The Audician card should have a pair of jumpers to disable the onboard amp, the output should then be really clean. For price/performance that card really can't be beaten.

Definitely steer clear of PCI cards for DOS gaming, there are many inexpensive and effective ISA options. Try disabling the Audician's amp first though.

What's the specific problem with CD audio?

YMF-719 cards can be very clean sounding.
Even some ESS cards can depending on the make. Compared to a soundblaster bus noise is much rarer to pick up usually can disable the amp on these via jumpers.

If you go PCI, YMF-7x4 cards can be very clean sounding, can have dos support as good as an ISA card if you use the SB-LINK.
With those you can have S/PDIF Coxial out in DOS.
Avoid the DCS make ones. I've had nothing but trouble with those.

I'll dig into the documentation on the Audician, but I for some reason don't recall seeing anything that would have allowed me to disable the onboard amp. I'm hoping it was just an oversight on my part.

As for the CD Audio, the issue was that it came through VERY quietly. I did end up swapping header connections (it doesn't have those typical "socket" connections you'd see on a Soundblaster or the like and actually terminates in this small white plug) and it got balanced out with the other signals, but then it was the grit of the overall signal that got in the way. It went from being too quiet and drowned out by the noisy MIDI and digital sound channels to being part of the noisy overall mix.

So yeah, back to the drawing board on the jumper thing. I'll check my card tonight for one and hopefully have no problem tracking it down. The card worked a treat otherwise and I got two of them for the price of one low-grade SB16.

Oh, and not to spam the thread, but what's the appeal of outboard MIDI devices that I've read about on the board? Are they really that much of an upgrade on a dedicated OPL or something of the like for DOS era games or is this something more of the Win95 vintage and onward?

The Audician is a great card. It has jumpers to change the output from speaker out to line-out. Line-out is what you want.

With CD Volume being too quiet or too loud, I use an external mixer and have a lead running from the back of the CD drive to the mixer. I found that there is too much of a variation form game to game to rely on the sound card mixer.

And as above, ISA is the way to go for DOS.

Ok, I did some digging around in the docs and on my Audician.

I'm going to attach a picture with highlighted areas to explain the issues I ran into and hopefully anyone else thrown off by the documentation on the card can use my fumbling about to save themselves some time.

First, I found the jumper in question (outlined in yellow on the picture). Here, it's shown in the "Amp Enabled" position. To disable the amp, both "plugs" (I'm not sure of the proper name for those plastic widgets) are moved "up" to cover the two exposed pins at the top. When configured correctly, the two bottom pins should be exposed instead and, yes, I can confirm that this cleans up the signal TREMENDOUSLY! So, many thanks to those who nudged me in that direction. That saved me considerable time, money and frustration. 😀

Second, with regard to the CD audio issues I had, the connection I originally attempted are the four longer-pinned jumpers labelled J10 in the red rectangle because I thought they were the only connection compatible with the standard CD audio connector. Later, I found a cord that went from the standard CD audio plug in the back of my CD-ROM drive to a smaller white connection, which fit into the plug just below those jumpers (labelled J11 in the same red rectangle). Both of these connections technically worked, but the sound output level for the CD audio was incredibly low in comparison with the MIDI or digital sound effect outputs. In games like Little Big Adventure, this was a bit obnoxious but could be addressed via the in-game mixer.

So, that being a bit of a nuisance, I then moved the connection from the CD-ROM drive audio output to the connector outlined in light blue. This brought the output to the appropriate level to match up with everything else.

Unfortunately, the documentation with this card has multiple card variants listed side by side, and they're very vague illustrations of each card variant just focusing on components in a specific region of the board - not exactly something that'll help you figure out which one you're dealing with in some cases. I'm still not sure what J10 and J11 are really for as everything that looked like them mentioned "audio." But yeah, this is the solution for this particular variant of the card.

I was reminded of why the Audician was a slight issue though because games like Interplay's Lord of the Rings refuse to accept it as any of the sound card options the setup program offers (it definitely refuses to initialize as a SB). I don't know if anyone's found any work-arounds for that particular issue, but I figured I'd bring that up while I was on the topic.

In conclusion, the recommendations for this card are well-founded barring some minor compatibility issues.

FYI, from my initial tests a while ago, I found the PCI YMF724, using SB-Link on a 440BX, more compatible than an ISA YMF719. Of course, I didn't test every game. However, of the ones I tested, the PCI version worked with all of them, whilst the ISA version had issues with Prince of Persia 2 and its intro speech. Other ISA cards were fine with its speech though - not sure why it was having issues.

AFAIK J10 and J11 are the CD-audio pins. They are shorted (you can't connect two CDs), but the order of the pins is slightly different (I believe one is LGRG and the other is LGGR). The one you used is probably the AUX input (same pinout as the same-looking CD in port). While it techicaly works, I doubt the in-game mixers now can adjust their volume. There is also the possibility that this is the modem input, but that would be mono, and I think you'd have noticed the difference.

Also, if you connect the CD back to J11, can't you adjust the default volume though Audicam's own mixer/setup software? I know the generic SETUPSA for YMF71x cards can do that.

Runicen wrote:

Oh, and not to spam the thread, but what's the appeal of outboard MIDI devices that I've read about on the board? Are they really that much of an upgrade on a dedicated OPL or something of the like for DOS era games or is this something more of the Win95 vintage and onward?

Well, really its a combination of personal preference and the composer's intent. While some people just outright prefer the sound of particular MIDI synthesizers over OPL (or even other MIDI synths, looking at you DB50XG) for some games, quite a number of DOS games were composed on these synths. Sierra intended for the music in most of their games to be heard on an MT-32, and the SC-55 was what basically everyone composing for 90's DOS games used.

alexanrs wrote:

AFAIK J10 and J11 are the CD-audio pins. They are shorted (you can't connect two CDs), but the order of the pins is slightly different (I believe one is LGRG and the other is LGGR). The one you used is probably the AUX input (same pinout as the same-looking CD in port). While it techicaly works, I doubt the in-game mixers now can adjust their volume. There is also the possibility that this is the modem input, but that would be mono, and I think you'd have noticed the difference.

Also, if you connect the CD back to J11, can't you adjust the default volume though Audicam's own mixer/setup software? I know the generic SETUPSA for YMF71x cards can do that.

I actually never bothered with the Yamaha software beyond the drivers themselves. My experience with the volume mixing came from Little Big Adventure, which seemed a pretty good template for what other games were "seeing" in DOS. All of the input options I used were easily modified using the "CD Audio" setting in LBA (which also included a "Line In" setting), so I'm more confused than not by the information you're giving me. The different pin layouts do make sense given the volume drops in the other plug in options I tried though.

The short and not overly complicated version of what I said is:

You connected the CD to the AUX input (your card should support at least four inputs: CD Audio, Line In, Mic and Aux). This should work fine, but some games might lose the ability to control the CD-Audio volume because they won't be adjusting the input channel you used.
You might try to connect it back to the CD-Audio pins and change the volume through the driver's mixer. If Audicam uses SETUPSA, starting it without parameters brings the mixer up, and shows both the SBPro and the WSS mixers. These levels are saved and reapplied when you start the drivers.

I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to messs with the mixer. If it's SETUPSA, well, it is a mess. Some levels go from 0 to 7, others go from 0 to 31 and a few go from 0 to 63. You never know if something is at max volume or some absurdly low volume.