Yeah, we know you are a purist, Ampera. In this scenario, Dosbox is nothing.
For me, Dosbox is all and nothing at the same time:

"Crusader: No regret" running in DOSBOX is the same thing running on those 486
machines back there. Interoperability at best !

When you read the list of Dosbox compatible games and realize some of them are
only "playable" ? Then this is no good.
When you read Far cry needs a 6800GT and when you read Myst requires a 386, you just forget all
about that! No way Jose.
Playing games is a spiritual experience, you enter the mood and get out of your body. Imperfections or when someone interrupts you is the contrary.

The thing is, we must strive for extracting the best from our monitor, our video card,
and I may say sound card. That's the logical thing to do. That's the real experience!
Not listen to the whirr of the platter (Quantum Fireball - Holy cats!) as you wear headphones 😀 😀
Let's get rid of HDs for good. No more huge interferences in our sound cards as a plus.
Hell, CF card won't break bad loading screen/loading times or anything - blame the faster processors for this.

But then again, in my scenario (camp number 2), 10 computers or so is a must and I'm not a rich boy.
A man can dream.

Deksor wrote:

Can we go back to the main subject ? I'm really worried about that sound card ...
DonutKing mentionned a mixer for SB16s under MS-DOS. But how do I install/use it ?
Though I tried to mute everything but midi and wave under windows and unfortunately it didn't help 🙁 but having the possibility to control voices under MS-DOS interrests me. The card in itself makes some noise even when it's doing nothing so the more I look at it the more I think that this is caused about bad caps (even though some of the noise might not be "fixable"). I might check the PSU too. This is still odd to me that the hiss sound isn't happening in every situation

As you wish. Did you read my advice ?
SB16SET.EXE runs the mixer.
About your problem with noises ? Creative strikes again!

Don't get me wrong, I use DOSBox too. I have a lot of fun on emulators when I just want to play the game, and not have to deal with anything. But when I play ,let's say, Duke 3D on DOSBox, I am playing Duke 3D. But when I use a DX4-100/120, and a proper 486 system, I am playing a whole different experience.

DonutKing mentionned a mixer for SB16s under MS-DOS. But how do I install/use it ?

You should download and install the DOS drivers for your sound card - this includes MIXERSET which will let you change the volume levels.

Here's a link
http://support.creative.com/downloads/downloa … nDownloadId=273

Okay so I installed the DOS drivers for the SB16 from the Vogons driver library.

Without touching to any settings in SB16SET.EXE, I can definitely tell that Jazz Jackrabbit sound munch munch better under DOS. The noise is completely gone ! Doom on the other hand still has the hiss sound, so that would confirm what frasco said about doom messing up with the mixer ...

Is there a mod for SB16 that would fix that ? I heared that Creative didn't use the correct capacitors for some circuits in their SB16s. Could putting the right caps fix that ? Or is there no way on fixing that ? I made a small MS-DOS mode shortcut which allows me to load stuff without touching the windows configuration. I know, this is a bit redundant since I was planning to install DOS 6.22 on another partition, but in fact I know that dualbooting between dos 6.22 and win95 is possible ... but I don't know how to do that 😊

Also in my first post, I said I thought that there was some drivers for the SiS chipset. Well, I was correct, I finally found them back here : https://driverscollection.com/?file_id=998

I know little about what it is doing, but it seems to have improved the HDD transfert speed. In speedsys, the buffered transfert speed was at ~3MB/sec, and with the SiS driver, it came up to ~11MB/sec IIRC so this is quite an improvement ! Though speedsys didn't find that enough to give it a higher score.

Edit : added photos of the results :

Bench without the drivers

Bench with the drivers

11.5MB/sec seems huge to me for a 486 😮

Deksor wrote:

Without touching to any settings in SB16SET.EXE, I can definitely tell that Jazz Jackrabbit sound munch munch better under DOS. The noise is completely gone ! Doom on the other hand still has the hiss sound, so that would confirm what frasco said about doom messing up with the mixer ...

Is there a mod for SB16 that would fix that ? I heared that Creative didn't use the correct capacitors for some circuits in their SB16s. Could putting the right caps fix that ? Or is there no way on fixing that ? I made a small MS-DOS mode shortcut which allows me to load stuff without touching the windows configuration. I know, this is a bit redundant since I was planning to install DOS 6.22 on another partition, but in fact I know that dualbooting between dos 6.22 and win95 is possible ... but I don't know how to do that 😊

"To win the game you must kill me, John Romero"
Thats what we will do !

Seriously, this behaviour is plaguing my sound cards! I just don't know what to say...
Maybe adjusting volume from menu - Options - Sound Volume
or creating a bat file to restore the mixer settings.

Dual boot DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 is not an easy thing to do.
Bootpart 2.60 comes to mind.

Deksor wrote:

Also in my first post, I said I thought that there was some drivers for the SiS chipset. Well, I was correct, I finally found them back here : https://driverscollection.com/?file_id=998
I know little about what it is doing, but it seems to have improved the HDD transfert speed. In speedsys, the buffered transfert speed was at ~3MB/sec, and with the SiS driver, it came up to ~11MB/sec IIRC so this is quite an improvement ! Though speedsys didn't find that enough to give it a higher score.

That's what I was talking about. Nice!
I believe this only helps file transfering when copying or moving files. Maybe even games will benefit (against sttutering).

Stutter only happened under windows 95 and only when I had 8MB of ram. Right now it's perfectly fine ^^. But yeah, more performance is always better 😁

Edit : here are the complete results of speedsys :

I've got the same HDD as one used as a reference ... that's quite funny to see that the HDD has better results than ... itself 🤣

Okay so now that this 486 is more or less usable as a 486 (I still wonder if there isn't a fix to these sound cards) here are a few photos of the machine :

I love that huge case, it's beautiful (and the case you see on the left is an ATX case)

The AP43 motherboard

And here is the evil sound card

Just one little problem with this case : the motherboard can only be screwed with one screw whic is close to the expansion slots. The gravity makes the motherboard tilt a little bit. I think i'm going to put something at the bottom of the case that will hold it in place

Jo22 wrote:

Blitzer gameplay : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS8i8dzGVd8

haha, that's a reminder of the great Windows gaming drought of 1991-1994, when everybody was running Windows 3.x but nobody had any games. Windows games, even crap ones, were highly sought after!

Errius wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

Blitzer gameplay : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS8i8dzGVd8

haha, that's a reminder of the great Windows gaming drought of 1991-1994, when everybody was running Windows 3.x but nobody had any games. Windows games, even crap ones, were highly sought after!

Well, yes.. Someone could say so. Haha. 😅 That's the abridged version, though.
That kind of games (GUI-based) was already there in the 1980s on Atari ST (GEM) or Macintosh (System x.y)..
Personally, I liked them. Esp. strategy, logic and puzzle games in ~640x480.
For "real" gaming I also had a NES which was on par with the average QVGA graphics anyway.