MT-32 emulation on any sound card is pretty useless when it comes to games. Sure there are a few that use the standard instruments and will sound fine but nothing of substance will sound correct and / or work.

Btw do you have to have memory installed in a AWE32 to use it?

King_Corduroy wrote:

Btw do you have to have memory installed in a AWE32 to use it?

There is a small jumper placed just at the same place as the memory slots.
That jumper can be used to selecting internal or external memory (modules or 512kb onboard)

carlostex wrote:

MT-32 emulation on the AWE cards is horrible. By comparison, a Gravis Ultrasound using MegaEm sounds way better.

Never had any luck, getting megaem to work on my GUS-ACE.
Therefor I have only tried the emulation on AWE32 and SB-Live.
Personally, I like the AWE32 better, when emulating MT32.
And I have never owned MT32 hardware.

I can only speak for Creative cards, and they do well enough for me.
Better than OPL though, in Monkey island.

Monkey Island sounds mint on the AWE with MT-32 emulation.

Personally, I like the MT32 emulation on the SB-Live better.
When it comes to monkey Island. What lacks though, are chorus and reverb settings.
Wich actually makes the AWE32 a better choice for that game.
Without those settings applied, the live wins.

philscomputerlab wrote:

MT-32 emulation on any sound card is pretty useless when it comes to games. Sure there are a few that use the standard instruments and will sound fine but nothing of substance will sound correct and / or work.

Nobody should expect MT-32 emulation on other cards to sound 100% correct. But to say it is useless is to strecthing it out a bit. Imagine someone that never owned a MT-32 and only had a GUS or an AWE. Why wouldn't someone take advantage of MegaEM or AWEUTIL to listen to some games with something different than OPL? Monkey Island for instance sounds pretty good with the Gravis Ultrasound MT-32 emulation.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Monkey Island sounds mint on the AWE with MT-32 emulation.

Well if you think that AWE MT-32 emulation sounds mint on Monkey Island i guess this is all down to personal taste. In my opinion on Monley Island the Gravis Ultrasound sounds way better than AWE.

brostenen wrote:

Never had any luck, getting megaem to work on my GUS-ACE.

MegaEM usually refuses to install when you have 64MB of RAM install. This is a known bug. Maybe that was your issue.

Cloudschatze wrote:

raymangold wrote:

Music creation on an AWE? I don't know of anyone who used an AWE32 or 64 for professional music creation-- the potential of a basic ROMpler would only be appealing to hobbyists back then; today its ROMpler playback is utterly useless and doesn't provide anything unique in terms of a sonic palette since it's a sampler and not a synthesizer (CQM aside). Professionals during that time used proper ROMplers like the Roland JV-1080-- and there are countless titles that used it for music like Starcraft, Sim City 3000, MechWarrior II, etc.

Nice diatribe. Guess I wasn't clear enough, what with words and terms like "potential," "hobbyist-musician," and "easily dismissible today." Comparing a $199 hardware/software package to a ~$1999 synthesizer seems like especially relevant discussion.

🤣! 🤣

Don't want to be entirely off-topic, but I feel as though this has been discussed countless times. The AWE64 Gold is a very interesting card and easily outpaces the AWE32 in SNR matters. The AWE32 is (unfortunately) a noisy card. The AWE64 is probably the better choice if you don't really care about OPL3 all that much or have an external MIDI module (which I think a lot of people here have, I prefer to stick to daughterboards).
It's a totally viable solution and I happen to be one of the few people around here, along with Cloudschatze, that actually really dig the AWE32/64 MIDI capabilities. Even the 1MB ROM is okay by me 😜.

If you can find an AWE32 Gold for cheap, grab it. If you don't like it, you can sell it a few years later for some profit 😀.

gerwin wrote:

AWE64 vs AWE32 will IMO always be about CQM vs OPL3. Either one cares for true OPL3 in the system, or one cares for the other features. (Using an AWE64 combined with another soundcard with true OPL3 is an annoying setup, I tried it and ditched it)

I can agree that the AWE is freakin' annoying trying to setup with other cards, although i have not given up on it. In fact, i mostly have all my cards working very well despite some motherboard instability.

One needs to disable SB16 part on CTPNP.cfg. Then with a custom batch file, i can activate only the EMU synth which will work along with the other cards. Most games i tried work well with this. Only Raptor refuses to play AWE music. I guess it needs to detect the SB16 part too. Doom, Doom 2, Duke 3D, Tyrian, Warcraft 2 play AWE just fine. I guess i need to try others as well.

If i want to use the AWE GM or MT-32 emulation i'll then have to use another CTPNP configuration where SB16 part is on otherwise AWEUTIL will bitch about MPU-401. AWE GM and MT-32 emulation is not worth the trouble. But for standard AWE synth it's worth to have the card on the system IMO.
But i have 4 ISA slots so...

Now for the OP he got an AWE64 cheap so it's a good card to play with if it's cheap. If one doesn't like its OPL sound the AWE synth is still usable.

The annoyance I mentioned concerned using the AWE64 for Sound Blaster Digital FX, and another card for OPL3 Music.

Using the AWE64 for just the EMU synth, as you describe, is an interesting idea. AFAIK The EMU has its own interface to the ISA bus, just that it shares the mixer and the DAC with the SB16. The mixer interfaces on I/O 220h/240h though.
I have CT1920 goldfinch AWE upgrade card here, which made it unnecessary to do similar experiments with a full AWE card.

Just keep it simple, four ISA cards is asking for trouble 🤣

My AWE64 Gold + MPU-401AT combo + external MIDI tower hasn't let me down yet.

gerwin wrote:

The annoyance I mentioned concerned using the AWE64 for Sound Blaster Digital FX, and another card for OPL3 Music.

Have you tried to place the adlib port at 398h to shut up CQM on AdLib games? Anyway i agree this will be annoying since some games will access OPL via SB port. Not worth the trouble as you mention.

gerwin wrote:

Using the AWE64 for just the EMU synth, as you describe, is an interesting idea. AFAIK The EMU has its own interface to the ISA bus, just that it shares the mixer and the DAC with the SB16. The mixer interfaces on I/O 220h/240h though.
I have CT1920 goldfinch AWE upgrade card here, which made it unnecessary to do similar experiments with a full AWE card.

I believe you are very correct about EMU sharing DAC and mixer with SB16 part. In fact, EMU synth will have much lower volume due to SB16 part being disabled. This won't be a problem for me since i'll be using a mixer.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Just keep it simple, four ISA cards is asking for trouble 🤣

My AWE64 Gold + MPU-401AT combo + external MIDI tower hasn't let me down yet.

My YMF-71x + SoftMPU + PAS Plus + GUS + AWE + external MIDI gear isn't letting me down either. As long as resources are properly laid out and there are no conflicts everything will work. In my case everything is working and sounds great. One would think that the YMF card would take a bootload of resources because of WSS, but it doesn't. And i'm impressed with my Pro Audio Spectrum Plus card. Great digital and FM quality. All i had to do was to disable the Thunderboard chipset and it works great. But what i really need is the original OPL2 Pro Audio Spectrum to make my system stand out.

In fact, this is nothing new. Cloudschatze's MIDI GENERAL setup is probably more complicated than mine and it still works fine. But if someone is starting to build their first DOS machine then i agree: Keep it simple. However if people don't experiment, there's no progress and discovery.

I use Sound Blaster Pro 2 / 16 in combination with a MIF-IPC-A card and a MPU-401 box coupled with SC-55 / MT-32 in all PCs. Works great. No hassle with TSRs (other than SB16 in some cases) / wavetables to be loaded / utilities and so forth.

Have my GUS-ACE set up, combined with an AWE32 CT-3900.
I absolutely do not have any issues or conflicts regarding installation.
Only when setting megaem up.
Plus they are easy to set up and working at the same time.

I might try the ACE in my P-133 with 32mb Ram, to see if megaem will run.

brostenen wrote:

I might try the ACE in my P-133 with 32mb Ram, to see if megaem will run.

Try enabling 15-16MB memory hole in BIOS and try MegaEM after that.

brostenen wrote:

Have my GUS-ACE set up, combined with an AWE32 CT-3900. I absolutely do not have any issues or conflicts regarding installation. […]
Show full quote

Have my GUS-ACE set up, combined with an AWE32 CT-3900.
I absolutely do not have any issues or conflicts regarding installation.
Only when setting megaem up.
Plus they are easy to set up and working at the same time.

I might try the ACE in my P-133 with 32mb Ram, to see if megaem will run.

If Megaem fails because you have 64 MB or more in your system try HIMEM.SYS 2.77 or QEMM. Regarding the resources, Megaem just traps port accesses on top of 330h, even if there is another actual soundcard there (which does not receive the data then).

Today is actually the first time I have read or heard about the 16mb issue.
Have tried all other options such as different memory manager, fsb settings and so forth.
The megaem just reports "memory out of range" on each try.
Have tried every versions of megaem that I could get my hands on.

Maybe its a different issue, because with EMM386 and a lot of memory it reports 'Can not extend server pages'.
I haven't heard of this problem yet. Maybe check your bank file or generate a fresh one from the patches.

elianda wrote:

Maybe its a different issue, because with EMM386 and a lot of memory it reports 'Can not extend server pages'.
I haven't heard of this problem yet. Maybe check your bank file or generate a fresh one from the patches.

Do you have success using MegaEM 3.10 with GF1 Ultrasound cards? It never works for me, reporting an error that it can't load the patch bank file. With MegaEM3.03B i don't have these issues so i reverted to that. Maybe MegaEM 3.10 is only for Interwave cards?

elianda wrote:

Maybe its a different issue, because with EMM386 and a lot of memory it reports 'Can not extend server pages'.
I haven't heard of this problem yet. Maybe check your bank file or generate a fresh one from the patches.

sorry....
That it the same error it is reporting back, as yours.
Just been too long since I tried it to remember correct.
As soon as I saw your post, I knew that I remembered wrong.