Unless you have specific archiving requirements (a trunk full of unique stuff on 5.25" disks), 5.25" drives are purely cosmetic on all but the very oldest systems (and many a 5150 has XTIDE with CF card onboard for good reason regardless).

But ISA sound is different. In DOS era, certainly the pre-Miles Audio DOS era, games contained their own hardware support for specific cards. They don't all sound the same and more importantly, there are drawbacks to almost every PCI setup without PC-PCI (SBLink), and motherboards with those are considerably more difficult to find than ones with ISA (more specifically: as it's ISA control lines over a separate interface, by definition all boards with PC-PCI will support ISA too, at least internally).

All other solutions need some form of TSR, which eats at scarce memory resources. Not an issue in all DOS games (once DOS4GW extenders became common it all got more relaxed), but iconic early 1990s stuff needs every last kB.

Also, if you don't insist on overpriced Creative cards, ISA cards aren't that expensive, even on eBay. You can get a perfectly serviceable Aztech or OPTi-based card for EUR 10-20 or equivalent that gives you SBPro2, bug-free MIDI, real (or 100% clone) OPL3 FM and probably WSS too. Most importantly you get full hardware compatibility with SB without TSRs of any kind. That's the regular card. I like odd stuff too, DIY replica cards of things like Covox, GameBlaster and SSI-2001. And if you feel rich (or get incredibly lucky) you could add Gravis Ultrasound. If games specifically support them, they sound different. Do you *need* all that stuff? No. But the option to do so is good. But it's really the RAM thing that makes the difference.

Agree with all of dionb's words. I have a couple of 5.25 drives. Only one is currently in service, and it never gets used except to test disks if they happen to fall into my lap. It's certainly not needed but it sure looks lovely in a build.

ISA is a must for me personally, purely because I love experimenting with a range of old sound cards. There is no PCI card or emulation that can replicate all the nuances - good or bad - of the many SBs and clones out there. I do also have a YMF744 card waiting to go into a PCI-only Pentium build. A superb card for both DOS & Windows compatibility, but with limitations such as the onboard XG MIDI not being accessible in pure DOS.

5.25" drives are just nerd swag on 386+ systems. 😉
I don't think they're required for era-correctness on anything after a 286. 386 PCs almost universally had 3.5" FDDs (sometimes alongside 5.25" FDDs) and in the late 80's newly released software was almost universally avaliable on 3.5" floppies.
Still I like to add a 5.25" FDD to my AT form factor builds. They're nerd swag after all. 😁

Yes. All of mine do. I am a floppy enthusiast

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-03-15, 21:02:

Yes. All of mine do. I am a floppy enthusiast

My systems came with them so why not?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE

Of course the real retro-snobs here have two 5.25" floppy drives in their retro PCs: a 360KB Double Density drive, and a 1.2MB High Density drive, due to mutual incompatibilities between the two. 😁

digger wrote on 2021-03-15, 21:23:

Of course the real retro-snobs here have two 5.25" floppy drives in their retro PCs: a 360KB Double Density drive, and a 1.2MB High Density drive, due to mutual incompatibilities between the two. 😁

Ah, but what do they do with 3.5" with such a setup? Period-correct 4-drive controller? Or LS-120 on IDE instead? 😉

^Yes, in old ATs or Turbo XTs two 5,25" drives are handy.
If I correctly remember, my father, though, only had HD drives (5,25"+3,5") installed in his 386DX-40 PC running Win95.

At the time, so circa mid-90s, these 5,25"/1,2MB drives were still around in my country/place.

You could buy matching floppies (new) still in computer shops just like regular 1.44MB disks.

In fact, we still have shareware floppies in the attic that were being written to in '93-'96.

I know, this seems not period-correct, but the HD drives were just all equally modern, no matter the size, I assume.

Anyway, each to his own.

It' s technically not necessary to use the old storage technology.
Someone can also build a legit retro PC with a Gotek, an SB Pro clone, an SSD+IDE/SATA
converter, an ATX PSU with adapter, a black/glossy ATX tower chassis with USB front
ports, an optical USB wireless mouse via adapter, a black rubber dome USB keyboard,
a black widescreen LED TFT screen and a lava lamp.
To get that cool 80s/90s vibe.

I have two 5.25 drives waiting for me to build a 286 and XT class systems.

Not so into sound cards, as I'm deaf in one ear and tone deaf in the other, but do have a few just because 😀 I collect pretty much anything x86 compatible, but mainly CPUs, MoBos and graphics cards. 8-bit ISA up to modern day, but mostly 386 to P4

My builds were usually too modern to be using 5 1/4in floppy drives.
My most used 'floppy' drives were either 1.44MB or ZIP drives, with some LS-120 and 2.88MB drives in the mix. My old backup PC (Athlon64 3500+) used to have a black-bezeled 2.88MB floppy drive.

I have used some ISA cards in the past (if only for basic testing) but I mostly used AGP or PCI.

I'd rather play DOS games in pure DOS than through the Windows command prompt, so for me an ISA sound card is a must. Of course PCI cards like an SBLive or Vortex are great for true Win9x games, but those games are modern enough that I can, and don't mind to, play them on a modern PC.

Oetker wrote on 2021-03-15, 22:27:

I'd rather play DOS games in pure DOS than through the Windows command prompt, so for me an ISA sound card is a must. Of course PCI cards like an SBLive or Vortex are great for true Win9x games, but those games are modern enough that I can, and don't mind to, play them on a modern PC.

One thing I've never gotten a clear answer on really: can anyone actually hear the difference between a real ISA sound card and DOSBox or PCEm emulation, or is it just the value of knowing you are running a real card? Which has real value, I don't deny (as someone who has an MT-32 despite knowing Munt is near-perfect).

captain_koloth wrote on 2021-03-15, 22:40:

[...]

One thing I've never gotten a clear answer on really: can anyone actually hear the difference between a real ISA sound card and DOSBox or PCEm emulation, or is it just the value of knowing you are running a real card? Which has real value, I don't deny (as someone who has an MT-32 despite knowing Munt is near-perfect).

Depends on the sounds. Regular PCM will sound pretty similar regardless of hardware, although there are big differences in filters (or lack thereof) and in sampling frequencies (DOS 44kHz vs Windows 48kHz being the biggie). Still, you can tweak output in emulation to compensate for a lot of that. Where things start to sound significantly different is when stuff is being synthesized. FM and wavetable synth sound noticeably different. Not always better but very much distinct. You have an SC-55 and DOSBox, which pretty faithfully emulates the same SC-55. I'm sure you can hear a difference - I certainly can.

But the biggest reason for ISA sound isn't the way it sounds but the compatibility. PCI audio is always a compromise, and even the best (ESS Solo-1 if you don't have PC-PCI, arguably YMF744 if you do) will be less compatible, if only in terms of memory usage, than an ISA card with hardware SB(Pro/Pro2/16) compatibility.

For an illustration, take Ultima 7. There's a reason the engine has been re-engineered for modern systems (Exult - highly recommended!) rather than running it in DOSBox. Ticks both memory management and 'hardware' compatibility of sound card issue boxes. To be honest though, Ultima 7 is an extreme case, and even on period correct hardware specially selected to run this one game it's far from a walk in the park. But it's not unique in running better (or at all) on native iron rather than in a virtual machine.

dionb wrote on 2021-03-15, 22:18:

digger wrote on 2021-03-15, 21:23:

Of course the real retro-snobs here have two 5.25" floppy drives in their retro PCs: a 360KB Double Density drive, and a 1.2MB High Density drive, due to mutual incompatibilities between the two. 😁

Ah, but what do they do with 3.5" with such a setup? Period-correct 4-drive controller? Or LS-120 on IDE instead? 😉

My 5162 has both HD and DD 5.25" drives, that was the factory configuration. My 5150 has 2x DD 5.25" internal drives and an IBM 4865 external 3.5" DD.

I also have a 486 setup with a 4 drive controller - DD 5.25"+ 3.5" HD internal, 8" drive external.

Finally I have a 20 MHz 286 with both a primary and secondary FDC. Secondary FDC drives an external IBM 4869 DD 5.25" drive, or my other 8" rig.

The rest of the stable just has the regular internal 3.5/5.25 HD config

All of my built and prebuilt XT, 286, 386 and 486 have 5.25" drives. The XT has 360k, the others have 1.2MB. Not required for 386/486 but very useful still.
ISA is required on XT, 286 and 386. No way around that ! Only late version 486 had PCI which I would still use an ISA sound card in.

captain_koloth wrote on 2021-03-15, 22:40:

One thing I've never gotten a clear answer on really: can anyone actually hear the difference between a real ISA sound card and DOSBox or PCEm emulation, or is it just the value of knowing you are running a real card?

The main benefit of using an ISA sound card instead of a PCI version is better compatibility with DOS games, especially in older titles. That said, certain PCI sound cards connected through SB-Link can achieve 99% compatibility, but motherboards which have that connector are somewhat uncommon.

Creative's AWE cards also support some extra features, such as loading custom soundfonts in certain DOS and Win9x games, which allows them to achieve a rather unique sound. More details here: AWEstruck...

In comparison to DOSBox and other emulators, I imagine real sound cards may have slight variations based on the type of low-pass filter which they use. Then there's also the fact that FM synthesis implementation can vary between cards, depending on what hardware they use. For example, newer ESS cards use ESFM instead of OPL3. This too can produce some distinctive music in games which support it natively.