold overpriced games and crappy video cards. Now that I think of it the pirated software got them sued out of existence

I used to order tons of computers and computer parts in the Cleveland, OH Area in the 90's for office use and most of the stores were owned by Russians with exotic cars parked in the back.

One of the places was busted for pirated Microsoft Mouse driver disks (among other pirated MS software).

https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/microso … ellers-in-ohio/

Bundling MS Office with a computer was a major selling point back then.

Finally got time to stick the card into my pentium iiie system. It is far less noisy than my audician. But the onboard sound ROM is definitely not as good sounding as my Ra-30. Can't wait to get some ram on this thing and test out some different sound fonts.

sydres wrote on 2024-03-15, 16:35:

But the onboard sound ROM is definitely not as good sounding as my Ra-30.

That's not surprising at all. The RA-30 is claimed to have 1MB of compressed audio samples. The AWE32 ROM has 512KB of 16-bit PCM uncompressed samples. Assuming a 3:1 compression ratio, the RA-30 as six times as much sample data in the ROM. Putting 2*1MB (if you have it at hand, step up to 2*4MB) into your AWE32 and loading even a basic sound font like 2MBGMGS or 8MBGMGS should make a big difference in how good it sounds. When I used an AWE32 as primary MIDI synthesis device, I considered the improvement of 8MBGMGS over the ROM font to be as substantial as the improvement of the ROM font over OPL3 FM synthesis.

I've got 32mb on the way so I'll have 28mb of ram to experiment with.