Turtle Beach Tropez Plus.

You could also use a PCI Yamaha YMF 7x4 based card for everything but MIDI in DOS. Real OPL3 and Sound Blaster Pro and Windows Sound System support. And you get hardware MIDI in Windows.

cyclone3d wrote:

Turtle Beach Tropez Plus.

You could also use a PCI Yamaha YMF 7x4 based card for everything but MIDI in DOS. Real OPL3 and Sound Blaster Pro and Windows Sound System support. And you get hardware MIDI in Windows.

We talked about it in another thread, but I couldn't get the pci ymf to work with the motherboard properly even with modified drivers and chipset with ddma support. That turtle beanch card might be interesting but I didn't see any in ebay. Any other more common cards that might work?

Doesn't the Audician32 have real OPL3 and bug free midi?

Certain Opti cards have OPL emulation so good you won't know the difference.

Personally I would go with an Audician32 combined with an Audigy1....but I would *really* shell out for a mobo with 2 ISA slots and then wack in an AWE32 plus a MusicQuest replica card alongside a YMF724/Audigy1.

There wouldn't be 16bit sounds with aurdician32, right?
I usually try to get by with what I have or what I can get cheap and I got my pentium 3 motherboard for free and I was happy it at least had 1 isa slow. My other P3 motherboard doesn't have any isa slots.

I've seen in other threads that some mainboards are able to make PCI soundcards visible by DOS programs, natively, without any emulation TSRs or anything. So check that first.

I tried my yamaha pci card. I was able to get setupds to work with ddma and dma 0, but many games still crashed when trying to use sound blaster. Also there are alot of dos games that don't support dma 0.
I would need to be able to make it dma 1 and I want all dos games that support sound blaster or general midi to work.

Baoran wrote:

There wouldn't be 16bit sounds with aurdician32, right?
I usually try to get by with what I have or what I can get cheap and I got my pentium 3 motherboard for free and I was happy it at least had 1 isa slow. My other P3 motherboard doesn't have any isa slots.

No it's SB Pro. I am not aware of many ISA cards with SB16 compatibility. If you want to be cheap on the mobo what can I say...if such an ablatross ISA card exists that does genuine OPL3, bug-free midi and 16-bit playback....it will probably cost a lot more than some s370 mobo with 2 ISA slots. Hell I would give you one if you lived next door.

Baoran wrote:

I have one of those pentium 3 motherboards that only have one isa slot. I would also like to be able to use it for dos games and also connect roland SC-55 to it for general midi.
What do you think would be the best sound card to use? Is awe64 the only option or is there other cards that might have better FM synth and not have midi bugs?
If it had 2 isa slots, I would probably use one card for midi and another for opl3 fm, but with this motherboard it isn't an option.

What is the model of your motherboard? Any actual pics you can upload?

If it has an SB-Link connector, then you can use a PCI Yamaha YMF7X4 card with great compatibility in DOS:

Yamaha PCI YMF-724 DOS Compatibility Thread

You connect a cable from the card to the SB-Link connector on your motherboard to enable this compatibility. You'll then have an ISA slot free for something else, like an AWE32/64 or a GUS.

Baoran wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Turtle Beach Tropez Plus.

You could also use a PCI Yamaha YMF 7x4 based card for everything but MIDI in DOS. Real OPL3 and Sound Blaster Pro and Windows Sound System support. And you get hardware MIDI in Windows.

We talked about it in another thread, but I couldn't get the pci ymf to work with the motherboard properly even with modified drivers and chipset with ddma support. That turtle beanch card might be interesting but I didn't see any in ebay. Any other more common cards that might work?

Oh yeah... hmmm. makes no sense really.

The motherboard is Asus CUVX4. It is supposed to have ddma but I cant get things to work with it and yamaha card. I got it for free last year and I just recently found a nice period correct case for it and decided to make a build. I got pretty much all the parts figured out except sound card.

Baoran wrote:

The motherboard is Asus CUVX4. It is supposed to have ddma but I cant get things to work with it and yamaha card. I got it for free last year and I just recently found a nice period correct case for it and decided to make a build. I got pretty much all the parts figured out except sound card.

Don't remember if you mentioned it before, but does it have the onboard audio option? If so, have you set the jumpers to disable it?

No on board audio. Just empty spot on the motherboard where it could be in some motherboard versions.

Edit: I found a picture of it on my computer so I must have posted it in some other thread too.

Baoran wrote:

No on board audio. Just empty spot on the motherboard where it could be in some motherboard versions.

Edit: I found a picture of it on my computer so I must have posted it in some other thread too.

cuv4x.jpg

Okay, looking at the board, I can't see an SB-Link connector, so can't recommend a Yamaha YMF7x4 PCI card. You could possibly try an ESS Solo-1 or Aureal Vortex 2 PCI for dual duties. And in DOS, use them for MPU401 alongside SoftMPU. Then use your preferred card in the free ISA slot - AWE32/AWE64/SB16/SBPRO/YMF71x etc...

Does SoftMPU reliably work against PCI sound cards?

Something like a SoundBlaster CT2230 or CT2290. Both cards have a CT1747 chip, so they have genuine OPL3 and are free from most MIDI bugs. Also fairly noise-free

I use this ESS Audiodrive in my PIII and think it's great:

ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card

badmojo wrote:

I use this ESS Audiodrive in my PIII and think it's great:

ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card

Looks like a good card, but wouldn't 16 bit sound support be better in a pentium 3 where you would most likely play newer dos games and use a card like that in an older pc like 386?

Baoran wrote:

No on board audio. Just empty spot on the motherboard where it could be in some motherboard versions.

Edit: I found a picture of it on my computer so I must have posted it in some other thread too.

The attachment cuv4x.jpg is no longer available

Ok, so I am going to take a look at the datasheet for the southbridge. I wonder if DDMA support is disabled by default and there need to be a utility made to change a chipset register setting to get it to work.

Edit: Ok, so according to page 61 of the datasheet, DDMA is disabled by default.... and if the BIOS doesn't enable it, then that would explain why it isn't working.

So I am going to look into making a utility that can change the register settings to enable it and see if that works. Since I have a board with the 586b chipset that seems to also have the issue, I should be able to test on that. If it works, then that should not only help the YMF based cards but other cards that use DDMA.

Baoran wrote:

badmojo wrote:

I use this ESS Audiodrive in my PIII and think it's great:

ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card

Looks like a good card, but wouldn't 16 bit sound support be better in a pentium 3 where you would most likely play newer dos games and use a card like that in an older pc like 386?

It does 16 bit audio via the Audiodrive interface. Same with MPXPlay.