I've ordered one of these 3 weeks ago and I still haven't recieved it, apparently its stuck in Customs over there. Probably a bad time of year for buying internationally.

🤣 same here! No card in sight...

A lot of my other eBay purchases also haven't arrived...

I don't remember if it's the same guy, but mine came in a bubble mailer wrapped in newspaper.
Still works though. 😁

I had a look at this ebay listing, and his ebay selling name of "double fish" rings a bell. I bought a couple of these DBs from him about 2 years ago. It's incredible that his inventory of these items is not yet depleted. They both worked fine. Actually, speaking of international orders which have not been delivered, I am also in this situation. Some Palominos from the USA have made it to the UK, but the tracking status says "attempted delivery" for last Friday...

TheLazy1 wrote:

I don't remember if it's the same guy, but mine came in a bubble mailer wrapped in newspaper.
Still works though. 😁

It's understandable that he must save on shipping in order to afford free international shipping, but I received two cheap wrapped cards and one of them was DOA, with some deep scratches on PCB surface. I reported the issue and he sent me another card for free without a word of complaint.

I've got one on the way too - he did say to expect shipping to take 20 days or so.

Mine took about three and a half weeks this past summer.

I ordered a spare too, quite some time ago. No problems then.

If I weren't broke I'd get another one and try to build it to an external box.

I've ordered one a year ago. It took 4(!) days for me to get it in US 😀

Mine arrived last week - hooked it up to my CT2290 SB16 and it works perfectly. Not as good, IMO, as a Sound Canvas - but very nice indeed. Between my GUS Max, SC55, MT32 and XR385, I think I've got the MIDI bases covered now 😀

megatron-uk wrote:

Mine arrived last week - hooked it up to my CT2290 SB16 and it works perfectly.

Have you tried the "Hexen hanging note bug test"? To do this, download the free to download Hexen shareware demo. Then, run Hexen at the DOS prompt like this:

Hexen -warp 02

Do you hear a stuck music note, when you have configured your SB to play digital effects and also General Midi using the NEC DB? Most of the time, this stuck note can be heard immediately, when this Hexen warp test is run. Sometimes, it takes a minute or two for the problem to occur.

If the problem has occured, there is a workaround, of sorts. For the General Midi / DB music, you can use a SB clone card. I've tried several, and my favourite is the ESS ES1686F chipset based card. The wavetable header is clear on these cards - better than all Creative cards that I've used, and I've tested over a dozen of them. For the SB digital effects, you can still use your SB card. Of course, you'll need 1 extra ISA slot for the SB clone card, and 1 stereo mixer, because of the 2 soundcards.

(Another option is to ditch the CT2290, if it causes General Midi music problems, and just use the SB clone card for both effects and music.)

I bought a CT2800 off ebay a while ago and it finally arrived, with an XR385 daughterboard attached... wasn't in the pics or description. Bonus 😀

I still haven't recieved the one I ordered from China though. Oh well now I will have two (if it ever arrives).

I'm back to work this week though so I'm hoping to get some time to play with it this weekend. Also need to try the MT32 on the CT2800 to see if it gets the hanging note bug. I wouldn't be surprised if it did though.

Same my NEC also hasn't arrived yet. But I ordered two CT2860's and they arrived today!

They also have Yamaha OPL chips. I got these because I saw your post. These CT28xx cards are the last "design" to come with real Yamaha OPL chips.

So a nice compromise between authentic sound and not having to use really long / old / expensive cards.

Is there any modern sound card that with daughterboard connectors?

The CT2900 appeared to have low-voltage mobile versions of the OPL3 on it although they seemed functionally identical to the standard chips to me - sounded the same as far as I could tell. They seem quite uncommon though.
I guess I will have to test that with the MT32/XR385 as well 😀

Is there a good 'test' for OPL sounds or will it just obviously sound wrong? I noticed that an Aztech card had different sounding music to a Creative card in certain games.

So is your CT2860 non-plug and play? And its a Vibra 16S chipset correct? The CT2800/CT2900 are both PnP.
I wish there was some rhyme or reason to creative's model number scheme 😵

I will upload pics in the "bought new retro hardware".

EDIT:

Might as well post them here:

DonutKing wrote:

Is there a good 'test' for OPL sounds or will it just obviously sound wrong? I noticed that an Aztech card had different sounding music to a Creative card in certain games.

So is your CT2860 non-plug and play? And its a Vibra 16S chipset correct? The CT2800/CT2900 are both PnP.
I wish there was some rhyme or reason to creative's model number scheme 😵

Yes also Vibra 16S (last SB16 design with real Yamaha OPL chip)

Regarding PnP the card installs slightly different compared to my AWE64. So CTCM.EXE + AWEUTIL.EXE /S doesn't work.

All I did was run INSTALL.EXE from the SBBASIC setup folder (these drivers are on the Creative Support Server). It then installs everything and all works fine.

Without any drivers, the card works as Adlib only. So not sure if it's 100% PnP 😜

Regarding OPL music, my personal test is Monkey Island 2. The very first bit separates the clones from the real OPL chips.

I tested both cards, the speaker output for starters sounded very noisy. I haven't done a recording on the line out yet...

Hmmm that's interesting. I personally found the CT2800 to have a much cleaner output than any other SB16 I tried.
I also found that even though the CT2800 is a PnP card, I didn't load any drivers (did put SET BLASTER in autoexec.bat though) and it worked perfectly at standard IO/IRQ/DMA settings.

I'll run Monkey Island 2 against the CT2900 and see if it is any different to a card with a 'standard' OPL3.