Out of those, I would personally go with a Yamaha card. It doesn't have to be the WF-192XG. Any YMF 724, 744, or 754 card would fit the bill. That way you would get real OPL3.

I also wouldn't necessarily limit myself to only 1 sound card.

The CT4170 and CT4180 are ISA cards.

Thanks for your input. I see. What about the SoundBlaster Live! ? I've seen during the sound configuration of some games that it is compatible with lots of dos games.

I guess the CT4810 "ES1973" has about the same compatibility for DOS games as a Live!. Select General MIDI for music in your games if you use one of theese.

Remember to patch Duke Nukem 3D if you're gonna play it on your rig with the Live! or a Sound Blaster PCI: http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm

For the ΥΑΜΑΗΑ WF-192XG make sure to download a driver with the DSDMA TSR included, looks like your motherboard lacks a PC/PCI connector and the chipset doesn't do DDMA.

Thank you very much!

After a closer look in the manual it looks like some of the motherboards came with an Aureal Vortex 8810 chip onboard, look if your board got one, should be MS-DOS compatible.

Mine is with the 82801AA controller.

Kamerat wrote:

For the ΥΑΜΑΗΑ WF-192XG make sure to download a driver with the DSDMA TSR included, looks like your motherboard lacks a PC/PCI connector and the chipset doesn't do DDMA.

I thought all Pentium III chipsets had that capability. Otherwise, wouldn't it be completely impossible to use an SB Live?

tanasen wrote:

Mine is with the 82801AA controller.

If you look at the upper left corner of this picture you can see the AU8810 chip and it's clock crystal, I guess your solder pads are empty.

Jorpho wrote:

I thought all Pentium III chipsets had that capability. Otherwise, wouldn't it be completely impossible to use an SB Live?

Live! uses a TSR to emulate the ISA DMA functions. Only 440BX/ZX of Intel's Pentium III chipsets supported DDMA.

Kamerat wrote:

Live! uses a TSR to emulate the ISA DMA functions. Only 440BX/ZX of Intel's Pentium III chipsets supported DDMA.

But you would need the same TSR even if you were using one of those chipsets. And there are plenty of chipsets for which that TSR won't work at all.

If you look at the upper left corner of this picture you can see the AU8810 chip and it's clock crystal, I guess your solder pads are empty.

Yep, it's empty.

Jorpho wrote:

But you would need the same TSR even if you were using one of those chipsets. And there are plenty of chipsets for which that TSR won't work at all.

Yes, none of Creative's card's ever used DDMA. The TSR of the Live! still need some spesific functions of the chipset enabled which seems to have gone on Intel's PCIe based chipsets and all nVidia and AMD chipsets. The only PCIe chipset I got that kind of emulation working were the SiS 671DX/968 with the ES1370/CT5507.

Kamerat wrote:

Yes, none of Creative's card's ever used DDMA. The TSR of the Live! still need some spesific functions of the chipset enabled which seems to have gone on Intel's PCIe based chipsets and all nVidia and AMD chipsets.

I thought those "specific functions" were the same as DDMA. I guess not.

Jorpho wrote:

I thought those "specific functions" were the same as DDMA. I guess not.

Maybe this thread gives you some answers.

Hello again. I purchased the CT4810 and the Sounblaster Live! 5.1. The first one worked but the drivers screwed up my system (no volume control, computer couldn't shut down) so I re-installed windows 98, but the second one is not recognised by any driver I try (probably 7 different drivers so far); so I assume the Live! is Dead!
Could you please tell me which drivers should I install for the sounblaster ct4810 for windows 98 first edition?

Is there some reason you are not using Windows 98 SE? One of the major differences is that SE supports WDM drivers, which may make a big difference.

If you want to test your other card, my usual recommendation is to try booting a version of Linux off a CD or USB stick. Many versions should already include appropriate drivers and if your card works with Linux, then you can be sure it's probably a Windows problem.

Problem solved after reinstalling the same drivers. No problem right now with CT4810, played Carmageddon 3dfx with sound. If problems reappear I'll try Win98SE. As for the Live! I'll try to test it on another system with Linux. Thanks!

Forgot to update. The SB live! worked in linux and now is paired with my voodoo 3 2000 in winXP. Works great! Managed to test successfully over 30 games in winXP. On the other hand the CT4810 also worked like a charm in win98 playing over 25 dos and windows glide games along with my voodoo-s3 virge dx combo. Now I need to find some time to actually play!