Get one of these

https://www.ebay.com/itm/AOPEN-AW744L-II-Yama … 872.m2749.l2649

Phil also reviewed it and he loved it for DOS compatibility on the PCI platform it'll give you that OPL/FM synthesis sound you are asking for. I made an offer of $20 and got mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCg_zy1_d4

For a good all-around bugdet sound card the Yamaha XG / YMF-7xx is hard to best. Works good in DOS too.

Both of your recommendations amounted up to the same thing, and for something that's boxed like Neco linked, I couldn't resist that offer.

Not only that, but with the $16 I still have, I should be able to get a TNT2 (or possibly an even better card) and have both upgrades made at once, which makes things much easier.

Once it's built, I'll definitely post it in the System Specs forum. Thank you for your help!

athlon-power wrote:

I would get a SoundBlaster 16, but with the US$32 limit, and the fact that I have to have something that's not going to hang on me - like I've read that some SoundBlaster 16/AWE cards do

I doubt you'd even know if it did. I'd take a genuine SB16 over a 'compatible' one any day.

Just grab any ESS ES688/1688/1868/1869/1898 card and enjoy a simple, problem free solution that has IDE, working bug-free wavetable/MPU-401, 100% SB Pro compatibility, ESS Audiodrive support in many games for better than SB sound, and sweet sweet ESFM OPL3 music.

BloodyCactus wrote:

I doubt you'd even know if it did. I'd take a genuine SB16 over a 'compatible' one any day.

What swooned me over so quickly was the video that Neco linked in his post.

Neco wrote:

Phil also reviewed it and he loved it for DOS compatibility on the PCI platform it'll give you that OPL/FM synthesis sound you are asking for. I made an offer of $20 and got mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCg_zy1_d4

At the start of it, you can hear what DOOM sounds like under Windows, which sounds quite nice, and at the end of it, you can hear DOOM sounding very similarly or the exact same as it does under a SoundBlaster 16. Not only that, but it's boxed, and it also has the ability to tie into DOS even as a PCI based card.

appiah4 wrote:

Just grab any ESS ES688/1688/1868/1869/1898 card and enjoy a simple, problem free solution that has IDE, working bug-free wavetable/MPU-401, 100% SB Pro compatibility, ESS Audiodrive support in many games for better than SB sound, and sweet sweet ESFM OPL3 music.

For this build, I don't need IDE, as the motherboard has an internal IDE controller, and if I was really hurting for IDE, it supports two devices per connector, which means I could have up to four standard IDE devices hooked up to it. I only have a 48x CD-ROM and a PATA HDD in it, so I don't have to worry about even that. If I wanted to hook it up to use CD-Audio, I've got several CD-Audio cables I can use to let it tie in directly to the sound card.

I also like the sound of SoundBlaster/Yamaha synthesis for some reason. Not sure why.

Plus, I had already purchased it by the time I had made that 3rd reply. It may have been hasty, but Phil's video showed that, to me at least, it was a more than viable option, and at the very least a massive upgrade over the Crystal 4281 PCI sound card that I have in there. Pretty sure that it can't even produce wavetable synthesis, because I've never seen anything to show that it can. Besides that, it was very hard to find drivers for. That's not to mention that by that point, I had also gotten a second reply saying that I should get what that card basically was.

It seems like you have already made up your mind and the AOPEN AW744L II is definitely a very good choice, I will say. However, there are definitely some fully working ISA Sound Blaster 16 cards out there that you can get for quiet cheap. If you are okay with choosing a CQM-variant instead of a OPL3-variant, prices shouldn't be too much of an issue; for example the CT4180 and CT4170 are not that expensive. 😀

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Creative-Sound-Blast … &frcectupt=true

Personally never liked the Vibra... or CQM from what little of it I remember hearing.

By the way if you occasionally want to get the sound like it does in Windows, just set your MIDI device to General MIDI instead of SoundBlaster.

I'm actually curious if there is a way to force OPL in Windows anyway. I remember my first sound card, was an Aopen AW35 with a Crystal chip and it could do both FM/OPL type stuff and General MIDI in Windows. I haven't installed mine yet as I've been playing with the onboard Yamaha chip on this dell. But hopefully I can replicate that behavior.

I will probably get a genuine SB16/ESS card for my 486 build, when it eventually comes into fruition. Because I didn't have to have an ISA card in this scenario, that AOPEN card looked like a very good option. I also don't have to have the games load up under raw DOS on that machine, seeing as it's a Win98 gaming rig, more than anything else.

I really just wanted a card that could do decent, genuine sound synthesis under Windows, which the Crystal 4281 PCI could not.

I also wanted a card with good drivers, which again, the Crystal card did not have. I scoured the internet for quite a while looking for drivers, and only found very basic WDM ones. With the AOPEN card, it's boxed, and comes right with a driver CD with a quite nifty custom control panel.

I know I mentioned raw DOS specifically in the original post, but as I said in it, I was probably a little too excited and thought of features I honestly didn't need at the end of the day, at least for this build in particular.

That's kinda the thing that prompted my suggestion though. I haven't watched Phil's video in complete fullness, so I don't know if MIDI is gonna sound like you want, under Windows. Generally in Windows things seem to default to wavetable / general midi. And the samples are certainly decent on the 744 II, but I don't know if you can get OPL going outside of a command-prompt or actual DOS.

Some windows games may still rely on MIDI versus their own internal soundtrack.. I'm sure someone with more knowledge can probably give better details.

Neco wrote:

That's kinda the thing that prompted my suggestion though. I haven't watched Phil's video in complete fullness, so I don't know if MIDI is gonna sound like you want, under Windows.

At 3:50, he mentions specifically that it can be accessed as a general MIDI device under Windows, so that works wonderfully for what I'm wanting to do with it.