First post, by Kordanor
Hey there!
I was trying to find some soundcard which will run on my PC which has ISA as well as PCI slots. Using the same board as shown here: PC100 BXcel board - is it worth it?
I wanted to set it up that I can boot straight into dos on one SD Card and into Windows on another, but pure DOS is my priority.
I am looking for a card which just sounds like I experienced it back in the 90s, without too many bells and whistles, so no external sound deck or anything similar required. It should be as interference-free as posible though.
So I have been looking around. Apparently newer sound blaster cards have a hanging note problem, while old sound blaster cards are super expensive.
I was looking into Sound Blaster Compatible options and found phils video about the YAMAHA YMF744
However as others they seem to mainly run the card in DOS Mode of Windows. I am not sure if that means that in pure DOS there are any issues.
Furthermore I found on Phils website over here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/yamaha-ymf74 … sound-card.html
The following sentence:
Under pure DOS, there is no wavetable, however an external MIDI device can be connected to the gameport.
To be honest, I have no idea what that means. What implications does a missing wavetable have? Does it just miss additional instruments which you can add on top on other cards? Or does it generally have issues when playing MIDI sounds in DOS? So let's say I'd play a game like Battle Island 2 or Ultima 8, would it have issues with playing the music?
Also I saw that it can have issues with certain southbridges (no idea if thats an issue with the board I have) and that you should use SB-Link (no idea if that board actually has an option for that, haven't been able to find a manual)
Are there any other recommendations for SB compatible cards which don't break the bank, sound like the "old original ones" and don't come with many additional problems/restrictions? Oh, and soldering it together myself is not really an option. ^^