The sound card issue is an immensely difficult field of retro gaming or computing. If you do not care about quality, focusing on compatibility, you are in a tiny bit better situation. Opl2 and opl3 were de facto standard instruments and blasters for sfx and digital. Having a real blaster or blaster pro is essential for some games where with other cards,you either get no sound support at all or missing out on certain sfx at least. Basically, sb pro compatibility is a must for a hefty lot of stuff. You will want to find matching cards for each retro system individually. For that 286, a blaster 1, 1.5 or 2.0 seem logical choices. Music wise, even a 286 can drive external midi hw by an mpu401 card or uart mpu401 port of a sound card, although a 386 or 486 is more versatile in this regard. Neither opl or midi devices were used to their full potential, but midi is vastly superior in most cases. High end Cards expanded by ram and daughterboards are usually pricey.

That's such a wide question, hard to answer in a post.

I recommend doing a bit of reading on old posts here. This is really well documented 😀

Adlib was one of, if not the, first sound card. Sound Blaster added digital sound effects and a game port, making it very popular. Later we got Roland MT-32 and General MIDI, but they were quite expensive. Cards with lots of memory let you upload Soundfonts, basically changing how a sound card sounds.

I agree. A very broad subject.
If you are just referring to Sound Blaster, then you basically have:
Sound Blaster original - 8-bit mono up to 22.5 KHz (version 2 could mix up to 44.1 KHz)
Sound Blaster Pro & Pro 2 - 8-bit stereo up to 22.5 KHz (backwards compatible with original Sound Blaster)
Sound Blaster 16 - 16-bit stereo up to 44.1 KHz. Also had a built in MPU-401 UART MIDI interface. There are quite a number of these models available. Some still used jumpers and later models were plug 'n play. Also came with the infamous MIDI hanging note bug on most models. Some used the Vibra chipset, which had a bit less noise but, your had no treble or bass support in the mixer. Some models had the Wave Blaster header for external MIDI daughterboard support. Did fully support original Sound Blaster but, not Sound Blaster Pro (was unable to mix Sound Blaster Pro specific digital sounds in stereo).
Sound Blaster AWE models - essentially a Sound Blaster 16 with an "integrated" MIDI synthesizer. Some models also had the Wave Blaster header and had memory upgrade sockets that allowed you to load more sound samples into memory (this is a subject on its own).

All Sound Blaster models supported the Adlib sound card (later AWE models no longer utilised the Yamaha OPL chip but, used Creative's CQM synthesis).

You can find more info on each of these on Wikipedia and also here on Vogons.

To add to jesolo's story:
The evolution is basically this (ignoring less popular sound cards, and card-specific features such as tone-control, reverb/chorus etc, just the 'milestones' as how games generally look at them as well):
1) Adlib: Yamaha OPL2 synthesizer chip
2) Sound Blaster original, basically an Adlib with a digital channel (8-bit 22 KHz) to record and play back digital samples. Music sounds the same, sound effects are better than on Adlib.
3) Sound Blaster 2.0: Slight upgrade to digital channel, higher frequencies (up to 44 KHz), and DMA transfers.
4) Sound Blaster Pro 2.0: OPL2 synthesizer upgraded to OPL3, with more channels, stereo sound, and better quality. Still backward compatible with SB/Adlib. Digital channel also has a stereo option now.
5) 16-bit SB-clone era: SB16 and various other clones such as Pro Audio Spectrum, ESS AudioDrive etc, basically an OPL3 card with 16-bit/44KHz digital channel, capable of CD-quality digital audio.
6) Wavetable era: Gravis UltraSound, SB AWE32 and others, using sampled instruments instead of generating instruments from oscillators and filtering/modulating like the OPL-synthesizer chips did.
7) Don't care-era: All music is either pre-recorded as an mp3, or generated in software with mixing and (3d) processing, so as long as you have a stereo 16-bit 44KHz digital channel or better, things work.

This is a nice primer on the subject, ranging 1981-1995:
Phonomenal! ... a retrospective view on sound card history
Though most talk and feelings are about the well known cards, there are very capable clones too. Like from ESS, Yamaha and Crystal.

Well, like on my case, I wanted an isa sound card because of dos games, so no pci.
Then, I excluded all sound blaster 16 and vibra that I found to sell.
Next I was seaching for the best isa card ever made.
I ended up looking for a sound blaster awe64 gold, but on the time I found a card that I never heard about, the Guillemot Game Theater 64.
I heard it was better than an SB AWE64, there was more onboard ram, support edo ram and not that weird creative ram, a good opl3 (ESSFM), some kind of MT-32 support and DIrectSound Aceleration (I still idk what that one does).
So I ended up into that card, I discovered it wouldn't work in dos mode because of the missing drivers, but I found over vogons a dos driver for it and voala, 99% dos compatible and it didn't even touched the main 640kb ram 😁

The oldest game that I played with sound was I think Ultima IV, that game did use the wavetable 😳
And almost all the games from 1987 to 2000 that i tested worked fine one it

If you spend any amount of time here you basically arrive at the exact same set of questions. There should be like a sticky sound card FAQ because I would wager many new people here would benefit from it.

That said, wouldn't an AWE64 gold basically seal the deal for 99% of people?

blank001 wrote:

That said, wouldn't an AWE64 gold basically seal the deal for 99% of people?

The AWE 64 is a great, trouble free card. That said, it has some serious downsides that break the deal for a lot of people:
- no real OPL3 (biggest issue for me personally)
- no General MIDI support without TSR
- no wavetable header

So, an earlier AWE 32, still with real OPL3, upgraded with a good wavetable module, could be the ticket. But it's considerably noisier than the 64.

Clones/competitors also have their downsides.

The perfect sound card doesn't exist, sadly.

oerk wrote:

The perfect sound card doesn't exist, sadly.

Agree, I've done some extensive investigations myself and, although there are arguably better clones out there, practically all of these lacked Sound Blaster 16 support (most only supported Sound Blaster Pro and some had very poor Sound Blaster support via emulation).

I personally think Creative took a bit of a wrong turn with their implementation of MIDI on their AWE cards, resulting in very "troublesome" MIDI support in DOS. I would have gone the route of sticking with a Wave Blaster header or direct support in hardware with the ability to load custom soundfonts (MIDI samples).
And why they never fixed the Sound Blaster Pro stereo mixing issue on their 16-bit cards is beyond me.

Due to the above, depending on the age (era) of my retro PC (I have more than one), I use different sound cards.

Jed118 wrote:

I had AdLib (8 bit) in a custom 286 I built for a friend, but browsing through some of these pages, I'm seeing AWE32 and stuff with expansion cards on them, slots for SIMM memory - I know a fair bit about old hardware, but can someone bring me up to speed on the various different sound cards? For example, how is a SB 16 Value different from an SB PRO or 2.0 or other versions? What's a decent one to have? Why do some of them require their own banks of memory? How does that all affect their sound quality?

To be clear, the SIMM sockets are used to load wavetables (or "soundfonts", to use Creative's terminology). More memory on the card means larger (i.e. more detailed and better quality) instrument samples can be loaded. The AWE64 uses specialized memory modules that work in precisely the same way, but they're not as easy to find as SIMMs. (There's also an adapter that will let the AWE64 use standard SIMMs, but it's a third-party creation and also not too easy to find.)

If you don't particularly care about MIDI quality, then that's all fairly irrelevant. There aren't very many games that particularly took advantage of the ability of the ability of the AWE32/64 to load soundfonts. For other games, some MIDI music might sound better with particular soundfonts, but I have the impression that composers often wrote music with a specific, default, low-quality instrument set in mind, such that it will come out all wrong if you try to play it with different samples.

The PCI Sound Blaster cards can also use soundfonts, but they can use them directly from the PC's memory and do not require extra memory on the card; the catch (if I'm not mistaken) is that you can only do that if Windows is running – and otherwise the instrument quality is extremely crappy. (It can load a couple of different specialized "ECW" fonts in DOS.) In my estimation at least, there's nothing really wrong with the PCI SoundBlaster cards otherwise, except that the drivers require EMM386 to be loaded. It's true that this interferes with some games, but I question whether it's likely anyone is likely to encounter such games. (Ultima 7 is the major exception, and there are other ways to run that.)

I think ESS Audio drives (1688/1868) were what most people had back in the late DOS era, at least around where I live. Small computer companies building cheap computers loved them because they worked and they were cheap.

Lucky enough they were mostly not only cheap and compatible but also decent sounding.

Skyscraper wrote:

I think ESS Audio drives (1688/1868) were what most people had back in the late DOS era, at least around where I live. Small computer companies building cheap computers loved them because they worked and they were cheap.

Lucky enough they were mostly not only cheap and compatible but also decent sounding.

Yes, they were just as popular here. The Aztech Sound Galaxy range of sound cards is what caught my attention in those days and I stuck with them. They also provided very good Sound Blaster & Sound Blaster Pro support.

oerk wrote:

So, an earlier AWE 32, still with real OPL3, upgraded with a good wavetable module, could be the ticket. But it's considerably noisier than the 64.

CT3900 comes darn close, to the best non-gus and non roland soundcard sollution, when you go for most features and best compatibility.
(It's pretty expensive on Ebay though)

Late DOS games, the AWE64 Gold is probably the best card of them all.

Early DOS games, I would stick to a combination of SB-Pro and Roland MIDI modules.

What is missing here, is the GUS card's. You could run two cards, GUS + SB-Pro/16/AWE32/AWE64.

Or you could probably pair the following: (perhaps the most expensive sollution of them all)
Early DOS gaming: SB-Pro + GUS-ACE + MT32
Late DOS gaming: AWE64-Gold + GUS-ACE + MT32

These sollutions might be the best of them all, depending on what you need.

I love this topic! No-one ever agrees!

My personal faves are Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230 or 2290) + Creative Goldfinch:

And an ESS Audiodrive ES1688 (specifically this one by Audician) + an Yamaha DB60XG:

The further back you go in time, the greater the difference between low end and high end sound cards for gaming.

For me, the ultimate combination in a DOS machine would probably be a good sounding SBPro clone with a wavetable header (and hardware MPU401) + a GUS. AFAIK anything that would benefit from SB16 over SBPro will probably work fine on a GUS.

jesolo wrote:

I agree. A very broad subject. If you are just referring to Sound Blaster, then you basically have: Sound Blaster original - 8-b […]
Show full quote

I agree. A very broad subject.
If you are just referring to Sound Blaster, then you basically have:
Sound Blaster original - 8-bit mono up to 22.5 KHz (version 2 could mix up to 44.1 KHz)
Sound Blaster Pro & Pro 2 - 8-bit stereo up to 22.5 KHz (backwards compatible with original Sound Blaster)
Sound Blaster 16 - 16-bit stereo up to 44.1 KHz. Also had a built in MPU-401 UART MIDI interface. There are quite a number of these models available. Some still used jumpers and later models were plug 'n play. Also came with the infamous MIDI hanging note bug on most models. Some used the Vibra chipset, which had a bit less noise but, your had no treble or bass support in the mixer. Some models had the Wave Blaster header for external MIDI daughterboard support. Did fully support original Sound Blaster but, not Sound Blaster Pro (was unable to mix Sound Blaster Pro specific digital sounds in stereo).
Sound Blaster AWE models - essentially a Sound Blaster 16 with an "integrated" MIDI synthesizer. Some models also had the Wave Blaster header and had memory upgrade sockets that allowed you to load more sound samples into memory (this is a subject on its own).

All Sound Blaster models supported the Adlib sound card (later AWE models no longer utilised the Yamaha OPL chip but, used Creative's CQM synthesis).

You can find more info on each of these on Wikipedia and also here on Vogons.

This right here clarified the basics for me very well - I will read with much more comprehension after this, thank you!

jesolo wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I think ESS Audio drives (1688/1868) were what most people had back in the late DOS era, at least around where I live. Small computer companies building cheap computers loved them because they worked and they were cheap.

Lucky enough they were mostly not only cheap and compatible but also decent sounding.

Yes, they were just as popular here. The Aztech Sound Galaxy range of sound cards is what caught my attention in those days and I stuck with them. They also provided very good Sound Blaster & Sound Blaster Pro support.

Man, that brings me back to working at a small computer retailer in the mid 90s (1996-1999ish) - The ESS Audiodrive was always out of stock. NOBODY was touching the (then) obsolete Soundblaster and Adlib - I managed to buy a stack of them from my boss for pennies and put them in low end 386s at the time (some SX grade 486s) and sell them privately. Brings back memories - At one point, my boss (I was 13 when I started there, under the table of course) would credit me parts for hours worked instead of cash, so I would buy parts at good discounts, haul them home on a bike (monitors even, I put a large parcel tray on the bike and bolted a shelf to it to take back CRTs), assemble them, and finally take out ads in the local papers and sell them for a good amount of money privately! I must have gone through hundreds of computers. By the time the mid 2000s hit, I scoured every thrift shop for 386-486 and using whatever parts I had made "Classic gaming systems" and sold them on eBay.

Now there's not much left of my stock - LOTS of 200Mb-3000Mb hard disks, some RAM, IO cards... Really not as much as I had back as in my late teens. It's mostly replaced by obsolete car parts these days, and even that has thinned out.

Thanks for the memories! Also, the information to research sound cards.

I think I will like it here!

Hm, are there any game list that are really hard to make they sound? and are they worth to invest into a specific sound card for them?

It's like opl3 for me, there're the clones, and the yahama chips, but almost all of them sounds almost 100% equal for me D:

I actually would like to test this evil games that refuses to work on new isa sound cards and only over sb16 or older on my sound card.

Maybe it would be cool since there're many guys over this forum that likes to make comparative or list threads, someone could make a list of dos games and how compatible it's with many vogons users sound cards ex:
Game Compatibility Sound Cards Tested SND CARD 1 - Status - problem
Monkey island 80% 12 Adlib - - 80% - no sound effect
Ultima IV 65% 7 SB 16 - 30% - problematic MT-32 emulation

Well this is just an example, so then people could check if some card that they want would work on that game or if not, that game was worth to get another sound card...

badmojo wrote:

My personal faves are Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230 or 2290) + Creative Goldfinch: http://i1096.photobucket.com/albums/g330/rjheard/D […]
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My personal faves are Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230 or 2290) + Creative Goldfinch:

Uhhh... That's a nice choice too.
Toss in a GUS-ACE + MT32's and you have a nice soundsystem in you'r retro-box.

I made some recordings of Money Island with various sound cards. Maybe this helps to understand some of the differences.

The Secret of Monkey Island with various sound cards