buckrogers wrote:

Or do I need a PCI card for direct x sound?

No. ISA is fine... I have both ISA and PCI sound cards and both work ok...
Of course you will not get fancy 3D effects in Windows games with ISA (but normal stereo will be ok).

Mirek

486+ era games will run fine on an ISA card. Most DirectX games won't. I remember that I couldn't run many DirectX games on my 120MHz 486 that had a VLB video card (VLB was to ISA what AGP is to PCI, except it was used for more than just video cards) because the system was just too slow.

I'd recommend a non-PnP SB16 since you have Roland cards to do MIDI with.

OK. So its an ISA SB16 non-pnp for DOS games, and a PCI SB128 or similar for DirectX games.

Until 2002 I used a ISA SoundBlaster card for all DirectX games, I don't see why it shouldn't work. Of course it doesn't support EAX or more than two speakers, but that's not a requirement for any game.
Some people claim that ISA cards slow down system performance, which was not the case on my machines.

ISA might slow down performance if the game tries to mix a lot of audio channels. Say if you load up Unreal and change the default # of audio channels from 8 to 32 @ 48KHz 😀 PCI cards usually have hardware mixing, and the bus has so much more and better bandwidth.

Ensoniq AudioPCI-based cards like the SB PCI 128 however only mix like 2 hardware channels so they might as well be software-based. They are a lot like having a ISA card, and are a lot like the crappy AC97 codecs all over these days on mobos. The bus might still help though. ISA likes to hog CPU time, especially with the wrong BIOS settings. Make sure Delayed Transaction and Passive Release are enabled, as long as they don't cause problems. A couple of other tweakable settings are the IO timings.

Check out the BIOS optimization guide for some more info.

swaaye is correct. I've tried ISA cards with older DirectX games and had problems due to the fact that it just couldn't mix everything in software and send it over the ISA bus fast enough, resulting in choppy sound.

I just followed swaayes suggestion and loaded Unreal on my K6 computer 😉. It has an AWE64 Gold card installed.

The default number of audio channels was 16 on my version, and I couldn't select 48kHz, so I settled for 44.1kHz. There was no stuttering or choppy sound, even when I increased the number of channels to 64 (although I doubt the engine uses more than 32; I think it's 8 for the tracker music and the rest for sound effects). Compared to modern EAX cards, the software rendered room effects sounded a bit cheesy, but not really awful (like the hardware EAX effects on cheap PCI cards).

For stereo soundcards without hardware mixing or 3D effect capabilities the ISA bus is fast enough, because the channels are mixed in software before they are sent over the ISA bus. All you need is a CPU that is fast enough and a mainboard chipset that can properly handle DMA requests (many 486 and pentium boards failed in that category).

IMO the SB 128 is not necessary if you already have a decent ISA card.