First post, by squareguy
- Rank
- Oldbie
Okay I have been collecting sound cards and listening to them. I have a couple favorites and I have some questions. I do not know a whole lot about sound cards if you didn't already catch that.
These are ISA cards and to be used within DOS only.
Yamaha YMF718-S, Audician 32 Plus
The card sounds good, real OPL3 integrated, has AdLib, SB and SBPro compatibility. No hanging note, wavetable header and support for SoftMPU.
Sound Blaster 16, CT2900
The card sounds good, real OPL3, has AdLib, SB and mostly SBPro compatibility. Hanging note, no wavetable header, not listed under supported SoftMPU cards.
After digging through tons of info the CT2900 is one of a few Sound Blaster 16s that have comparably low noise and a real OPL3. I don't care about lack of MIDI with this card, either on header or joystick connector. It only needs diagnose.exe to setup and initialize the card and you just need to create the 'set' command in autoexec.bat yourself.
I have read that SB16 is not 100% compatible with SBPro in that it will be mono instead of stereo. I have also heard this is a non-issue because no games really support SBPro stereo that don't also support SB16. The YMF718-S probably has better SBPro compatibility but at what expense?
I guess the real question isn't which one of these cards is better in 8-bit, since both are capable but rather in 16-bit. I know the SB16 has 16-bit support in games although I don't know which ones and I am not sure the YMF718-S does because it does not offer SB16 support and I am not sure how a game would support it in 16-bit under DOS, if at all. Does it even matter? Does 16-bit in games that support it sound that much better?
I don't think I could go wrong with either card but I'd like to know the pluses and minuses that I may not be aware of.
I will have a lot of sound cards for sale soon on ebay 🤣 😉
Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE