No, AWE32 uses a seperate port (620h) while SB MIDI uses DSP commands. I also found a programmer's manual on google and AWE32 interface is much more complicated than a simple midi in/out. You'd have to emulate the EMU8K registers and a bunch of read/write IO ports...
This effectivly makes AWE32 emulation not worth it...most (if not all) games that support AWE32 also support General Midi.

Yeah, I agree.

gulikoza wrote:

There's an AWE32 soundfont floating on the net.

Any idea what it's called? Searching for AWE32 soundfont doesn't really help so much (though I did find one called chaos that seemed to fit the bill - is that the one?)

Mine is called awe32romgm and google will only find 1 page 😜
Don't know however if Creative/E-Mu objects to the distribution of the rom as much as Roland does...

I've no midi hw at all, I'm using MS synth that comes with win2000 and I
don't like that wavetable.
But I remember, when years ago I had a 486dx4 and an sb16 value, how I
really hated that friend of mine with a P100 and the awe32, playing US
Navy Fighters with that HUGE speakers....
In my humble opinion that was a great wavetable, and I really would enjoy
hearing again all that great midis how I remember them.
I've tried to replace gm.dls with a custom dls with the awe wavetable that
you can find around, and I've also tried that fluidsynth patch on sf and
believe me, none of them gave me half the quality of the original.

The AWE32 card is the only soundcard I miss in dosbox. AWE32 is simply SB16 + EMU8000 hardware wavetable chip. Dosbox already has SB16 emulation, so only EMU8000 chip emulation is missing. Some games (like Dungeon keeper) uses EMU for high quality hardware mixing. Some people say that games can use SB16 emulation using in-game low quality software mixing. Thats true but AWE32 emulation could give us better sound than AWE32's when these sounds would be mixed on today hardware (via DirectMusic or DirectSound e.g.).

No, it won't get you better sound. Software mixing stays software mixing, no matter who it does. Moreover, software mixing sounds the same as hardware mixing. Since we're talking about sound effects, not music (no resampling, short duration, simple straightforward mixing), the performance gain would be negligible. BTW, amazingly little new hardware has multiple PCM streams, and even if they have, it's often just 2-4 channels, not enough for AWE32.

Wouldn't the performance of an emulated hardware mixer be better than an emulated CPU doing software mixing and rendering that on a single-stream emulated device?

There might be a difference in quality if a programmer has decided to decrease audio quality of the samples (lower sampling rate or bit depth) to decrease the CPU usage of a software mixer, but that is a design decision, not a hardware issue. Still, it may have mattered in DOS era.

Why in hell would you want emulated AWE32? That's just dumb. It's just another wavetable synth, and it was a board with one of the worst sound sets ever produced. It sucked in quality, and the DOS protected mode compatibility nightmares were worthy of some award in marketing stupidity (put a real MPU-401 interpreter on your chinzy card Creative.)

BTW, I've recorded my AWE32 playing Dark Forces thru its ROM set to help you all get your ears bleeding. Then listen to the Soundscape Elite, and think about how Soundscape Elite cost $160 while the AWE32 was around $250. Lets not compare the pristine Roland SCD-15 to anything from Creative. 😀 Sound cards - from best to worst.

AWE's only advantage was those cool 30-pin RAM slots. I have one here with 8MB on it. Load it up with Synergi 8M, or some other good font, and find a game that will actually support the card, and it actually sounds good. Too bad they didn't make a DOS soundfont loader, so you have to play games in Win9x and hope they'll run ok.

Stick with Roland, Yamaha, or Ensoniq for your retro needs. For DOSBOX just use the perfectly capable MPU-401 wrapper and run either a Soundfont on a SBLive or higher, or just with DirectX's semi-sweet Roland softsynth.

We talk about AWE32 emulation for mixing custom game sounds effects (SFX) only - NOT midi music. Today hardware has better quality mixing hardware than old software in-game mixer where programmer was cutting down every mixing procedure to save CPU cycles. Implementing AWE32 EMU8k emulation will allow today software/hardware synths to mix sounds in higher quality than old AWE32 or cutdown in-game software mix for SB16.

zbiggy wrote:

Implementing AWE32 EMU8k emulation will allow today software/hardware synths to mix sounds in higher quality than old AWE32 or cutdown in-game software mix for SB16.

Which remains to be proven. Read some of my early posts... Check that it really makes a difference. SFX software mixing is not that difficult, even when you want high quality. I doubt that it makes a difference. Record samples from a real AWE vs. a SB16 and we will see.

swaaye I also think that there is nothing better for midi playback than Roland or Yamaha. I would like to see AWE32 emulation for games using EMU8k features (sample upload which enables HW mix with sound interpolation to give smooth, clean sound)

Moe, I think you try to compare SB16 DAC with AWE32 DAC which are both the same. That is why you hear no difference. Many games shows AWE32 as playback device which is simply alias to SB16 driver. The difference is only heard when game/program REALLY uses EMU8K synth.

I had SB32 PnP with 2MB RAM. I used to play Amiga music modules (*.mod files, 8bit 11kHz samples inside) on this card. I checked many module players to find the best quality. Most of them was for SB16 DAC, but the one: AMP (awe module player by Lada Kopecky) used EMU8k synth for hardware mixing. Nothing can beat this player in terms of quality (including today's windows players). Compare module playback using DOS module player for SB16 on AWE32 and then AMP on the same AWE32 with 2MB RAM or more. You will understand what I am talking about.

I'm sure AWE32 emulation would be available in dosbox if programming it was not so hard.

List of games supporting AWE32
http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attr … buteId,128/p,2/

I wonder how many simply had the option of AWE32 but were just SB16? I can't believe 365 DOS games were optimized for AWE32.

95 % of them do not use EMU8k. AWE32 was expensive card so only few people had it. The smaller group had any RAM on this card. Programmes are usually lazy so they aliased SB16 to AWE32 to meet demands of boss and Creative folks who pushed for AWE32 support (to make clients buy new product). However some games (mentioned at the top of this topic) make use of EMU8k improved sounds. EMU8k was the best wavetable chip with RAM in DOS era. However unCreative as usual killed this quality by making poor soundfonts, hiding programming documentation and making buggy, uncmopatible drivers.

Lada Kopecky's AMP was one of the DOS programs which shows real power of EMU8k.

Woah, best wavetable chip with RAM in the DOS era. zbiggy is a comedian.

zbiggy wrote:

swaaye I also think that there is nothing better for midi playback than Roland or Yamaha. I would like to see AWE32 emulation for games using EMU8k features (sample upload which enables HW mix with sound interpolation to give smooth, clean sound)

Moe, I think you try to compare SB16 DAC with AWE32 DAC which are both the same.

No, I meant SB16 vs Emu8k BECAUSE the DSPs of the cards themselves are the same. That's what I mean: Which games actually sound differently (better) when they use Emu8k instead of the SB16 DSP for SFX?

Your mod tracker probably doesn't qualify - It's hard to believe that no modern mod tracker can reach the quality of 10 year old hardware. If that's the only reason you'd like to see AWE32, it would be easier to write a good-sounding mod tracker than full Emu8k emulation.

Why does AMP sound so smooth and clean?
───────────────────────────────────────

The major advantage of AMP is the direct use of the EMU8000 synthesizer that
performs the following tasks in hardware (that means with no CPU load):

1. high quality pitch-shifting using a patented dynamic four-point
interpolating filter

This allows the removal of signal distortion that is so typical for all
software-mixing players. Their interpolators (if any) are mostly two-point
linear or rarely three-point quadratic (or they are unknown - hidden behind
magic and meaningless names like FFT, FOI, IDO, 32-bit, spline etc.). But
those basic mathematical algorithms are not suitable for signal processing,
therefore such interpolators can't remove the unwanted artifacts while
preserving the high frequencies contained in the original waveform.

<< NOTE: For those of you being unfamiliar with digital signal processing,
here is a brief explanation:
Let's take an example. You have an instrument sampled at 20kHz when playing
the C4 note. But you need to play e.g. the C3 note at 40kHz output rate.
To do it, you must increase the number of sample points (i.e. decrease
the pitch) by factor of four _without_ changing the information content.
If you obtain the three new points by repeating the old sample value, then
the resulting frequency spectrum will include new high-frequency replicas
(mirrors) of the original signal's spectrum. In our example, the original
spectrum 0..10kHz would be shifted to 0..5kHz and also mirrored to ranges
5..10kHz, 10..15kHz and 15..20kHz. These replicas would add an ugly ringing
distortion to the output sound. To remove them, you need a sharp-cutoff
low-pass filter that won't damage the signal that is passed through.
The result will be the "right" new samples smoothly inserted between old.
This kind of digital filter is often unfortunately called an "interpolator"
even if it does not perform "interpolation" in a common mathematical sense
(such as linear or polynomial interpolation between known points).
It is important to realize that a well-designed filter response is more
crucial then just a number of input sample points used for interpolation.
>>

2. mixing at 44.1 kHz frequency allows output frequencies up to 22 kHz

You would need a very fast Pentium machine to get just a simply interpolated
sound in 30 channels at the 44kHz mixing rate with a software-mixing player.
And it would eat most of the CPU processing power.
With AMP, all you need is a Sound Blaster AWE32 compatible sound card with
sufficient sample RAM and any 386 or better computer.

3. starting/terminating the notes and changing the volume without any clicks
(using the EMU8000's envelope engine)

The software-mixing players usually can't afford such smooth volume ramping.

4. customizable reverb and chorus effects

Without effects, the sound is dry and flat.
Any good effect processing requires many additional complex computations.

5. smooth panning in 256 steps

<< NOTE: I've heard a few people saying that software mixing performed by
their interpolating routines sounds better than hardware mixing on the AWE
card. That's a big nonsense from both theory and experience. High quality
pitch shifting and mixing equivalent to that performed by EMU8000 (four-point
resampling in 30 voices at 44.1 kHz) requires about 12 million multiplications
per second! << (4+4+1) * 30 * 44100 = 11,907,000 >>
This means that the sole multiplication would consume all cycles on a P120
machine. But just multiplying is not enough. We have to do other things as
well. And what's even worse, we still don't have any reverb and chorus.
The MMX technology can be 3-10 times faster, though - that may be a real
chance for software-mixing players. Time will show.
(If anyone wants to see the details on how the EMU8000 works and how complex
the computations are, I recommend checking the US patent # 5,111,727 -
available also for free on Internet, e.g. from the Patent Server operated
by IBM).
>>

I forgot to tell you the text I sent before comes from AMP documentation. It doesn't matter if you play game's samples or *.mod samples. Both are treated in the same way by EMU8k. The games that use EMU8k probably will sound in the same high quality. However only few of them uses EMU8k. The example titles were presented at the begining of this topic. I could not check them because do not have AWE32 anymore. Due to lack of ISA slot I replaced EMU8k with EMU10k2 😀

GUS Pnp does that list but has a cleaner DAC, 8192 panning steps, 16bit samples vs emu8k which clips everything to 13bit, 32 channels where emu8k is limited to 30.

gulikoza wrote:

Mine is called awe32romgm and google will only find 1 page 😜

Didn't turn up any for me :> But fair point about rom distribution, so I'm not going to belabour the point.