Yes you will be missing out, especially the early Lives as you deal with really awkward FM->Wavetable 'emulation' 😁

The AWE-supporting games (Eradicator, FF7, etc) don't work on Live IIRC.

I think an ISA card would definitely be the ideal solution for all the late 90's builds. The fact is that AWE64 cards, just for example, are getting to be too expensive to buy. So was wondering what my alternatives may be. And I have a pile of SBLive cards 🤣.

I am going to rephrase my question. What DOS games are worth while that were released January 1st 1998- January 1st 2000?

I think Eradicator was a 1996 game and FF7 a 1997 game.

fsmith2003 wrote:

I think an ISA card would definitely be the ideal solution for all the late 90's builds. The fact is that AWE64 cards, just for example, are getting to be too expensive to buy. So was wondering what my alternatives may be. And I have a pile of SBLive cards 🤣.

I am going to rephrase my question. What DOS games are worth while that were released January 1st 1998- January 1st 2000?

I think Eradicator was a 1996 game and FF7 a 1997 game.

I'm not aware of any. Seems 1997 was the last year any significant DOS titles were released.

Even if there were DOS games of any significance released in that narrow timeframe, I can't imagine they wouldn't work precisely as the developers intended on a system from 1997 or even 1996.

fsmith2003 wrote:

I am going to rephrase my question. What DOS games are worth while that were released January 1st 1998- January 1st 2000?

If the game has options for running General MIDI music, sampled music or CD audio the Live! often will do just fine. The requirement for EMM386 and a large(?) TSR can cause some incompatibilities, but I think you see less of them in newer DOS games.

I was just discussing the history in http://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-many-gravis-ultrasounds/

I'm in a somewhat similar position here. I've built a SS7 rig mostly for DOS games, but quickly realised there is no reason I can't enjoy some Windows on it as well. It has a K6-3+, so it runs Unreal Gold really well, but it feels like the SB16 is not really up to the task. It's not noisy or anything, but the music and sounds in game feel like I'm listening to a really low-bitrate MP3.

Don't know whether it's the soundcard or the quality of the source material itself, but I feel like I need to stick a PCI card there for good measure.

type 'preferences' in the console and raise those audio mixing rates and etc. Also you might want to adjust the bass/treble in Windows' volume control. iirc the SB16 defaults to some really low treble (at least the early drivers did)

If it was your only or even 2nd retro gaming PC I would have said definitely keep ISA, maybe ISA and PCI card
But the fact you already have a 96 and 97 build with Awe64 you can probably get away with "crappy dos support" I'd much prefer a Live! for 9x gaming.
Specially as you don't seem to have any dos games specifically in mind, so you may never even drop into dos?