Another update on my project 😀
I replaced the Riva128 with an AGP edition and this card runs fine with V2 SLI 😁 3DMark benches will follow.
Also picked up the AWE32 CT3900 today, which came in the retail box with install floppies and lots of manuals 😁 And OMG... this is now officialy the largest soundcard I've ever seen 😳 2 inches larger than my GUS MAX. I even had to cut some metal out of the inside of my case to make it fit!

Installed it and works great with the existing AWE64 drivers, in DOS and Win98 (too bad I didn't figure this out until I screwed up my Windows installation 🤣). FM sounds much better now! (again I have Vogons to thank me for the tip on the AWE32 😉). MIDI is fine too. But... ofcourse I have to run in some weird issue again:
SB sound is crackling in some games. For example with the game "Alien Carnage", most noticable at the loud parts of the in-game music. Already tried playing with the volume levels with Mixerset and downclocking ISA bus speed, no difference. The AWE32 is not sharing any IRQ/DMA/MIDI address with my GUS MAX.
Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?
My GUS MAX has some sound crackling too in certain games, but much less annoying.

In the meantime, some DOS benches with the Riva128 AGP installed:
3DBench: 449,8
PCPBench: 56,3

EDIT: So, here's the 3DMark 99 MAX results, with default settings, on the final configuration with V2 SLI:

8200 CPU 3Dmarks

640x480: 3900 3DMarks
800x600: 3900 3DMarks
1024x768: 3300 3DMarks
I'm happy 😁

mOBSCENE wrote:

Another update on my project :) I replaced the Riva128 with an AGP edition and this card runs fine with V2 SLI :D 3DMark benches […]
Show full quote

Another update on my project 😀
I replaced the Riva128 with an AGP edition and this card runs fine with V2 SLI 😁 3DMark benches will follow.
Also picked up the AWE32 CT3900 today, which came in the retail box with install floppies and lots of manuals 😁 And OMG... this is now officialy the largest soundcard I've ever seen 😳 2 inches larger than my GUS MAX. I even had to cut some metal out of the inside of my case to make it fit!

Installed it and works great with the existing AWE64 drivers, in DOS and Win98 (too bad I didn't figure this out until I screwed up my Windows installation 🤣). FM sounds much better now! (again I have Vogons to thank me for the tip on the AWE32 😉). MIDI is fine too. But... ofcourse I have to run in some weird issue again:
SB sound is crackling in some games. For example with the game "Alien Carnage", most noticable at the loud parts of the in-game music. Already tried playing with the volume levels with Mixerset and downclocking ISA bus speed, no difference. The AWE32 is not sharing any IRQ/DMA/MIDI address with my GUS MAX.
Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?
My GUS MAX has some sound crackling too in certain games, but much less annoying.

In the meantime, some DOS benches with the Riva128 AGP installed:
3DBench: 449,8
PCPBench: 56,3

Congrats. Yes the AWE32 is huge and it is notorious for cracking and popping sounds. It's by design.

Edit: Any reason you didn't get a Riva 128ZX chipset? its clocked higher and has 8mb or ram.

@ RogueTrip: By design... 🤣, really? By design of the CT3900 or the AWE32 in general? If it's just the CT3900, I could be looking for another non-PnP model or perhaps a SB16 with daughterboard.

I've read about the Riva 128ZX, but unfortunately very rare. There's just one model on eBay, but that would cost me 50 euros... way too much for my liking.

Yep, earlier Sound Blasters up to AWE32 had really poor quality sound. As you've discovered Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry is a great test for this.
Later SB16 Vibra's and I believe AWE64 have much higher quality sound and don't have the crackles and pops.
I have a CT2800 Vibra that plays music perfectly in Halloween Harry.
If you look at this thread "The Many Sounds of:" - A look at various different sound cards and the sound they produce in DOS games I've made some recordings of halloween harry on an older style SB16 and a CT2800 Vibra 16. If you skip to about 2:40ish the crackles and pops in the older card are more apparent.

Unfortunately it seems that with the Creative cards you can choose only two of the following: Real OPL FM synth, General MIDI without stuck notes, decent quality sound without crackles and pops.

There are no creative cards that give all three. You may want to look into clone cards particularly ESS.

mOBSCENE wrote:

Another update on my project :) I replaced the Riva128 with an AGP edition and this card runs fine with V2 SLI :D 3DMark benches […]
Show full quote

Another update on my project 😀
I replaced the Riva128 with an AGP edition and this card runs fine with V2 SLI 😁 3DMark benches will follow.
Also picked up the AWE32 CT3900 today, which came in the retail box with install floppies and lots of manuals 😁 And OMG... this is now officialy the largest soundcard I've ever seen 😳 2 inches larger than my GUS MAX. I even had to cut some metal out of the inside of my case to make it fit!

Installed it and works great with the existing AWE64 drivers, in DOS and Win98 (too bad I didn't figure this out until I screwed up my Windows installation 🤣). FM sounds much better now! (again I have Vogons to thank me for the tip on the AWE32 😉). MIDI is fine too. But... ofcourse I have to run in some weird issue again:
SB sound is crackling in some games. For example with the game "Alien Carnage", most noticable at the loud parts of the in-game music. Already tried playing with the volume levels with Mixerset and downclocking ISA bus speed, no difference. The AWE32 is not sharing any IRQ/DMA/MIDI address with my GUS MAX.
Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?
My GUS MAX has some sound crackling too in certain games, but much less annoying.

In the meantime, some DOS benches with the Riva128 AGP installed:
3DBench: 449,8
PCPBench: 56,3

If you like benchmarking old rigs, you could start a new thread with a couple benchmarks. I'm pretty sure theres other members willing to chip in 😉

DonutKing wrote:

Yep, earlier Sound Blasters up to AWE32 had really poor quality sound. As you've discovered Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry is a g […]
Show full quote

Yep, earlier Sound Blasters up to AWE32 had really poor quality sound. As you've discovered Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry is a great test for this.
Later SB16 Vibra's and I believe AWE64 have much higher quality sound and don't have the crackles and pops.
I have a CT2800 Vibra that plays music perfectly in Halloween Harry.
If you look at this thread "The Many Sounds of:" - A look at various different sound cards and the sound they produce in DOS games I've made some recordings of halloween harry on an older style SB16 and a CT2800 Vibra 16. If you skip to about 2:40ish the crackles and pops in the older card are more apparent.

Unfortunately it seems that with the Creative cards you can choose only two of the following: Real OPL FM synth, General MIDI without stuck notes, decent quality sound without crackles and pops.

There are no creative cards that give all three. You may want to look into clone cards particularly ESS.

Yes!! This is exactly the crackling/noise I'm experiencing. My AWE64 Gold doesn't have this issue indeed.

So, if you say I can choose two out of three: which AWE32 model should I be looking at if I want the the real OPL FM synth + decent sound quality + stuck notes? I barely use General MIDI anyway, use the GUS for MIDI in games.

@ Tetrium: There's already a general 3DBench thread. Guess I should send my data in 😉

So, if you say I can choose two out of three: which card/model should I be looking at if I want the the real OPL FM synth + decent sound quality + stuck notes? I barely use General MIDI anyway, use the GUS for MIDI in games.

If you aren't worried about general MIDI on the sound blaster, my vote is for a CT2800 or CT2900. They have real OPL synth and don't have the pops and crackles that other sound blasters have.

I personally don't like the GUS's general MIDI. Games that support the GUS natively sound great but my Roland SC55 sounds MUCH better in games using General MIDI.

In my 386 I have a Sound Blaster Pro which surprisingly doesn't have the pops and crackles that an SB16 does, although I think this is due to much heavier filtering. I also have an intelligent MPU-401 card which takes care of the MT32 and SC55 when I need them.
In my 486 I have a Gravis Ultrasound and a CT2800 - the gravis unfortunately has terrible FM synth emulation and some games just plain don't work properly with it. However the CT2800 has the hanging notes and I cannot get the MPU-401 interface on the GUS to work under DOS, so I'm considering getting ANOTHER sound card for general MIDI.
I did have an acer magic S20 card in there which worked with MIDI and sounded great, unfortunately it seemed to only play one sound at a time - other sounds that were playing were cut off. So, the quest continues...

DonutKing wrote:

If you aren't worried about general MIDI on the sound blaster, my vote is for a CT2800 or CT2900. They have real OPL synth and don't have the pops and crackles that other sound blasters have.

Thanks for the suggestion. I see these are both SB16S, but I actually do want an EMU-8000 chip and memory banks. According to this test http://queststudios.com/smf/index.php?PHPSESS … g23497#msg23497, the best single slot option is the CT3930 (and the CT2800 + CT1920 the best dual slot). A daughterboard is not an option (not enough free slots). However, the CT3930 is not available anywhere atm. Do you know of any AWE32 alternatives?

EDIT: According to this thread AWE32 with RAM and OPL?:

Ace wrote:

Don't forget the SoundBlaster 32 model CT3930. This is actually the only card in the SoundBlaster 32/AWE32 family with a true discrete Yamaha YMF262. The CT2760, CT3900 and CT3980 all use an ASIC variant of the YMF262 found inside a custom Creative ASIC labeled CT1747. However, the sound is identical between the ASIC-based YMF262 found in the CT1747 and a discrete YMF262.

So I guess the CT3980 is the best option after the CT3930. I actually happen to bought this model off eBay, waiting for it to arrive. Will see how well it does 😀

DonutKing wrote:

I personally don't like the GUS's general MIDI. Games that support the GUS natively sound great but my Roland SC55 sounds MUCH better in games using General MIDI.

Have to agree with you on this one. I only use native GUS support + MT32 emulation. The GUS's MT32 emulation sounds pretty good imo though (using MegaEm 3.10 with the ProPatches Lite large.bnk), just too bad SB emulation won't work because of the AWE32 presence.

DonutKing wrote:

In my 386 I have a Sound Blaster Pro which surprisingly doesn't have the pops and crackles that an SB16 does, although I think this is due to much heavier filtering. I also have an intelligent MPU-401 card which takes care of the MT32 and SC55 when I need them.
In my 486 I have a Gravis Ultrasound and a CT2800 - the gravis unfortunately has terrible FM synth emulation and some games just plain don't work properly with it. However the CT2800 has the hanging notes and I cannot get the MPU-401 interface on the GUS to work under DOS, so I'm considering getting ANOTHER sound card for general MIDI.
I did have an acer magic S20 card in there which worked with MIDI and sounded great, unfortunately it seemed to only play one sound at a time - other sounds that were playing were cut off. So, the quest continues...

How about using MegaEm's MT32 option and setting it to output to the GUS's MPU-401, will that work?

However, the CT3930 is not available anywhere atm. Do you know of any AWE32 alternatives?

Apart from Gravis Ultrasound? 😜
Nope, sorry. Never owned an AWE32/64.
But like all Creative cards, its a juggling act. If you want clean sound with expandable memory for big soundfonts under DOS then as far as I know, you're out of luck.

How about using MegaEm's MT32 option and setting it to output to the GUS's MPU-401, will that work?

nope. Been there, done all that. Even spent #50 on a Gravis brand MIDI adapter and it still didn't work regardless of what I did under MEGA-EM.

Someone told me that it only works under win 3.11. If someone manages to get it working under DOS I'd love to hear from them 😀

mOBSCENE wrote:

@ RogueTrip: By design... 🤣, really? By design of the CT3900 or the AWE32 in general? If it's just the CT3900, I could be looking for another non-PnP model or perhaps a SB16 with daughterboard.

I've read about the Riva 128ZX, but unfortunately very rare. There's just one model on eBay, but that would cost me 50 euros... way too much for my liking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWE64

Another improvement comes from better on-board circuitry that increases the signal-to-noise ratio and overall signal quality compared to the frequently quite noisy AWE32 and Sound Blaster 16 boards. This improvement is most notable with the AWE64 Gold, because of its superior RCA connector outputs. The improvement also comes from increased integration of components on AWE64 compared to its predecessors. Increased integration means the board can be simpler and trace routing to components is reduced, decreasing the amount of noise-inducing signal travel. This also made it possible to reduce the size of AWE64's board noticeably, compared to AWE32.

I got a AWE32 for free from work, haven't tested it and bought the AWE64 Gold over it (with simmcon and 32mb EDO). Awesome card but find most of my games work well enough with either Vortex 2 or SB Live! hardware.

Wow, didn't realize the ZX revisions were rare. I also got one of those for free from my work 😀 Didn't test it as well but its a STB Velocity 128 dated 1998 (1998 dates usually mean ZX chipset as 1997 was regular). Has a really cheap looking regulator heatsink attached.

After your original thread I had bought a P1 233MMX and a SB 16 ISA card to use with that Riva 128ZX and a Voodoo 1 card. Just need a Baby AT Tower/Desktop case.

I'm saddened your rig has changed so much. I been doing it to a P3 rig of mine and finally rather happy with it so I can understand the changes atleast.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

I got a AWE32 for free from work, haven't tested it and bought the AWE64 Gold over it (with simmcon and 32mb EDO). Awesome card but find most of my games work well enough with either Vortex 2 or SB Live! hardware.

I agree, AWE64 Gold is quite awesome. It's just too bad it doesn't have a real OPL3 FM chip 🙁 Only the CT3930 and CT3980 seem to fulfill my requirements (real/indentical OPL3 FM, single slot ISA with memory banks, not so noisy). I'm still waiting for the CT3980 to arrive and I really hope I can finish my rig with this for good.
I have no experience with the other soundcards you mention.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Wow, didn't realize the ZX revisions were rare. I also got one of those for free from my work 😀 Didn't test it as well but its a STB Velocity 128 dated 1998 (1998 dates usually mean ZX chipset as 1997 was regular). Has a really cheap looking regulator heatsink attached.

Geez, I need a job like that ! 😉 I will continue to look for a Riva128ZX, but for now I'm satisfied with my card. The Riva128(ZX) really is a great chip for DOS/Win9x purposes!

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

After your original thread I had bought a P1 233MMX and a SB 16 ISA card to use with that Riva 128ZX and a Voodoo 1 card. Just need a Baby AT Tower/Desktop case.
I'm saddened your rig has changed so much. I been doing it to a P3 rig of mine and finally rather happy with it so I can understand the changes atleast.

That sounds like a great base for a rig setup! Only the Riva128ZX might be a little overkill (wanna trade? 🤣, just kidding) I think the P1 233MMX is really enough for any DOS game out there (at least the non-3Dfx ones). When starting this thread I had no real intentions to upgrade my rig, but I now find it quite challenging to look for the fastest config possible in conjunction with optimum compatibility with my games/apps. To be honest I don't really need all of this extra power.

oops, please ignore this post.