None of these cards have onboard MIDI synthesis capability. You will need additional hardware for this task, some combination of MIDI modules, daughterboards, or even an external computer to perform emulation. Essentially, they act as transceivers to devices that interpret or send MIDI signals.

As far as compatibility, the Creative card is probably the least desirable due to various chipset bugs on Creative products which cause problems with MIDI. Your card may be affected to a greater or lesser degree, the extent only truly being known by testing.

The ESS cards offer excellent compatibility with SB Pro functionality and perfect MIDI support (the ES688 requires a TSR for MIDI support). The ES688 based card has an external chip for FM synthesis which may be a genuine Yamaha OPL3 chip or a clone. The ES1869 chip has an integrated OPL3 clone that isn't quite accurate but is generally thought to sound good.

The YMF719 based card offers very good SB Pro functionality and perfect MIDI support along with a genuine OPL3 synthesis chip onboard. The only compatibility issue is with certain games which require ADPCM decoding support, chief among them being Duke Nukem 2. For this reason, DN2 will not be able to play some sounds on this card.

Great reply gdjacobs!

I use an SBAWE32. I find it is better than an AWE64 due to it's 30-pin RAM support (AWE64 uses a hard to find proprietary format) The AWE32 and AWE64 are nearly identical, with some polyphony improvements on the AWE64 (Normally not needed).

The AWE32 can sometimes have real OPL3, while the AWE64 is always CQM, but unless you are intending to do constant side by side comparisons, or are particularly offended by slight changes like this, the CQM and real OPL3 support is about as good.

There are also wavetable headers, If you want to do something REALLY cool try to find something that can use 256MB or RAM or higher, than you can get some REALLY fancy soundfonts, but there are also good AWE32 supporting soundfonts if you max out the RAM (Not hard to do)

I personally hate the SB16 and Pro1/2 series of cards from Creative. I find them lacking and boring. Maybe they are fine on a 386, but unless you're using a wavetable addon or an MT32/Sound Canvas, it's kinda stupid for a 486.

Looking at the relative benefits of different MIDI synth options is another conversation.

* Glitchy double post deleted *

Thanks everyone I think I will be on the look out for a SBAWE32 from what Ampera said but I have also been for the last couple of days trying to get my Labways Yamaha YMF719E-S card to work but I have had no success, Ive tried everything from using different values in the Autoexec.bat then trying nothing in the Autoexec.bat and using the setupsa.exe or com file to change values but I keep getting sound/voice that plays for a bit then cuts off so I think my card is faulty but Im open to suggestions for a dos driver as I cant find one only the setupsa dos program. It seems to work in windows but I will install a video driver soon to try Gabriel Knight 1 in 256 colour mode to see if windows sound is working, If your interested these are the settings I have tried and they all give sound cut out and other settings like A240, H3 hangs the system:

Autoexec.bat
set blaster=A220 I5 D1 H0 T4 and T6
set blaster=A220 I7 D1 H0 T4 and T6
set blaster=A220 I5 D1 T4 and T6
set blaster=A220 I7 D1 T4 and T6
Removed settings with this line blank for use with setupsa.exe and changed in setupsa.exe IRQ5 to 7 both work, 220 to 240 gets a hanged game start, D1 to 0 and H0 to 1 works but H3 hangs, and for some reason setting both D1 and H1 work. Maybe its a bios setting but when the pc goes through post it sees the sound card but like this:

ISA/PNP device listing ...
Card No.---Device No.---DMA---IRQ-----Device Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1------------0---------------0,1-----5--------OPL3-SAX Sound Board
1------------1---------------0,0-----NA------OPL3-SAX Sound Board

why is it listing it twice and not giving it any values for "Device No. 1"? is it because of PNP?

I am using a slightly diffrent Labway card with the same Yamaha chipset and I love it when combined with a Dreamblaster S1.

Have you tried disabling all your serial and parallel ports in the BIOS just to free up resources for troubleshooting?

GabrielKnight123 wrote:

H3 hangs the system

That's not too surprising, since H is the DMA channel for 16-bit audio, and DMA channel 3 is reserved for HDD controllers.
On PC/XT class systems, DMA channel 0 is also reserved for memory refresh.
DMA channel 4 is reserved for cascading with two DMA controllers.
Normally you'd want to set H5, H6 or H7, since that also uses the 16-bit DMA controller on AT-class systems (and your Pentium is obviously AT-class or better 😀).

Ive been looking at daughter boards and they are all new to me and what Rhuwyn said about the Dreamblaster S1 I might get the X2 some day to go with a Sound blaster 16 or pro 2 or a awe32 but that will be much later in about a year but hopefully at current prices, Ive disabled the Parallel and serial ports since I dont need them and I will upload some pics of my bios settings but I installed my video driver to test if Gabriel Knight 1 works in windows 98 and low and behold it actually does! So the Labway card with the Yamaha chip works but Im finding dos a time and repeat over and over pain but for now im going to bed to tackle it another day. I have two cards that are doing the same thing in terms of playing voice and not playing the whole sentence so it must be a setting somewhere or just something I dont know about yet.

Scali I dont realy know everything about this but I cant use anything higher than H3 because of the Setupsa program for the Labway card and only goes to H3 but thats under "WSS", my motherboard has DMA66 and 80 wire cables for the HDD and DVD rom but im not sure of the HDD DMA speed as its only a 20 GB drive so maybe a UDMA drive? If I dont use the setupsa program and put H5/6/7 in Autoexec.bat file would that be workable?

GabrielKnight123 wrote:

If I dont use the setupsa program and put H5/6/7 in Autoexec.bat file would that be workable?

Probably not. The setupsa.exe needs to set the configuration, the BLASTER statement is just a string that applications can request to see what the configuration is.
Perhaps your card doesn't support it (BLASTER statement is for real Sound Blasters of course, and the Hn was added for SB16, which does support higher DMA).
One thing you could try is to set Dn and Hn to the same value. That worked on real SB16 at least, probably on your card as well. It would save you some resources.

WSS uses a different field (ULTRA16=...)

At any rate, the H-value is not important for any regular Sound Blaster or SB Pro software. They only look at the D-value.

Not to mention that SETUPSA will create the field anyway.