Probably yes, although you might need drivers. Maybe you don't need drivers though, try some DOS games and see if they work!

And yes, ATI cards have horrible EGA compatibility. I always stay away from them when I plan to do DOS stuff. You might try a PCI video card.

keenmaster486 wrote:

...And yes, ATI cards have horrible EGA compatibility. I always stay away from them when I plan to do DOS stuff. You might try a PCI video card.

Should I go for an S3 Trio 64 card?

Trio 64 is better suited to Pentium I machines. For Pentium II I honestly don't know, maybe something from nVidia? I'm not the right person to ask..

For a PIII 450+ MHz I always recommend 3DFX Voodoo 3, but that's just my personal preference. It would certainly work for your machine, but I think it would be overkill.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Trio 64 is better suited to Pentium I machines. For Pentium II I honestly don't know, maybe something from nVidia? I'm not the right person to ask..

For a PIII 450+ MHz I always recommend 3DFX Voodoo 3, but that's just my personal preference. It would certainly work for your machine, but I think it would be overkill.

There are pretty much three classes of DOS machines:
8088/8086/80286 + CGA/EGA/Tandy + Tandy 3voice
80386/25Mhz or 33Mhz + VGA (ISA) + Adlib/Sound Blaster (ISA)
486DX/33Mhz or 66Mhz + SVGA (VLB/PCI) + Sound Blaster 16 (ISA) + CD-ROM distribution

P54C/P55C/Pentium II/Pentium III are all Windows 95-98SE era machines, and thus PCI or onboard PCI hardware is what is on them, which makes configuring them from DOS usually impossible, and sound blaster emulation usually only available in DOS from inside Windows 95/98.

Having had everything from the Tandy 1000 to modern systems, I'd probably suggest avoiding all sound cards that are not the Creative Labs cards or the GUS until you get to PCI sound cards, by which all PCI soundcards are terrible for DOS, if you even have a way to enable them under DOS, it typically consumes memory and then getting the game to work is difficult.

Ask old hardware questions in Marvin. This forum is for DOS games on modern systems.

MechaniKey wrote:

it uses a Crystal CS4236 sound card. Would this be at least somewhat compatible with early-mid '90s DOS games?

CS4236 (or any CS423X for that matter) has Sound Blaster Pro emulation in both the DOS and Windows 9x drivers.

Kisai wrote:

P54C/P55C/Pentium II/Pentium III are all Windows 95-98SE era machines, and thus PCI or onboard PCI hardware is what is on them, which makes configuring them from DOS usually impossible, and sound blaster emulation usually only available in DOS from inside Windows 95/98.

Having had everything from the Tandy 1000 to modern systems, I'd probably suggest avoiding all sound cards that are not the Creative Labs cards or the GUS until you get to PCI sound cards, by which all PCI soundcards are terrible for DOS, if you even have a way to enable them under DOS, it typically consumes memory and then getting the game to work is difficult.

I guess I'd better stop using my K6-2 machine for DOS gaming (actually, I have to, because grad school). Apparently it doesn't work. Also, everyone using a YMF PCI card for DOS gaming (using SB-PCI or otherwise), your sound cards are terrible and you should quit using them, even if you're completely satisfied.

Moved to Marvin.

Stiletto wrote:

Moved to Marvin.

Sorry about that, I'm still new here 🙁

The CS-4236 is an excellent DOS soundcard. It has a very good SNR, high compatibility and no hanging note bug on it's MPU-401. The only possible negative is that the FM synthesizer built into it does sound different from the Yamaha OPL3, however this is personal preference whether it sounds bad or not. Audio quality and noise will naturally be determined by the analogue stage of the motherboard. If it's been well designed, the sound quality will be excellent and noise levels very low.

My two favourite games for testing the sound quality of the SB-Pro part is Epic Pinball and Dune 2. Epic Pinball will quickly reveal if the sound channels are swapped and if the soundcard has a poor anti-aliasing filter. The music will be scratchy and have a "ringing" sound to it if the anti-aliasing filter is badly designed and if the channels are swapped, pressing the left shift key will play the flipper sound on the right channel and vice-versa. (Obviously choose SB-Pro as the soundcard in the setup menu)

Dune 2 is also a good test for the anti-aliasing filter, it also has a "ringing" sound to the voice if the anti-aliasing filter is badly designed.I remember being gob-smacked at how good it sounded on the Turtle Beach Tropez+ soundcard when I heard it the first time. The Tropez+ soundcard has the CS-4232 chipset which is the same as the CS-4236, just without the built in FM Synthesizer, however, it has one of the best analogue stages of the ISA consumer soundcards out there.

Sorry Kisai, but saying that avoiding all soundcards that are not Creative Labs soundcards is utter nonsense. There are many other excellent cards out there that are as good or better than the Creative Labs ones, Aztech, ESS based, YMF-71x based and CS-423x based are a few that come to mind. Many SB clone and genuine SB cards suffer from poor analogue design though and are noisy, have poor frequency response or pick up digital or power supply noise from the motherboard or other expansion cards in the PC.

Gerwin has a few posts on the CS-423x chipset, look them up for a better understanding of the chipset and driver downloads for it.

orcish75 wrote:

There are many other excellent cards out there that are as good or better than the Creative Labs ones, Aztech, ESS based, YMF-71x based and CS-423x based are a few that come to mind.

PAS16.. Let's don't forget about the Pro AudioSpectrum 16 from Media Vision.
It was the archenemy of the SB Pro so to speak and had a genuine OPL3, too.

According to my memory, it's native mode was quickly supported by a number of games.
So many games which do have SB16 support, are also PAS16 compatible.

Except for the demo scene maybe. Seems like they were more like Creative/Gravis fans..
So yeah, depending on how you look at it, the PAS/PAS16 was like a standard of its own (like the GUS or WSS).

From a techincal point of view, audio quality is fine. The built-in SB 2.0 compatible DAC could be disabled.
One thing someone could cavil about is the little MIDI buffer. A clone was marketed by Logitech as the Soundman 16.

Epic pinball has a Building bug when detecting a Creative Card, so that does not count on reference.
My d1025 and d1026 do have cs423x Build in and sbpro is really exzellent on this. Fm is good to but
I can hear the bugs in some cases, though its not bad, but I think I Will Go for an Isa fm Card and
Deactivate Onboardfm.

Keeping in mind this is a PII older fair chance your going to run into speed issues even if you add a more compatible graphics card.
This link will let you know if you need to replace the ATI card or not.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS

Sound wise, yes ideally you want an ISA card, but if the on board card works in dos no reason not to use that for now and wait for a good deal on your desired isa card. You may even find your perfectly happy with it anyway.

Early PII's are almost perfect for late SVGA dos games plenty of horsepower for the days before hardware 3 acceleration.

CS4232/36 are both very solid for DOS gaming but their FM Synthesis is not an OPL3 clone, it will sound warmer and more vibrant, but that may not be your taste so listen to samples if you want to see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ibdIm-ZBB4

Some demoscene intros have clearly a "sweeping drum error", I recognized it directly.
On some point the drums/percussion sound harsch.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5936

appiah4 wrote:

CS4232/36 are both very solid for DOS gaming but their FM Synthesis is not an OPL3 clone, it will sound warmer and more vibrant, but that may not be your taste so listen to samples if you want to see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ibdIm-ZBB4

CS4232 doesn't include FM synthesis. That can be done with a CrystalFM/3D companion chip (which sounds horrible) or a third party chip (which can sound very nice indeed).

gdjacobs wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

CS4232/36 are both very solid for DOS gaming but their FM Synthesis is not an OPL3 clone, it will sound warmer and more vibrant, but that may not be your taste so listen to samples if you want to see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ibdIm-ZBB4

CS4232 doesn't include FM synthesis. That can be done with a CrystalFM/3D companion chip (which sounds horrible) or a third party chip (which can sound very nice indeed).

CS4232 is almost always accompanied by CS4289 companion chip. CS4289 and CS4236 don't sound very different from CS4236 in my experience.

My VXD Drivers in Win95 do produce stutters in the video-sequences from wingcommander3 (kilrathi saga).
There is an option to deactivate direct sound "wc3w - no_sound" but this disables the sound at all. 🙁
Did not find a suitable solution yet.

appiah4 wrote:

CS4232 is almost always accompanied by CS4289 companion chip. CS4289 and CS4236 don't sound very different from CS4236 in my experience.

Except it isn't always made with the CrystalFM/3d chip. That's why some fortunate folks have access to Turtle Beach Tropez and Acer Magic S23 cards.

I find the output of the CS4289 to be very grating, like recordings I've heard of glitched FM on CS4235 chips. I haven't done much in the way of listening tests to compare against an unglitched CrystalFM implementation, but I hope the CS4236 chip does sound somewhat nicer.