Just out of curiosity... what if you were to actually use the Goldfinch with a "dummy" soundblaster installed in a spare slot? The way I use my Goldfinch card is to run it through the line-in on my CT2940, so the Goldfinch certainly doesn't care which card it is physically connected to. I wonder if just having a compatible soundblaster card in the system will allow you to check that box and make the card work while not interfering with the features of the card you're actually using for output. Then of course we'd have the issue of how to configure things so that they don't conflict with one another...

I would lean toward Creative artificially limiting this feature to systems running with another Sound Blaster, since it seems to function completely independently of the "host" card.

Yes it's a good idea and might get it working, but at the end of the day - even if I could get the resources thing sorted out - I wouldn't be happy having a whole extra sound card sitting in my already cramped case just for the purposes of trickery. The SB16 I'm using currently is actually a very nice card (I think), but it would be nice to be able to take a break from it for a while without losing my sound font capability.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Another dumb question... What if it's a software thing? I'm not sure if you removed all traces of your SB16 before installing the other cards, but its possible that the awe software is looking for some rather simple software queues... Like the existence of certain autoexec or config. sys lines (these are just examples, I know these don't matter much in 9x).

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Another dumb question... What if it's a software thing? I'm not sure if you removed all traces of your SB16 before installing the other cards, but its possible that the awe software is looking for some rather simple software queues... Like the existence of certain autoexec or config. sys lines (these are just examples, I know these don't matter much in 9x).

It might well be and I considered breaking out my hex editor and starting to dig around, but ultimately I decided that I don't have the time / patience for driver hacking anymore. And there's a chance that it's only compatible with the Creative MPU-401 at a hardware level, so no amount of messing with drivers will help.

Too many unknowns!

This issue has never stopped bugging me but I stumbled on the solution somehow - there was no skill involved sadly and to be honest I'm not exactly sure why it worked this time after so many previous attempts. One difference was the sound card I paired the Goldfinch with - this Crystal CS4232 based badboy pictured below. With this thing installed I re-installed the Goldfinch and this time, for whatever reason, the installer added a 'Creative SBAWE MPU401 Emulation' driver along with the Wave Effects Synthesis driver. Initially the MPU401 Emulation driver was clashing with the two other MPU401 I have in this machine (Roland SCC1 + the one on the sound card), but I was able to adjust the resources to make the emulated MPU401 sit at 320, and everyone was happy.

Now I can tick the 'Emulate MPU-401 on this device' in the AWE control panel and use the loaded sound font loaded by the Goldfinch at port 320 when running DOS games in Windows95. I'm pretty bloody happy with this result because I've been wanting to switch out the SB16 for a nicer sounding clone for a while (this Acer Magic S23A sounds great), but didn't want to lose the ability to use sound fonts in a DOS box. Now I can have my cake and eat it too!

The relevant specs of the PC in question can be found here if anyone's interested: Pentium 166MMX tower of power

Awesome! 🤣

I wonder if its because the card is called an AW32, Creative mistakenly thought it was one of theirs? (kidding)

This is a pretty great discovery IMO. I hate to ask you to change anything since it's working now, but I'd be interested to see if you can just drop in a different card now (YMF719 for example), in place of the Crystal card without losing the AWE capabilities.

Normally, one of the few down sides to using non-creative cards is that you lose AWE capabilities in games that directly support it. I like to have as many sound options as possible to compare, just because I'm weird. This would let someone have SB Pro compatibility, FM (OPL3 with the right card), non-bugged MPU-401 AND the ability to play AWE synth in games that support it.

Out of curiosity, can you use this in pure DOS in games that directly support the AWE without a TSR? For example, Descent feeds its own sound font into an AWE32\64 and it sounds pretty cool. I believe this worked in DOS when I last tried it, though I can't remember at the moment.

Sadly, my latest DOS\9x system only has two ISA slots, and currently they are being used by a YMF719+Midiman MM401.

I wonder if its possible to get this working with a PCI card that has good DOS compatibility, like a YMF724 or even a Vortex 2.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I wonder if its because the card is called an AW32, Creative mistakenly thought it was one of theirs? (kidding)

🤣

Yar I'm quite reluctant to temp fate by switching in other cards at this point - I'd spent hours previously on this with other sounds cards with no luck, so although I'm confident it would work with the right driver installed, I'm not confident enough to try and prove it! I should mention that some sound cards seem to conflict with the Goldfinch outright - i.e. before drivers are even loaded for the sound card, the Goldfinch is unusable. ES688 and ES1688 are examples of chipsets that kill the Goldfinch (but strangely not ES1868), and a Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2 also clashes somehow (changing the DMA / IRQ doesn't help).

In saying that, most sound cards I tried were OK - including OPLSAx. And it's worth the effort I think - having AWE capabilities is a win but I'm more pleased with the sound font functionality the Goldfinch provides. I think that works really well and having .SF2 functionality alongside the sound card of your choice is handy.

Yes it works in pure DOS as you'd expect - you have to run a specific version of AWEDIAG but you can find that on VogonDrivers. No TSR required for Descent.

Unrelated but this AOpen AW32 Pro is proving to be a very nice card - very easy to setup and sound great with everything I've thrown at it so far. Nice wavetable too!