This question has no answer, or rather a different answer depending on who you ask. You first need to ask yourself what games you want to play, and that should narrow down your hardware requirements - you can't cover it all with one setup in my experience.

Your 1-5 steps above look pretty good, although it includes 2 '4s'! SoftMPU is a wondrous thing but you won't need it for the majority of games, only those that require intelligent mode, and you might not want to play them anyway.

The CT1600 is a cracker of a card and will cover most requirements, but of course it can't do fancy MIDI, it just has the OPL3 chip for music. The MT-32 and General Midi stuff is fun to play with but it complicates matters a LOT. If you're happy with nice, compatible FX and OPL3 music then it's the way to go. No fuss, no muss. Personally, after messing with all of this hardware over the years, I think a CT1600 is all you need.

Thanks for the reply. I went ahead and fixed the two fours and I think I will definitely pick up a CT1600 at least to start with. Sound in DOS really is a pretty complicated issue.

If you're just getting a CT1600 + MT-32, then it doesn't have to be complicated at all. Some games supports the MT-32, and they'll have setting for it in the sound setup, shouldn't be difficult at all, the one that don't, well, just run OPL3 (FM Sound) for music. Get a pair of Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II speakers, which have 2 line inputs, one where you could connect the CT1600's line-out and one where you could plug in the line-out from the MT-32. If you ever need intelligent mode for midi playback, just use SoftMPU as you've already figured out. Problems solved.

Unless you have a Roland MPU-401AT, let me remind you that the CT1600 does not have a UART compatible MPU-401. If you still want Creative go with a SB 16 CT1740, or if SB Pro compatibility is more important go with a YMF718 or 719 chipset card.

You might want to be patient and wait for betold cards to appear at lower prices. This ebay store sometimes sells SB Pro 2 CT1600 for $20-25, and SB16 CT1740 for $15, which is cheap enough.

I always wanted to grab a Yamaha based card, if for no other reason than just to have one. How about this?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ISA-16bit-Sound-Card- … s-/200965841109

squareguy wrote:

I always wanted to grab a Yamaha based card, if for no other reason than just to have one. How about this?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ISA-16bit-Sound-Card- … s-/200965841109

Yep that will be fine. Although the dos software is nothing special, the card is not hard to configure. It has very good SB Pro compatibility and real OPL3 sound. It gets better if you disable 3D, ymersion and bass. Also it's good to disable the internal amp. You do that by changing jumper positions. The card will have good sound to noise ratio. As far as i know, it has shown perfect compatibility with SoftMPU.

It has my approval.

I ordered two cards. I plan to use one with a Vortex 2 card for my Windows 98 SE box possibly and the other for a pure DOS box for older games. Thanks for the input.