AFAIK, no card will sound exactly as an SB-16 , not even AWE32 or AWE64. Also, few PCI sound cards have drivers for DOS. If you want DOS compatibility with all (most?) games, you gotta get an ISA sound card, no other way around it. Or try launching your DOS games from within Win98 and see it it works fine. DOSbox is another option, but then, why using retro hardware with it?

DOS games for all intents and purposes are not deciedn for PCI. Doing it with PCI is going to be a mountain of headache and it wont work right.

As far as I know, the Yamaha YMF 7x4 are the only PCI cards that have genuine OPL3. This is relevant if you're looking for FM synth music that sounds exactly like an early ISA SB16.

Some later SB16 revisions and all AWE64 cards used CQM for FM synth music, which doesn't sound quite the same. You might find this interesting: OPL3 vs. ESFM vs. CQM vs. SBLive

What are the specs of the system you are wanting to install a PCI sound card in? The support for the DOS supporting PCI sound cards depends a lot on the motherboard chipset being used.

The SB16 card you used would have either had OPL3 or CQM for FM sysnthesis. They don't sound exactly alike. The Yamaha YMF7x4 cards all have integrated real OPL3 so that is going to be about the best you can get with a PCI card in that regard.

They "only" support Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 digital sound which is 8-bit instead of 16-bit like the SB16.. They do have WSS support though so you can get 16-bit digital sound in games that support WSS. Should be the same for games that support the AIL or Miles Sound System.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:13:

They do have WSS support though so you can get 16-bit digital sound in games that support WSS.

I think the 7x4 series dropped WSS, at least I couldn't find any references to it in the documentation or the DOS drivers.

Aside from the authentic/non-authentic sound issue, my understanding is it's just super hard to emulate the ISA DMA used by a SoundBlaster card through hardware alone when the card is on the PCI bus.

Floppies also use ISA DMA, but I guess it still works because the floppy controller is on LPC which is a form of ISA.

In theory the SB-Link motherboard header solves this, right, by allowing the ISA DMA transfers to leap over to the PCI card? But it seems to have disappeared right at the point it would have first become useful.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:13:

What are the specs of the system you are wanting to install a PCI sound card in? The support for the DOS supporting PCI sound cards depends a lot on the motherboard chipset being used.

The SB16 card you used would have either had OPL3 or CQM for FM sysnthesis. They don't sound exactly alike. The Yamaha YMF7x4 cards all have integrated real OPL3 so that is going to be about the best you can get with a PCI card in that regard.

They "only" support Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 digital sound which is 8-bit instead of 16-bit like the SB16.. They do have WSS support though so you can get 16-bit digital sound in games that support WSS. Should be the same for games that support the AIL or Miles Sound System.

y build system is an Abit vp6 dual cpu Pentiu3 build, sadly they did not include an isa slot in it.

I mean, dual CPU and ISA don't really go together in terms of target audience, you think?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:18:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:13:

They do have WSS support though so you can get 16-bit digital sound in games that support WSS.

I think the 7x4 series dropped WSS, at least I couldn't find any references to it in the documentation or the DOS drivers.

Ohhh.. really. Hmmm. I was thinking that was what the "Native 16-bit sound" test in DOS was using. Maybe not.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:27:

I mean, dual CPU and ISA don't really go together in terms of target audience, you think?

You would be surprised. This was enterprise level hardware and wasn't uncommon to require an ISA slot if they were running some specialised hardware that cost thousands to upgrade to PCI.

I'd say it's more due to being socket 370, even consumer grade motherboards were dropping isa round the same time.

I think it's easier to forget about FM midi if you want a PCI sound card, better off buying a PCI sound card for general midi and have an earlier system for FM synthesis.

That's the conclusion Ive come too.

Like someone above said, try running your DOS game in Windows 98.

A different PC.

ok thank , thanks for all the comments

i guess there are 2 real choices in order to have a retro PC that has all my needs + has support to top CPU processor speed to cover more games developed for windows xp.

1) is to get one of those strange pentium 4 motherboards with an ISA slot, that were produced not for consumer, more like factory market. with a sb16 and a pentium4 3.4ghz
2) is to get one of those not so common Athlon xp boards with ISA slot, some of those boards were able to support ahtlon xp 2600.

by doing that i can have DOS + win98 + winXP all in 1 machine.
while having a perfect retro audio.

by doing that i can just trash the idea of buying a vortex2 or some yamaha pci soundcard. Because most of my concern comes from sound in the DOS era when you need to hear the tones as they were in the old days, while in the last years of win98 we started to use integrated motherboard audio wich was not that of a big deal for me.

Cga.8086 wrote on 2020-07-05, 05:47:

by doing that i can just trash the idea of buying a vortex2 or some yamaha pci soundcard. Because most of my concern comes from sound in the DOS era when you need to hear the tones as they were in the old days, while in the last years of win98 we started to use integrated motherboard audio wich was not that of a big deal for me.

If you happen to come across a motherboard with a SB-Link connector, you can use that to hook up a Yamaha YMF7x4 card and achieve near perfect compatibility with DOS games.

Those motherboards seem to be rare though.

> by doing that i can have DOS + win98 + winXP all in 1 machine.

You can't really. Such a PC will be too fast for many DOS games. You're better off with a dos/win98 PC that can be slowed with setmul, and a dedicated XP box.

kolderman wrote on 2020-07-05, 06:14:

> by doing that i can have DOS + win98 + winXP all in 1 machine.

You can't really. Such a PC will be too fast for many DOS games. You're better off with a dos/win98 PC that can be slowed with setmul, and a dedicated XP box.

Another problem is that Windows XP's "era" carried on at least until 2007 (later, if you discount Vista). By then, the functionality that allowed most PCI sound cards to emulate ISA sound cards under DOS was no longer present in most chipsets .

That and the aforementioned speed issue are good reasons to have a separate machine for XP .

EDIT: Be careful with the ISA slots on Pentium 4 industrial boards. Many of them do not support ISA DMA, which is essential for all ISA sound cards that do PCM audio .

EDIT2: An Athlon XP will not be that great for XP games from 2007 .

Cga.8086 wrote on 2020-07-04, 18:25:

[...]

y build system is an Abit vp6 dual cpu Pentiu3 build, sadly they did not include an isa slot in it.

Dual CPU? Then you're not running DOS or Win9x anyway, I hope, as they don't support SMP so the second CPU. SMP-aware OSs (Win2k/XP on a system like this) don't need ISA sound cards.

I can only speak from a SB 128PCI, which is rather bad for DOS, but at least works, when using the older drivers from Ensoniq (not the ones form the Creative site) Sound is really not that great, but it's a PCI card that will run in DOS (-mode)