I've been experimenting with ES1688 based Panasonic KXL-D20 card to see if it's capable of playing digital (PCM) samples in DOS.
This is a feature of Ablib sound card that is used rarely and not well known. Although there are some games and software that use this possibility. Just to be clear it's not an imitation of digital effects by FM synth (like in ROTT for instance), but playing actual digital sounds. The CPU does all of the processing in this case as there is no DMA.
And the PCMCIA card has actually worked very well on every game I tried.
The games I tried this on are:
- Sango Fighter (a new game from 2010, BTW)
- Stunt Driver
- Pinball fantasies
- F-15 Strike Eagle II
- Sound Club music editor.
It plays .mod files and a couple of more file types very well. as for .wav files it does not play them directly. But there is a possibility of loading new sound samples in .wav format and it's possible to listen to them before loading (some kind of "preview") . But it plays correctly not all .wav files.
AFAIR there are also other editors that are capable of using Adlib for playing digital samples.
A separate case is Alone in the dark. KXL-D20 plays digital sound (footstep sound, shots ) in this game as well. But not in Adlib mode, but if Sound Blaster(no DMA) is selected in setup. Maybe it's just same thing under different name, I'm not sure.
I think all the above is relevant for other ES1688 based cards.
So, are there other games that use Adlib for digital sounds? Would be great to find and try more of them.