If your ALS120 works well, use it . They have a bad reputation because of the cheaply made ones. Not all of them are necessarily bad .

As for Sam and Max, are you sure it's not an issue with CPU being too fast .

EDIT: The noise on other cards may be due to mixer settings being unnecessarily active . Make sure to mute what you don't use .

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 15:50:

If your ALS120 works well, use it . They have a bad reputation because of the cheaply made ones. Not all of them are necessarily bad .

As for Sam and Max, are you sure it's not an issue with CPU being too fast .

EDIT: The noise on other cards may be due to mixer settings being unnecessarily active . Make sure to mute what you don't use .

I will check the mixer settings, didn't know that 😀

Sam and Max is related to the setup, it seems that it's not saving the sound conf.

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds great but it has a LOT of incompatibilities. It's really a Sound Blaster Pro, NOT a Sound Blaster 16 and a lot of games would have issues with it. Also, out of the box it sounds TERRIBLE - you need to edit the configuration file by hand to make it sound decent which seems rather odd to me.

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc. When I popped in my Sound Blaster 16 and retested the games, all the problems went away. Some of these games were really big: Cannon Fodder, Duke Nukem 3D, ... so it was impossible to ignore.

I'm not even sure where the Audician fits - as a SB Pro, it doesn't work great with later DOS games (which is where most compatibility issues could be found) but the card was released around that period so it's odd. On top of that, I found the DOS drivers to be buggy - they use no conventional memory (which is a plus) but it would often not correctly load my volume settings requiring me to enter the program and quit and then magically it would load them even though I changed nothing. Windows 3.1 drivers are extremely limited as well with a very ugly front-end.

So yeah, when it works, it has clean quality sound but isn't the point of having a go-to sound card one that can tackle as many things as possible? This one certainly is not it ...

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 20:59:

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds grea […]
Show full quote

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds great but it has a LOT of incompatibilities. It's really a Sound Blaster Pro, NOT a Sound Blaster 16 and a lot of games would have issues with it. Also, out of the box it sounds TERRIBLE - you need to edit the configuration file by hand to make it sound decent which seems rather odd to me.

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc. When I popped in my Sound Blaster 16 and retested the games, all the problems went away. Some of these games were really big: Cannon Fodder, Duke Nukem 3D, ... so it was impossible to ignore.

I'm not even sure where the Audician fits - as a SB Pro, it doesn't work great with later DOS games (which is where most compatibility issues could be found) but the card was released around that period so it's odd. On top of that, I found the DOS drivers to be buggy - they use no conventional memory (which is a plus) but it would often not correctly load my volume settings requiring me to enter the program and quit and then magically it would load them even though I changed nothing. Windows 3.1 drivers are extremely limited as well with a very ugly front-end.

So yeah, when it works, it has clean quality sound but isn't the point of having a go-to sound card one that can tackle as many things as possible? This one certainly is not it ...

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

EDIT: I personally never had issues with YMF71x SB Pro compatibility with any games I have tried that support it . There is a known issue with lack of ADPCM decompression that pretty much only affects only Commander Keen, AFAIK .

EDIT: As far as I am concerned, unless you only have one ISA slot, running both an SB16-compatible and SB Pro-compatible in the same machine is another scenario . I have an AWE64 with my Audiotrix . Best of of both worlds .

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:12:

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was odd. Actually there's many games that had issues - here's the main ones (I have a list which I kept for testing games):

Cannon Fodder 1 & 2
Pinball Illusions (no sound)
Pizza Tycoon (no sound or music)
UFO Enemy Unknown (no sound)
Innocent Until Caught ("sound card not initialized")
Battle Isle 1 (would crash during the 3D combat scene - I thought it was the graphics card but it was the sound card ... go figure)
Heart of China (error sound card interrupt already in use) - I believe this is caused by the Audician also using a Windows media sound thing that conflicted

There's way more but I'd need to check the most current list on the test PC, the TXT file on my main rig is outdated and only covers the first few days of testing.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 20:59:

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc.

That card also has Windows Sound System (WSS) compatibility, right? Using that should give you crystal clear 16-bit sound, if the game supports it of course. Granted, it wasn't as widespread as SB16 support, but a decent amount of games did support WSS.

Here are a few popular examples: Descent, Aladdin, Tomb Raider, WarCraft 2, Command & Conquer, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Settlers 2 Gold. I played all of these on my Opti card using its WSS mode, and they sounded awesome.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:18:

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was o […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:12:

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was odd. Actually there's many games that had issues - here's the main ones (I have a list which I kept for testing games):

Cannon Fodder 1 & 2
Pinball Illusions (no sound)
Pizza Tycoon (no sound or music)
UFO Enemy Unknown (no sound)
Innocent Until Caught ("sound card not initialized")
Battle Isle 1 (would crash during the 3D combat scene - I thought it was the graphics card but it was the sound card ... go figure)
Heart of China (error sound card interrupt already in use) - I believe this is caused by the Audician also using a Windows media sound thing that conflicted

There's way more but I'd need to check the most current list on the test PC, the TXT file on my main rig is outdated and only covers the first few days of testing.

Did you try disabling L1 cache ? Lots of games have CPU speed sensitive SB Pro routines that require slowing down the CPU on machine faster than a 386 or so .

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:26:

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:18:

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was o […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:12:

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was odd. Actually there's many games that had issues - here's the main ones (I have a list which I kept for testing games):

Cannon Fodder 1 & 2
Pinball Illusions (no sound)
Pizza Tycoon (no sound or music)
UFO Enemy Unknown (no sound)
Innocent Until Caught ("sound card not initialized")
Battle Isle 1 (would crash during the 3D combat scene - I thought it was the graphics card but it was the sound card ... go figure)
Heart of China (error sound card interrupt already in use) - I believe this is caused by the Audician also using a Windows media sound thing that conflicted

There's way more but I'd need to check the most current list on the test PC, the TXT file on my main rig is outdated and only covers the first few days of testing.

Did you try disabling L1 cache ? Lots of games have CPU speed sensitive SB Pro routines that require slowing down the CPU on machine faster than a 386 or so .

Oh yeah, that was part of my testing routine. For every game that had problems I tried:

- disabling cache
- try both with EMS, without EMS
- limit XMS ceiling using RAMDISK
- use DOS 5 boot disk, use DOS 6.22 boot disk
- different mouse drivers or no mouse driver at all

Especially Roland MT32 music often needed cache disabling along with SoftMPU to work.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:22:

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 20:59:

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc.

That card also has Windows Sound System (WSS) compatibility, right? Using that should give you crystal clear 16-bit sound, if the game supports it of course. Granted, it wasn't as widespread as SB16 support, but a decent amount of games did support WSS.

Here are a few popular examples: Descent, Aladdin, Tomb Raider, WarCraft 2, Command & Conquer, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Settlers 2 Gold. I played all of these on my Opti card using its WSS mode, and they sounded awesome.

Yeah it did - I never used it because all the games you mention are played on my Pentium 233 MMX which had the AWE64 Gold. Well, except for Aladdin which also sounds great on the SB16.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:37:

Oh yeah, that was part of my testing routine. For every game that had problems I tried: […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:26:

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:18:

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was o […]
Show full quote

I could NOT get Cannon Fodder to detect it and I tried this on two different PCs. I could get neither sound or music which was odd. Actually there's many games that had issues - here's the main ones (I have a list which I kept for testing games):

Cannon Fodder 1 & 2
Pinball Illusions (no sound)
Pizza Tycoon (no sound or music)
UFO Enemy Unknown (no sound)
Innocent Until Caught ("sound card not initialized")
Battle Isle 1 (would crash during the 3D combat scene - I thought it was the graphics card but it was the sound card ... go figure)
Heart of China (error sound card interrupt already in use) - I believe this is caused by the Audician also using a Windows media sound thing that conflicted

There's way more but I'd need to check the most current list on the test PC, the TXT file on my main rig is outdated and only covers the first few days of testing.

Did you try disabling L1 cache ? Lots of games have CPU speed sensitive SB Pro routines that require slowing down the CPU on machine faster than a 386 or so .

Oh yeah, that was part of my testing routine. For every game that had problems I tried:

- disabling cache
- try both with EMS, without EMS
- limit XMS ceiling using RAMDISK
- use DOS 5 boot disk, use DOS 6.22 boot disk
- different mouse drivers or no mouse driver at all

Especially Roland MT32 music often needed cache disabling along with SoftMPU to work.

Strange. The irony is MT-32 works for me without disabling cache in Cannon Fodder, on a P3 1400Mhz . Maybe these YMF71x cards are not all made equal .

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:39:

Well, except for Aladdin which also sounds great on the SB16.

I don't think Aladdin has stereo music when using its SB16/AWE32 setup option, at last it didn't for me.

But yeah, if you have SB16 compatibility, then WSS isn't that important. OTOH, for many SBPro compatible cards (not made by Creative) using WSS is a great way to get 16-bit sound.

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:12:

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That […]
Show full quote

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 20:59:

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds grea […]
Show full quote

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds great but it has a LOT of incompatibilities. It's really a Sound Blaster Pro, NOT a Sound Blaster 16 and a lot of games would have issues with it. Also, out of the box it sounds TERRIBLE - you need to edit the configuration file by hand to make it sound decent which seems rather odd to me.

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc. When I popped in my Sound Blaster 16 and retested the games, all the problems went away. Some of these games were really big: Cannon Fodder, Duke Nukem 3D, ... so it was impossible to ignore.

I'm not even sure where the Audician fits - as a SB Pro, it doesn't work great with later DOS games (which is where most compatibility issues could be found) but the card was released around that period so it's odd. On top of that, I found the DOS drivers to be buggy - they use no conventional memory (which is a plus) but it would often not correctly load my volume settings requiring me to enter the program and quit and then magically it would load them even though I changed nothing. Windows 3.1 drivers are extremely limited as well with a very ugly front-end.

So yeah, when it works, it has clean quality sound but isn't the point of having a go-to sound card one that can tackle as many things as possible? This one certainly is not it ...

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

EDIT: I personally never had issues with YMF71x SB Pro compatibility with any games I have tried that support it . There is a known issue with lack of ADPCM decompression that pretty much only affects only Commander Keen, AFAIK .

EDIT: As far as I am concerned, unless you only have one ISA slot, running both an SB16-compatible and SB Pro-compatible in the same machine is another scenario . I have an AWE64 with my Audiotrix . Best of of both worlds .

I haven't thought about having two ISA cards installed. Right now I have an Audigy 2 ZS and the ALS120, I will try other combinations and probably also take the SB Pro from my 486 to test.
I had a SB 16 Value but was "burnt", I was thinking about buying a cheap SB16 CT4170 . But probably I already have more components that I would like to have 😀.

esbardu wrote on 2020-06-11, 22:15:

darry wrote on 2020-06-11, 21:12:

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That […]
Show full quote

red_avatar wrote on 2020-06-11, 20:59:

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds grea […]
Show full quote

The Audician 32 plus is overrated. I bought it, used it for a while but boy, it's NOT as good as advertised. Yes it sounds great but it has a LOT of incompatibilities. It's really a Sound Blaster Pro, NOT a Sound Blaster 16 and a lot of games would have issues with it. Also, out of the box it sounds TERRIBLE - you need to edit the configuration file by hand to make it sound decent which seems rather odd to me.

Last Winter, I tested my new HP Vectra and used the Audician as main sound card. Out of 250 games tested, over 30 had sound issues with the card ranging from the game refusing to run at all, to no sound, to reversed stereo, to very low quality sound (16 bit not supported), to weird slow downs, etc. When I popped in my Sound Blaster 16 and retested the games, all the problems went away. Some of these games were really big: Cannon Fodder, Duke Nukem 3D, ... so it was impossible to ignore.

I'm not even sure where the Audician fits - as a SB Pro, it doesn't work great with later DOS games (which is where most compatibility issues could be found) but the card was released around that period so it's odd. On top of that, I found the DOS drivers to be buggy - they use no conventional memory (which is a plus) but it would often not correctly load my volume settings requiring me to enter the program and quit and then magically it would load them even though I changed nothing. Windows 3.1 drivers are extremely limited as well with a very ugly front-end.

So yeah, when it works, it has clean quality sound but isn't the point of having a go-to sound card one that can tackle as many things as possible? This one certainly is not it ...

Cannon Fodder and Duke 3D work fine on my YMF715 based Audiotrix 3D/XG , which should be quite similar to the Audician32 . That said, Cannon Fodder requires disabling L1 cache to work for me .

EDIT: I personally never had issues with YMF71x SB Pro compatibility with any games I have tried that support it . There is a known issue with lack of ADPCM decompression that pretty much only affects only Commander Keen, AFAIK .

EDIT: As far as I am concerned, unless you only have one ISA slot, running both an SB16-compatible and SB Pro-compatible in the same machine is another scenario . I have an AWE64 with my Audiotrix . Best of of both worlds .

I haven't thought about having two ISA cards installed. Right now I have an Audigy 2 ZS and the ALS120, I will try other combinations and probably also take the SB Pro from my 486 to test.
I had a SB 16 Value but was "burnt", I was thinking about buying a cheap SB16 CT4170 . But probably I already have more components that I would like to have 😀.

I actually a Gravis Ultrasound too . I am down to a single IRQ for all my PCI devices, but everything works .

Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 uses dual OPL2s. Isn't there some issue with OPL2 cards in systems faster than a 486DX-33?

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-06-12, 01:19:

Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 uses dual OPL2s. Isn't there some issue with OPL2 cards in systems faster than a 486DX-33?

Thanks for the info. In my 486DX2 66 it works flawless. I haven't tested it in the rest of systems.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-06-12, 01:19:

Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 uses dual OPL2s. Isn't there some issue with OPL2 cards in systems faster than a 486DX-33?

Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 and Pro Audio Spectrum 8-bit both work fine in my 486 DX4-100 system.

There are some cards that are indeed speed sensitive.. but from what I have seen that doesn't usually start showing up till you get past 133Mhz.

Of course I have not tested every card out there... much less most of the cards I have.

It seems to me more like a problem with games themselves being speed sensitive than the cards being the problem... at least below 133Mhz CPU speed.