@kalohimal
Right now I'm getting noise/distortion with every MOD player I have tried: glx.exe, opencp.exe, cmod.exe, ft2.exe, it.exe..., so any MOD player will do.

@dr_st
I'm only using Win98SE DOS for the FAT32 filesystem. If I use FAT16, then Win98SE is of no use to me and I might easily as well use DOS 6.22. This is a DOS only machine.

@appiah4
I only want to do DOS gaming. I have no interest in Windows. So I would be interested in the best PCI sound card for DOS.

For me, at least, the "best" PCI sound cards are the Yamaha YMF724/744/754 cards (at least a few of them, not all, since some were built cheaper than others). These are actually my favorite sound cards, period! I find them better than anything else, even better than the best ISA sound cards. All of them have authentic OPL3 sound and are extremely compatible, even when using the ddma emulation: dsdma (which is what you will need for the Intel 815 chipset). Please note that DSDMA requires expanded memory, so a few games that don't work with expanded memory will, of course, be unplayable (well, unplayable with sound, anyway 😀 ). Also, If you find a good manufacturer, the card will also be extremely quiet, much quieter than 99% of ISA sound cards that have OPL3.
DISCLAIMER: This is my own personal opinion, what works for me might not work for somebody else 😀 "Best" is a relative term.

Now, the big issue for you will be the CPU, which doesn't offer much flexibility. It basically has two states: extremely fast (with the L1 cache activated) or extremely slow (~386 speed with L1 cache disabled).
Your video card is also not exactly suitable for DOS gaming...
Bottom line, if your plan is specifically DOS gaming, you should go with either a Pentium MMX or a K6-2/3+ PC. Pair them with a Riva TNT, Voodoo Banshee, or even an S3 Virge DX and you're good to go.

Like the others users stated, ATI card are not very compatible with DOS and even earl directx games (table fog and 8bit textures).

You are absolutely right - the P3 is not the best for DOS gaming, but it's what I already own. And so far CPU speed wise, I seem to be doing fine using a combination of throttle.exe and smb.exe.

BTW, I finally found the cause of my application crashes - EMM386! I had forgotten about these memory management issues since its been over 20 years since I last used DOS . So I created 3 menu items - one for HIMEM+EMM386, one for HIMEM+EMM386(NOEMS) and one for plain HIMEM.

Unfortunately, Audigy (and YMF744 apparently) need EMM386 to load their drivers. That means for two one of my menu options I have no sound 🙁.

Now if only I can fix the noise/distortion while playing MODs, then I will be done with this PC.

enaiel wrote on 2020-06-05, 13:58:

BTW, I finally found the cause of my application crashes - EMM386! I had forgotten about these memory management issues since its been over 20 years since I last used DOS . So I created 3 menu items - one for HIMEM+EMM386, one for HIMEM+EMM386(NOEMS) and one for plain HIMEM.

Haha, yes! I can't remember when I first discovered this but it's been so long that it's second nature now. Set up a new PC, include the menu options for various combinations of HIMEM and EMM386.

enaiel wrote on 2020-06-05, 13:58:

Unfortunately, Audigy (and YMF744 apparently) need EMM386 to load their drivers. That means for two one of my menu options I have no sound 🙁.

And now you discover yet another reason why having an ISA slot is almost a necessity for pure DOS.

FM801 cards don't require EMS or DDMA for SBPro emulation in DOS.

Can someone please test if the YMF744 or FM801 are able to play MOD files properly using any MOD player? I think the reason why Audigy has problems with MODs is because the MOD players were created by people in the demoscene, and so probably use some very low level and undocumented APIs that the SB16 emulation has trouble with.

One problem with the FM801 is that the only ones available on eBay are from Russia.

Regarding the video card, it is not a high priority right now, because I haven't faced any issues yet. I do have a GF2 that I originally planned to use for this project, but when I took it out of storage I found that a screw had broken off and the card had separated from it's bracket. Still trying to figure how to put it back together.

When your MOD player is "making noise", are you throttling or with cache disabled? If so, are you able to run the player without throttling/cache disabled? Some south bridge has poor implementation on throttling, and will cause FM/SFX to stutter if they are emulated by software. Full hardware implementation will not be affected by throttling.

Which mod player and which mod? I can test tonight, maybe.

@kalohimal
I get the noise/distortion while playing MODs even without throttling or disabling the cache. The distortion is as if the amplification is too high and the audio is getting clipped. But no settings in Audigy or in the MOD players seems to have any effect. Everything else plays fine.

@appiah4
Thanks, that would be really helpful! Any MOD player or MOD will do - but if you want a specific example try Open Cubic Player with CHILDREN.MOD.

enaiel wrote on 2020-06-05, 18:12:

I get the noise/distortion while playing MODs even without throttling or disabling the cache. The distortion is as if the amplification is too high and the audio is getting clipped. But no settings in Audigy or in the MOD players seems to have any effect. Everything else plays fine.

Hmm... could it be due to bad capacitors on the Audigy? But you said it's ok when playing games.

I've tested using ocp player and children.mod, on an i815 motherboard with P3-1GHz Coppermine CPU and Yamaha YMF744, with CPUSPD T1. No such distortion that you mentioned, only occasion minor noise on the right channel, but that's most probably due to old capacitors on my old sound card (need to find one day to recap it).

Update: I tried another YMF744 spare card of mine, and the right channel noise is still there. So I downloaded another file "beyond music.mod" and tried, and the noise is gone. Perhaps the noise is from the MOD?

Thank you so much for doing the test. That noise is part of the song - it's the sound of people talking. I'm glad it works because I just panic bought the last YMF744 from the seller on eBay after I saw 9 of his 10 units get sold while I was watching!

You're welcome and glad to be able to help. Hope you will solve your problem with the new card. Btw, the YMF744 needs dsdma driver to be loaded, which will put the PC into protected mode. In case you need to throttle when using the card (which ocp needs), I have a universal speed control utility here.

Thanks I'll give it a try and update this thread when my YMF744 card arrives.

My current go-to utilities are throttle and slowdown. How does your CpuSpd compare to them?

CPUSPD uses the same principle as the original Throttle by Jeff Leyda, in that it uses the south bridge of the PC to slow down the clock frequency supplied to the CPU, but in addition CPUSPD also allows you to control the CPU cache and also the multiplier. Furthermore, the original Throttle relies on a database of chips info stored inside the program, and because it was written over 16 years ago, many new motherboards with newer south bridges had since been available which it is unable to control. CPUSPD made use of ACPI instead to locate the hardware port for throttling the CPU, hence it is universal and able to throttle all PCs that supports ACPI. The original Throttle is also a real mode program, so it cannot execute when the PC is in VCPI mode (when EMM386 is running) or protected mode (When Windows 9x is running).

Slowdown is a software solution and a TSR. It stays resident in memory and uses timer and interrupt to execute software delay loops in the attempt to slow down the computer. As PCs get faster, longer delay loops are needed which can quickly exceed the capabilities of the original program, and longer delay loops couple with timer/interrupts can also interfere with the execution of other programs (games/applications/etc). Besides that it also takes up precious DOS memory.

CPUSPD is more like a combination of the Setmul utility by garwin and Throttle, and expanded for modern hardware. Setmul was originally targeted for VIA C3 and Cyrix and later expanded for AMD up to K8, but excludes many Intel CPUs (which it can only control the CPU cache and not multiplier). CPUSPD is able to control these Intel CPUs as well, including Core 2 CPUs. CPUSPD also offers throttle control which is absent in Setmul.

Thanks for the detailed explanation - it sounds like exactly what I need!

On a completely unrelated note, I just received my scanline generator from Focus Attack for my RetroPie, and just for kicks I tried it on this PC and was quite pleased with the results. Reading text with it on is not that great, but it looks pretty good in games. The picture doesn't do it justice - it just makes all the pixel art look really smooth and pop out, even though I'm using a 1080p LCD.

That's interesting. I did the reverse, by using a scan converter to convert video outputs from Atari, Amiga and Apple computers to VGA.

Btw, do you have any good MODs to recommend? Children.mod is pretty good, I tried other top rated MODs on MOD archive but find that they are overrated.

Yeah, you either hate scanlines or love them - there is no middle ground.

Some of my favourite modules from the 90's Amiga and DOS demoscene (in no particular order):

• 2ND_PM.S3M
• DEADLOCK.XM
• ELYSIUM.MOD
• dreams.xm
• enigma.mod
• POPCORN.MOD
• projectx.xm
• nemesis.mod
• 2UNLIMIT.MOD
• rez-monday.mod
• sommar.mod
• crystal3.mod
• class09.mod
• leavin_teramis_2.xm
• unreeeal_superhero_3.xm

These just blew my mind at the time, as there were either no MP3s, or my DOS PC could not play them. I'm looking forward to hearing these modules again on this DOS PC!

Thank you very much, I'll check them out later.