I'm going to build a new custom computer in next few months. I like to play games off gog and dosbox to play old games. My question is what newer soundcards would you suggest?
HT Omega eclaro pci-e soundcard has best 7 drivers but, had no idea if it would play sound in dosbox
What newer soundblaster card would you recommend?
If it works in Windows, it will work in DOSBox.
I wouldn't recommend any sound card for DOSBox: DOS sound usually was not high fidelity, so any sound quality would be wasted. Maybe, you are looking for a sound card with low CPU use, but...
In any case, I've got an Asus Xonar DS. It works in Windows XP, 7 and Linux, and it si well rounded. Maybe it is not the best sounding card, or the fastest, but for the price is a very good option.
Avoid at all costs Creative sound cards; because their compatibility with newer operating systems is always poor. SB Live! and Audigy lost some capabilities in Windows Vista (capabilities that were present in Windows XP drivers), and I doubt that they'll get drivers for Windows 8.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
get whatever card you like, if it works in win7 it will work in dosbox (windows sees it as another (windows)application that uses sound, there is no special requirements of drivers)
@Zup:
creative cards are just fine, if one is building a new computer with an ancient card like the live/audigy (the audigy was released a decade ago and live is from ~1998 IIRC) then you are asking for trouble IMHO , anything current from creative is fine
I have a SB Audigy and I haven't noticed any relevant issues. Maybe I am lucky. I am running Win7 x86.
well, there was the case where Creative bann unofficial's Improved Vista's Drivers that would bring features that exist in winXP drivers, but lost/unsuported in official Vista Drivers, for the very same soundcard.
Its cause an uproar back then.
-fffuuu
wrote:I'm going to build a new custom computer in next few months. I like to play games off gog and dosbox to play old games. My question is what newer soundcards would you suggest?
You are aware that the vast majority of motherboards these days have onboard sound, right?
Many years ago onboard sound was in some ways inferior (partly because official DOS support was often rather sketchy), but it is really quite acceptable nowadays.
Yeah Realtek HD audio ALC888 is excellent from what i've heard.
I used to have an ALC883 (quite, quite similar to the ALC888) and I preferred my X-Fi...
wrote:I used to have an ALC883 (quite, quite similar to the ALC888) and I preferred my X-Fi...
Any particular reason?
Overall sound quality; drivers with an EQ that didn't compress portions of the audio when certain frequencies were reached (tested on mine, and two others with the same chip and a range of driver versions, this was the biggest annoyance); ability to use Soundfonts (could be fixed with a software solution for other cards, though); Alchemy (granted, there's a solution for realtek cards too...but didn't work all that well); I process and create audio sometimes and the X-Fi offers lower latency; what I sometimes liked better about that ALC was the audio matrix ("speaker fill"). Creative's greatest failure has been the drivers...but they have smoothed them out with the latest betas; and some issue I didn't really suffer about nvidia sli chipsets (mine had an sli chipset and didn't really suffer from that crackling issue).
I would personally go for a card that can handle latency low enough to lower the blocksize to at least 256. I think any of the Creative X-Fi cards can do this. They're also generally recommended for games.
Stay away from built in sound cards for motherboards. I've heard people claiming they are better now, but in my experience they still sound pretty horrible. (and has high latency)
wrote:Yeah Realtek HD audio ALC888 is excellent from what i've heard.
Aye, the integrated stuff is good enough to use for most things, especially something like DOSBox that only use stereo sound. I use integrated audio on my gaming computer and I have no complaints.
No games ever given me a high latency issue on the gaming computer. The only time I suffered from high latency was when I decided to install Cakewalk on it "just for fun" to check things out.
But that's kinda what I expected, and I do have a dedicated studio computer with a M-Audio card that I normally use to compose music anyway, so it's hardly an issue. At least not for me 😜
So yeah, I reckon that dedicated soundcards are a waste of money for most people these days.
