I think your best bet is Aureal Vortex 2, since it doesn't need EMM386 and doesn't need Distributed DMA either.

Thanks. If someone points another card to evaluate, otherwise I will just look for the Aureal Vortex 2.

Let's clear out some things first :

You are - a. Having a SB Live! Card.
- b. Want to boot to DOS mode to play Dos Games

There are two main driver sets for SB emulation for higher SB PCI cards.

Try seeing this site for the drivers : http://easymamecab.mameworld.net/html/snddosdr.htm

I have successfully used Audigy with one of these drivers. I'm not so sure about the DDMA problem though. Try changing the Live card to another PCI slot. May also require a tweak in Bios.

If all else fails, as Kreshna says, get a Aureal Vortex 2 based card.

Thanks for the interest Malik, but simply SB16 emulation of the Live! and many other cards from different vendors is not possibile on motherboards that do not support some peculiar low level features (namely DDMA using a NMI), no matter what driver you use. I don't know if there's a trend within mb chipset producers to drop these, but simply it appears that nforce is one of the newer chipset that will never support SB16 emulation using DDMA. Although this kind of emulation require a memory extender (emm386.exe), reducing compatibility with dos games in this way, it seems that it is the most common way for sound card producers to offer SB emulation on pci cards.
As pointed by Kreshna, Aureal Vortex 2 is one card that don't need DDMA to offer SB emulation. Unfortunately it's only SB Pro emulation and not SB 16 (I just hope that few games will require a SB16...). Sadly, hardware that still properly support legacy OSes and devices (like SB Live!) is running out of the market, and soon we will just be obligated to buy old systems on ebay or rely on software emulation (dosbox and others).

I have read about this "DDMA / NMI" problem which you describe. I just did some research on the internet regarding Ensoniq's AudioPCI soundcard, but unfortunately it appears that this card won't help either because Wikipedia says -

" (DOS) Compatibility was achieved through the clever use of the PC's NMI and a TSR program that together virtualized the Sound Blaster hardware. "

You also said - "I don't know if there's a trend within mb chipset producers to drop these..."

From what I have read about this subject, yes it was a trend that was adopted very approximately from about 2001 onwards, approximately from the advent of the Pentium 4 onwards. That is to say, to drop support for this type of "NMI SB-type" requirement.

Pity. 🙁

I investegated the matter: reading better this article, it seems that ESS chipsets are very good with dos compatibility and don't require special mb features. They don't have great sound quality, but people that want to play dos games (like me) often just want to ear something and don't care about sound quality. An interesting card, that even features a wavetable connector, is the terratec DMX (support site, with hi-res images), chipset ES1970 Canyon-3d:

The only problem with it is that it isn't supported in windows XP. This does not just means that features like audio acceleration (A3D/EAX) aren't supported, but that is supposed to work only in 2-channels mode with default drivers in the windows xp cd.

As said in various sites, drivers that worth trying are:
- An user modded driver that is said to support 4-channels (link);
- The ESS maestro-2e XP driver (link);

If nothing works, drivers in the original windows cd should works (link, updated with SP1 files).

W9X/Dos drivers are in the terratec or ESS sites.

Another option, this time with supported XP drivers, is every card with an ESS chipset from ES1978 (maestro-2e). Don't know what "XP supported" does means, but at least DirectSound and AC'97 (4-channels audio) should works. A3D/EAX accelerations maybe aren't but who care about them anymore in xp compatible games? These chipsets were used mostly in notebooks, but some pci cards exists: an example is the Diamond Multimedia Sonic Impact S100 (site with hi-res images), chipset ES1989 Allegro.

This card doesn't feature a wavetable connector, but should have an internal wavetable. This just means that it has limited MIDI sets support and less effects (please confirm), but if you are interested only in playing DOS games, you should always ear something. W9X/DOS and WXP drivers are at the ESS support site.

If you know an XP supported card with an ESS chipset featuring dos compatibility and a wavetable connector, please report it here.

Why looking for a world of trouble when you have DOSBox?.

Yeah, I know this isn't what the OP wanted.

Why looking for a world of trouble when you have DOSBox?.

Yeah, I know this isn't what the OP wanted.

I highly support projects like DOSBox. But, I'm sorry, we are still at the point where a 64bit processor like the amd64 x2 can more compatible with ancient 8086 instructions than DosBox. Still, a broken vesa implementation on a ati video card may be less bugged than the DOSbox one. Still, a broken sb pro emulation on a opti sound card may be better than the DOSbox one. Emulation is hard, 100% correct emulation even more and can be nearly impossible (see amiga emulation scene: the Winuae developer said that 100% correct Amiga 500 emulation may be never reached). Dosbox has made giant steps in the last versions (i recently played Sherlock Holmes: the serrated scalpel, with 0 probs: only a smal graphic glitch that may still be visibile in real hw, dunno), but still there a considerable rate of unplayable games. Running games on the bare metal can cause other kind of troubles, true, but nothing that can't be solved quickly with a correct setup and a bit of dos knowledge.

Dosbox will grew and the failure rate will become trascurable in the feature, but for now I still prefer to run games in the "reference" hw.

EDIT: Qbix kindly asked me about any dos game I was aware to be broken with dosbox. This is what I've answered him, to clarify what I meant with this post.

ceztko wrote:

Well, my little experience with dosbox has always been positive: I played Strife, Sherlock Holmes: the serrated scalpel and Lure of the tempress and they worked just fine. I didn't want to say dosbox has bad compatibility: looking at the game database, unplayable games on the latest stable version are around 5%. This is a very good achievement and if you says cvs development version is even better, these are great news. Seeing that dosbox support more hardware variants, I would say is possible/probable dosbox has already a compatibility higher than an average old pc. But my preouccupation is not broken games, it is about games with defects: considering that I have only limited dos games experience, how I can say if a glitch is caused by dosbox or is present even in the original? This is the main reason I can't be a serious dosbox tester and I still prefer playing with real hw. I am more inside amiga scene: in fact I've already reported some bugs to win-uae dev(s).

I find that to be a funny comment considering your system. It's hardly a standard DOS era platform.

This is like saying the A1200 is a good A500 gaming machine and better than WinUAE, which frankly isn't the case. Even when you disable cache on A1200, you still have a different CPU (which has FPU inbuilt) and AGA emulating ECS to contend with, let alone the opcode differences of the newer Workbench ROM. At least with WinUAE you have much better chance to isolate the emulation to specific A500 behaviours.

Using DOSBox is going to give you much truer performance than your listed system.

@dh4rm4: i haven't really listed my system. I should specify my area of interest with dos games, that is all games post 1989. So yes, the computer I have prepared may not be suitable for very old dos titles. In my clarification, I've already admitted that dosbox already support more hw variants so it can be more compatible than an average not-so-old pc. I disagree with your comparison with amiga computers: the lacking of consistent backward compatibility between models caused seriour harm and annoying to the users. Some games are known to be working only an amiga 500 OCS, with kickstart 1.2, with 0.5 mb of chip-ram, with a double density floppy drive. Add 0.5 mb on the expansion door and the game stops working. Change the drive from double density to high desnity and the game stops working. I've never heard of a pc dos game that stopped working because you added a 4mb simm. What I want to say is: backward compatibility is more effective on pcs. Bios never changes, vesa is well known, sound blaster is the de-facto standard, dos is ms supported. And modern cpus still mantain compatibilty with 8086 16 bits instructions (read a recent interview to an AMD engineer)!

So, yes: I've tryed building an hybrid computer that can still run legacy code but keeping linux and wxp fast. In case of failure, will post here 😁

Your motherboard and corresponding CPU will be of issue though, due to a couple of factors:-

The nforce chipset(s) weren't even around in the DOS peek era (late 80s - early 90s) and they are Windows/DirectX centric by design.

The CPUs that can mount on that board will often be too fast (though they can be slowed with wait states or possibly underclocked depending on BIOS options) to make games playable or even stable.

Late 80s DOS era machines were peaking at 90mhz.

When you add an PCI SB emulating card to that mix it's likely that some games will fail. Have a look at the system specs forums on this board, you'll see that the majority of people who're running machines for the same DOS era games that you wish to are using much older, much slower, much more standard (for their day) components. Most of those machines have at the very least a couple of ISA slots for their soundcard(s).

"Windows/DirectX centric" is just adversting in the form of "optimized for Windows XP" that does mean nothing. Dos dosn't require anything special: it just require a compliant bios and a x86 cpu. Dos games don't differ much: as long they don't do very stupid assumptions about the hw, they mostly require a valid dos enviroment, a compliant video card, a compliant sound card, and a mouse driver loaded in the memory.

Even a p100 is faster for bad coded games that assume certain cpu timings. Many early '80 games suffered this but I doubt the sympthom is common in late '80 ones (played a lot of dos games with my athlon 1000 with almost 0 probs). Many players will prefer having original hw in their ISA slots: good for them. I trust sb emulation of various sound cards as non-tech people have done for years without noticing it much.

Yeah but you probably will. Your whole point of view on Amiga emulation seems to indicate that you notice these sorts of things.

I'm the same.

My experience selling all manner of 'multimedia" hardware in the 90s was that there were many games that did not work properly with SB emulating soundcards - such as samples playing too fast, white noise in place of sound, FM music/effects sounding wrong due to incorrect notes/instruments being played and so on. These kinds of issues were brought up by 'non tech' people (ie customers) and many other people who worked selling PC hardware in those days. The people who didn't notice these things were those that never heard the correct sounding hardware in the first place.

Just saying...

When I had my old Win95a/Dos6.22 computer I I had to trust Sb Emulation because My Sound card was an Old Yamaha OCL3 Or OC3 or what ever it was called and it had great sb emulation as well as other souncards such as adlib and it worked perfectly under Dos for them old games. But that was an ISA card though not PCI. But I had a PCI128 card and it had sb16 emulation and I got it working under win98's command prompt only screen.

A little bit OT, but am I being anal-retentive for suggesting that this thread should be moved to Marvin? And probably this thread too.