Well you could replace the ensonic with a Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32.
Also think about getting a Voodoo 2 card.IT will play everything from 1999 and back.Also if you do get a Voodoo 2 you should add the Millennium for DOS games
since it's better that voodoo for DOS.The Processor should be enough but you can get a 200 mhz or 233 mhz.It would be a kick butt system.Good luck 😜

CentaurHauls is the id of a WinChip C6 CPU. It's a Pentium equivalent unless you want to play 3D games that use lots of floating point math. It sucks for that. Luckily, most DOS games are for 486s or less which have even worse FPUs (or don't have an FPU).

64 MB is plenty for Windows 95. Even for gaming. 128+ MB can possibly cause compatibility issues in DOS games. DOS games aren't going to need more than 16 MB RAM.

Ensoniq Soundscape is a pretty decent DOS sound card. You can even download drivers for it from EMU yet. Just go to their driver section and look up Ensoniq hardware. Plenty of later DOS games have native Soundscape support. But, if the game lacks native Soundscape support, you have to select Sound Blaster, Adlib, or SB 2.0 for digital audio. The card has hardware MPU-401 so you can just select General MIDI for music. Nicest thing about Soundscape cards is that they don't need a big TSR (unless it's a VIVO).

swaaye wrote:

CentaurHauls is the id of a WinChip C6 CPU. It's a Pentium equivalent unless you want to play 3D games that use lots of floating point math. It sucks for that. Luckily, most DOS games are for 486s or less which have even worse FPUs (or don't have an FPU).

64 MB is plenty for Windows 95. Even for gaming. 128+ MB can possibly cause compatibility issues in DOS games.

Ensoniq Soundscape is a pretty decent DOS sound card. You can even download drivers for it from EMU yet. Just go to their driver section and look up Ensoniq hardware.

I think the motherboard is an Aladdin. What processor upgrades are available for it? I suppose I don't have to worry much, like I said earlier I don't plan on doing much 3D gaming (mostly 2D adventures).

I've got a lead on an AWE32 for under $10, so I was going to try and go for that as I was told that it was better for gaming than the Soundscape.

Speaking of sound cards, can you use a Roland MT-32 (the big external box) with a Soundscape or Awe32? I think they have a general MIDI port on them. Some games displayed funny messages on the MT-32 which would be fun to see.

Could 128MB really break DOS games? I thought DOS games wouldn't see anything beyond the 64MB? I never had any trouble on my next computer which had 512MB.

Tempest

Soundscape has better MIDI than AWE32 for DOS Games. AWE32 also has a big, annoying TSR called AWEUTIL (I believe) that is needed for General MIDI support quite often. This needs EMM386 to be loaded, or it won't work. That's not ideal at all...

The only downside to Soundscape is its lack of SBPro and SB16 support. If the game doesn't natively support it, you are stuck with mono digital audio. If the game does natively support it, it does 16-bit 48 KHz stereo audio that is cleaner than any SB card. 😀 MIDI support is worry free, like I said, because it has great General MIDI support.

And yeah your CPU is totally adequate for DOS games. If you want to upgrade, you need to figure out what socket it is. Socket 7 gives you quite a few options. But I wouldn't worry at all if you are just playing DOS games.

I have problems with 128 MB in DOS with a Intel Pentium Pro motherboard. That could've just been something with that board though. DOS4GW wasn't liking it at times and was giving weird errors that were solved by pulling half the RAM.

swaaye wrote:

Soundscape has better MIDI than AWE32 for DOS Games. AWE32 also has a big, annoying TSR called AWEUTIL (I believe) that is needed for General MIDI support quite often. This needs EMM386 to be loaded, or it won't work. That's not ideal at all...

The only downside to Soundscape is its lack of SBPro and SB16 support. If the game doesn't natively support it, you are stuck with mono digital audio. If the game does natively support it, it does 16-bit 48 KHz stereo audio that is cleaner than any SB card. 😀 MIDI support is worry free, like I said, because it has great General MIDI support.

Hmm... No SBPro/SB16 or Better MIDI? Decisions descisions... If you had access to both a AWE32 and a Soundscape, which would you chose? Also, I do plan on running some Windows games, just nothing fancy like Quake 3 or anything like that.

Tempest

Most early Windows 9x games that aren't shooters don't need much CPU power. Diablo runs fine on a low-end Pentium, for example.

As for sound cards, well a lot of DOS games have native support for Soundscape. So I guess you'll just have to see if you have trouble with it. Back in the day I ran a Soundscape and a SBPro together. That is even better than a SB16 IMO because SB16's backward compatibility isn't always that great and newer games usually have native Soundscape support which is better quality than SB16.

I forgot to mention though that you really don't want to use Soundscape's FM synth support. It is not good at all. Sound really strange. But, hey, if you have a General MIDI card why use FM anyway?

So I can run the AWE32 and the Soundscape together? Interesting. So if I had both in the same system what order should I chose for sound when given options (from best to worse)?

1. Soundscape support
2. AWE32
3. SBPro / SB16
4. General MIDI

Also if I have a MT-32 module, where does that fit into all of this? Is that considered General MIDI? How do you interface a MT-32 with the computer? I assumed it just plugged into the sound card somewhere.

Tempest

Tempest wrote:

So I can run the AWE32 and the Soundscape together? Interesting. So if I had both in the same system what order should I chose […]
Show full quote

So I can run the AWE32 and the Soundscape together? Interesting. So if I had both in the same system what order should I chose for sound when given options (from best to worse)?

1. Soundscape support
2. AWE32
3. SBPro / SB16
4. General MIDI

Also if I have a MT-32 module, where does that fit into all of this? Is that considered General MIDI? How do you interface a MT-32 with the computer? I assumed it just plugged into the sound card somewhere.

Best to worst: Soundscape -> AWE32 -> SB16 -> SBPro. You can hear some recordings of Soundscape and AWE32 in this thread (page 2). Also some interesting sound card info there.

General MIDI is supported by both Soundscape and AWE32. If you run both cards at once you'll have to change the default MIDI port on one of them. Soundscape has nice, easy to set jumpers for MIDI port. Then, with General MIDI in games, you just set the port that points to one of the cards.

Also, don't enable SB emulation on Soundscape if you are using an AWE32 too.

Tempest wrote:

Also if I have a MT-32 module, where does that fit into all of this?

Unless you plan on purchasing a dedicated MIDI interface, you'll want to connect the MT-32 to the Soundscape, through use of a joystick-to-MIDI adapter

The Soundscape is the *only* card that I am aware of that acknowledges "intelligent mode" MPU commands. Simply put, games that might normally require the use of a genuine MPU-401-derivative (Sierra's SCI0 adventures, for example), will work just fine with the Soundscape.

But if you use the joystick port for the MIDI, doesn't that prevent you from using it for, you know, a joystick? 😀

Tempest

Tempest wrote:

But if you use the joystick port for the MIDI, doesn't that prevent you from using it for, you know, a joystick? 😀

Tempest

Most adapters have a joystick passthrough. 😉

Is the MT-32 module worth picking up or will the MIDI from the Soundscape board do? Also, will the MT-32 display messages when used through the Soundscape card? What about the Sound Canvas card (SCC-1)? Is that worth tracking down?

So is the Millennium card decent enough for games? I don't recall ever having problems with it, but if there's something better out there I'll look for it.

Tempest

The MT-32 is worth picking up since it will go much further than any card, since you can use it with almost any computer (since there are midi usb adapters). I'd even recommend a CM-32 instead (a bit more advanced sfx or so).

And to confuse matters worse, if you like playing FF7 or Descent, you might as well pick up a Yamaha XG music card as well 😀 Such as the internal daughter board DB50XG, or the standalone (like the SCC-1 equivalent): SW60XG

Welcome to Vogons 😀

Is there any point in adding extra memory to the AWE32? I assume the extra memory was used by sound programs and for loading homemade sound fonts and such, not by games.

Tempest

Is there any point in adding extra memory to the AWE32? I assume the extra memory was used by sound programs and for loading homemade sound fonts and such, not by games.

AFAIK that's exactly it. No use then really.

In DOS you can't load soundfonts. I've looked and looked but have never found a utility to do it. So AWE32's RAM is useless in DOS.

If you can get the game to work in a Windows 9x DOS session, where you can load soundfonts with Creative's utility, you can set the game to use General MIDI and will be able to use the soundfont for the game. It's still tricky though as AWE32's MPU-401 support is all software based and frequently a pain in the ass. You have to figure out the right setting to get the card to not use its onboard ROM waveset. Some games will simply not work with AWE's MPU-401 "support" though.

Still have to find some 4MB+ 30pin SIMMs. Not all that easy or cheap. It only supports a max of 28MB (4MB of 32MB isn't addressable). I have 8MB on an AWE32 and have managed to get soundfonts working with DOS games thru Win98, but it is such a waste of time and effort that I don't really bother at all.

Much more fun to load Soundfonts on a Live/Audigy/X-Fi and play the games in DOSBOX.

I do think it was possible to load soundfonts in dos but it may be just possible for the Live! series and then through some non standard file format (ecw I think). But yeah, with the Live! you need EMS to use it anyway 🙁

Edit: and sorry for being a smartass, I know it's about the AWE and ot the Live!

Yeah you can swap out the default.ecw for the DOS TSR for Live!. This is the fairly limited AudioPCI waveset format from Ensoniq. You can use the 8MB ecw file with Live! in DOS this way. It's not as good as a quality 8MB soundfont though...