The SC8600 is likely to be similar to the 8500 discussed in this thread.

Do you have more information about the "Yamaha OPL3-based ISA sound card"?
If it is based on a OPL3-SAx (Yamaha YMF71*) chipset, chances are high that is is SB Pro compatible.

There are very few cards that are SB16 compatible and not made by Creative. Both cards you mentioned above can only emulate 8-bit Soundblasters.

It is a Yamaha YMF719 OPL3 card... i am guessing this will be SB Pro 2.0 compatible? (using OPL3)

Here are pics of the two cards...

This is the ESS 1868F with Dream chip (Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D)

And this is the Yamaha YMF719 OPL3 based sound card:

I just need to know which one would be better.... i want one with good midi and good SB pro support! Do ESS audiodrive cards support OPL3?

Cheers 😉

Ok i decided to buy the ESS 1868F based card with the Dream wavetable (Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D ISA) 😁 It only cost me £2.99 on ebay which i think is a nice little bargain 😁

I wanted a card with good midi, SB Pro compatibilty and OPL3 support... as far as i know this card has it all! (i'm sure ESS cards support OPL3 or use some clone OPL3?)

Now i don't want anyone to say i should have got the Yamaha card instead!
😜

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Ok i decided to buy the ESS 1868F based card with the Dream wavetable (Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D ISA) :happyhappy: It only cost […]
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Ok i decided to buy the ESS 1868F based card with the Dream wavetable (Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D ISA) 😁 It only cost me £2.99 on ebay which i think is a nice little bargain 😁

I wanted a card with good midi, SB Pro compatibilty and OPL3 support... as far as i know this card has it all! (i'm sure ESS cards support OPL3 or use some clone OPL3?)

Now i don't want anyone to say i should have got the Yamaha card instead!
😜

No, not going to write that. I'm not familiar with whatever OPL3 might be, however (edit here: at least I wasn't until now). Just yesterday, sweating like crazy in the room I use as a "shop", although I was only in there a few minutes at a time (it was 102 F outside, again, and it's still not a powerful enough window AC unit in there), I picked up one of the AWE64 cards I'd tried in an Asus ALi chipset system -- P5A, and had to set back down.

In the P5A, all three AWE cards had static and fuzz noise; but in the Intel SE44BX, as soon as I disabled the Crystal Sound Fusion onboard audio (it wouldn't give up some particular interrupt to let the AWE work), I had good sound. No idea yet why the difference in systems (I have ended up using Turtle Beach Santa Cruz cards in that P5A and another similar system with a P5A that currently isn't complete.) I had kept my AWE32 and AWA64 cards from when I used them in the systems I had back then, and recently added a second AwE64 when my own AWE cards were seemingly so noisy now.

If that OPL3 thing is mostly involved with playing DOS games, I'm sticking with Windows32 games right now, but my curiosity bump was tickled. (In edit -- I'll Google it, I suppose. Probably should've done that before now. OK, it's a Yamaha chip alias, then. The AN430TX board I have that still isn't working has a Yamaha sound system onboard.)

OPL3 is the FM synthesis chip used on the SB16.

Adlib: OPL2 only, no DAC (i.e. it could do music but not digitized sounds)
SB: OPL2 + 8-bit mono DAC
SB Pro: Two OPL2 chips for stereo FM music + 8-bit stereo DAC
SB16: Single OPL3 for stereo FM + 16-bit stereo DAC

Masses of clones report themselves as SB Pro but have OPL3.

SBPro2 (CT1600) has OPL3 instead of dual OPL2 chips. This one does 8-bit 44.1KHz mono or 22.05KHz stereo sound (same as older?).

SB16: I'm pretty sure that some of them use a bad OPL3 wannabe from Creative. For example, the end-run SB16 Waveffects sure doesn't have OPL3 onboard. The older revisions of the SB16 are safest, I believe. The AWE and SB32 cards have this issue too among other things.

Real OPL3 is nice to have but the most troubles on a non-directly-supported sound card usually come from getting digital sound working.

Not all SB16 cards have OPL3... Some have Creative's own crappy FM synthesizer chip which i think sounds horrible! (i think it is mainly used in SB16 Value and Vibra 16 cards?).

The Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D card i chose seems to be pretty good at the moment... It is compaitible with SB Pro, ESS Audiodrive, General Midi and Roland Sound Canvas.

Now the only big gripe i have with it are the Dos drivers! Since it is an ISA card that uses the same resources as a real Sound Blaster i thought i could just get away with adding the Sound Blaster environment variable to my autoexec.bat... but it did not work!
It plays Dos games fine under Windows 95 but when i restart into Dos mode the sounds will not work and i have to use a crappy driver that uses up too much conventional memory!! (it's just like using a PCI sound card for Dos 😒 ).

I know there is a way to load Dos drivers into high memory and i am sure it involved using EMM386 but i just cannot remember how to configure it all in my Autoexec.bat and Config.sys.... It's "LOADHIGH" or "DEVICEHIGH" or something??

As for the Soundcard, that is PnP, execute a ressource override for plain DOS.
As for the DOS memory management get qemm386, as later emm386 versions introduce alot of problems with mainly dos programs.
Memory management is nothing you learn to configure within minutes. (well there have been always Memmaker users.)

I have a few extra SB AWE 64s ISA in the garage I was going to offer you one but I noticed your in the UK and Im in the USA, shipping kills the deal. 😒

PowerPie5000 wrote:

The Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D card i chose seems to be pretty good at the moment... It is compatible with SB Pro, ESS Audiodrive, General Midi and Roland Sound Canvas.

Now the only big gripe i have with it are the Dos drivers! Since it is an ISA card that uses the same resources as a real Sound Blaster i thought i could just get away with adding the Sound Blaster environment variable to my autoexec.bat... but it did not work!
It plays Dos games fine under Windows 95 but when i restart into Dos mode the sounds will not work and i have to use a crappy driver that uses up too much conventional memory!! (it's just like using a PCI sound card for Dos 😒 ).

I was also tempted to get me a Maxi Sound 64 Dynamic 3D some months ago, but I resisted. I do have a Terratec Gold-16/96 with the same ESS-1868 chipset, but without the hardware wavetable. I do not remember the DOS driver of that one taking up any memory. Maybe it is the midi chipset driver that requires the memory? Did you try using custom soundbanks in DOS yet?, I wonder if that works well.