Some games just used that term to play 8-bit sounds at a higher rate (particularly Miles Sound System games that limit sound output to 11khz if Sbpro and under, but 22khz if SB16 - and not neccessarily 16-bit either)

That's not to say there aren't any games that used 16-bit sound. I think MAX and Shattered Steel were some of the first big ones coming long after the 16-bit hype. and 16-bit mixing does have noticable more clarity regarding quieter/faded sound effects - it's noticable in Quake and Duke3D.

Quake used to have a ton of 22khz 16-bit audio around its early stages, but there was a huge memory drawback (16mb was REQUIRED, not recommended, unlike the final game which worked on 8mb). Not to be confused with Quake 2 which was released with (almost) full 22khz 16-bit audio.

So how does a person achieve "true" 16-bit sound in DOS? Obviously an SBPro wouldn't cut it as it's 8-bit, and an SB16 wouldn't cut it either since it reportedly only has a 12-bit DAC.

badmojo wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the right forum but my question is regarding 16 bit ISA sound cards and DOS games. During the early to mid 90's my friends and I were all lusting after '16 bit sound'. We didn't know why exactly, we just knew it had to be twice as good as our 8 bit sound cards.

It's actually 256 times as good as 8-bit 😉
The main difference is the maximum dynamic range (and thus, noise level), which is 20*log(2^8) = 48dB for 8-bit, and 96dB for 16-bit.

badmojo wrote:

And then there's the sampling rate issue. Is a sound card's sampling rate dependent on whether it's 8 bit or 16 bit? Or some other factor?

For DOS games this depends on the software interface. SBPro2 only supports 22kHz in stereo, and 44kHz in mono. WSS goes up to 48kHz stereo at 16-bit.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

...an SB16 wouldn't cut it either since it reportedly only has a 12-bit DAC.

This is false. It's been suggested that the A/D input resolution is effectively 12-bit, due to the poor SNR, but the CODEC itself is 16-bit, all-the-same.

Frankly, the high-frequency roll-off on the earlier SB16's that starts at 4kHz and completely squelches things by about 17kHz seems like a larger issue.

OK so is it fair to say that very late DOS games (~1996) started to implement true 16 bit audio, but there was no advantage in having a 16 bit card for games before that time-frame?

Or is that incorrect because some games could play 8 bit sounds at a higher sample rate (e.g. 22khz) and only a 16 bit card would allow that? I was playing around with Terminal Velocity the other night and noticed an option to increase the sample rate for music, but that game was released in '95, so still pretty late in the DOS era.

I'm still confused over here people!

Jagged Alliance needed a SB16 to play voices at 22khz 8bit mono for some reason (buffering?) despite the SB and SBPro being capable of such specific audio quality and format.

This issue is pretty bad when there's laptops that mostly have SBPro compatibility at best....

badmojo wrote:

OK so is it fair to say that very late DOS games (~1996) started to implement true 16 bit audio, but there was no advantage in having a 16 bit card for games before that time-frame?

I'd go with 1992, which is when the PAS-16 (Q2) and SB16 (Q4) were released, and when 16-bit audio would have been "the new thing" for gaming. It looks like Sierra started introducing 16-bit audio files in late 1992, consequently.

I think the advantage in using a later card for titles with 8-bit samples is mostly the benefit of a more-advanced (quieter) design, higher-quality components, features, etc. The downside is that the 8-bit sample playback can sound worse as a result of the differences in filtering, etc., depending on the card.

Or is that incorrect because some games could play 8 bit sounds at a higher sample rate (e.g. 22khz) and only a 16 bit card would allow that?

Plenty of 8-bit cards support a 22kHz playback rate.

All I know is that Build games yield horrible results when trying to set 16-bit 44.1 kHz on a Creative card. If MIDI is used on the same card the music will be missing notes. They even acknowledged this in the Shadow Warrior help file, recommending 8-bit 11 kHz...

How many are there 16-bit digital audio standards that are supported by DOS games anyway?

I can think of these, based on Miles Sound System driver analysis:

Creative Sound Blaster 16
MediaVision ProAudioSpectrum 16
Roland RAP-10
Gravis GF1 Ultrasound
AMD Interwave (GUS PnP and compatibles)
Microsoft Windows Sound System
Nvidia NV1
Ensoniq SoundScape
Ensoniq SoundScape AudioDrive (you might want to try it, badmojo)
NewMedia WaveJammer
Guillemot Maxi Sound 64

Note: I haven't seen a 16-bit Miles digital driver for PAS16. Only 8-bit stereo proaudio.dig 🙁

Are there any other 16-bit standards? I can think of Adlib Gold but not sure. There are rumours that RAP-10 has 12-bit capabilities (much like Adlib Gold), however, its Miles driver accepts 16-bit wave data.

d1stortion wrote:

All I know is that Build games yield horrible results when trying to set 16-bit 44.1 kHz on a Creative card. If MIDI is used on the same card the music will be missing notes. They even acknowledged this in the Shadow Warrior help file, recommending 8-bit 11 kHz...

Interesting. Is this even the case on Creative cards that don't suffer from the 'hanging note' bug?

bjt wrote:

Interesting. Is this even the case on Creative cards that don't suffer from the 'hanging note' bug?

Yes it is unfortunately.

bjt wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

All I know is that Build games yield horrible results when trying to set 16-bit 44.1 kHz on a Creative card. If MIDI is used on the same card the music will be missing notes. They even acknowledged this in the Shadow Warrior help file, recommending 8-bit 11 kHz...

Interesting. Is this even the case on Creative cards that don't suffer from the 'hanging note' bug?

Read the relevant threads in regard to sound issues with those games: Re: Duke Nukem 3D - General Midi Problem., AWE64 Gold weirdness, Duke Nukem 3D Midi problem

One of the biggest problems with 16-bit sounds was the amount of data the system had to process to get those higher quality sounds. You had more storage on disk, had to transfer that into memory, process it by the cpu that's trying to do other things too, and more. In the end, if you enabled 16-bit sound, a lot of times the game wasn't as playable anymore.

d1stortion wrote:

All I know is that Build games yield horrible results when trying to set 16-bit 44.1 kHz on a Creative card. If MIDI is used on the same card the music will be missing notes. They even acknowledged this in the Shadow Warrior help file, recommending 8-bit 11 kHz...

I'm not sure why this entered the discussion at all, but the problems associated with the simultaneous playback of MIDI and digital-audio with the Sound Blaster 16 cards are pretty well established by now (or so I'd thought), and seem to be mainly due to some combination of the following:

- The shared interrupt system
- An insufficiently sized hardware buffer
- The sharing of said hardware buffer for both MIDI and PCM playback

It's a poor architecture, exacerbated by poorly written drivers, and the problems aren't limited to just Build games.

bristlehog wrote:

There are rumours that RAP-10 has 12-bit capabilities (much like Adlib Gold), however, its Miles driver accepts 16-bit wave data.

The RAP-10 certainly records at 16-bit, and plays-back 16-bit data (as you noted). Most people aren't aware that the PCM playback goes through the synth engine though, "stealing" two voices in the process, and resulting in the odd, 26-voice polyphony. (Gee, sound familiar?) There's obviously some detriment to doing this, as the frequency-response apparently tops-out at ~15kHz, which is even worse than a SB16.

Another benefit with 16bit / 44.1khz sound cards is with games that use tracker-based music. There is an obvious improvement in quality if the game will mix and output at the higher rate, regardless of the quality of the music's samples.

bristlehog wrote:

Ensoniq SoundScape AudioDrive

This is actually ESS Audiodrive.

Thanks for the replies. I have a related question regarding 'clone' ISA sound cards and their claim at being 16 bit. Take for example the ESS ES1868 AudioDrive based cards, these cards - according to the spec sheet - are 16 bit but are only Sound Blaster Pro compatible. So does this mean that although a given game might include higher quality 16 bit audio, only 8 bit SBPro quality sound will be played because of the limitations of the AudioDrive's compatibility?

And swaaye mentioned tracker music which makes me wonder about red book audio - how is this impacted by a given card's compatibility? Is the internal 'CD in' header impacted by which sound card driver is selected in a given game? Or is this data processed by the card directly? I.e. a 16 bit, 44.1kHz capable cards like the ES1868 AudioDrive will always play red book audio at CD quality?

Obviously 16 bit vs 8 bit is not the only factor that should be considered when choosing a sound card; I'm just trying to get a better understanding of how much of a factor it is. Like I said in my original post, this was made out to be a big deal back in the day.

What I remember about one computer with the ESS1688 (or was it 1868?) is ZSNES's sample rate being chopped in half and requiring the 'adjust pitch' option to compensate for the strange 16-bit sound support...

badmojo wrote:

Take for example the ESS ES1868 AudioDrive based cards, these cards - according to the spec sheet - are 16 bit but are only Sound Blaster Pro compatible. So does this mean that although a given game might include higher quality 16 bit audio, only 8 bit SBPro quality sound will be played because of the limitations of the AudioDrive's compatibility?

Seems so, unless you select a native AudioDrive sound driver. At least Human Machine Interfaces Sound Operating System (SOS) and later versions of Miles Sound System (MSS) provide native AudioDrive drivers. I didn't analyze the SOS driver, but MSS driver (audiodrv.dig) is really 16-bit.

badmojo wrote:

And swaaye mentioned tracker music which makes me wonder about red book audio - how is this impacted by a given card's compatibility? Is the internal 'CD in' header impacted by which sound card driver is selected in a given game? Or is this data processed by the card directly? I.e. a 16 bit, 44.1kHz capable cards like the ES1868 AudioDrive will always play red book audio at CD quality?

I highly doubt that CD music depends on soundcard's bitness and sampling frequency. It is already an analog signal from CD-ROM drive's DA converter, why convert it back to digital and then again to analog? It would mean loss of quality, even on a 16-bit 44 khz card.