IMHO SB Pro for 386 (best compatibility), GUS for 486 (with SB16 may be if you allocate their resources separately) and... may be Vortex2 and/or AWE64 for P2. I guess P2 most likely going to be focused on windows 9x. Then again, also depends on whether you're going to expand this setup further through external GM and/or MT-32 modules.

I would definitely not count on the GUS as your only soundcard.
I think that the GUS and SBPro2 are the best combo.

Even in the mid-90s with games like Duke3D and Quake, samples were still only 8bit and usually 11kHz.
The SB16 (non-AWE32/64) really has very little reason to exist in any vintage build since I would assume that your PII build would be running Windows 9x, and thus could easily use an SB Live or Aureal PCI card.

Juste one note: the SBPro does not have an MPU-401 compatible midi output whereas the SB16 does. If you plan on buying a Sound Canvas and/or MT-32, the SBPro will give you trouble, and the Gravis with its terrible MegaEm tool, I won't even consider for midi output.

For the 386, I would just use a cheap Sound Blaster 2.0 clone.
386-era games usually are Adlib OPL2 games, some with SB mono digitized sound effects at best.
No point investing big money in that rig.

Tree Wyrm wrote:

IMHO SB Pro for 386 (best compatibility), GUS for 486 (with SB16 may be if you allocate their resources separately) and... may be Vortex2 and/or AWE64 for P2. I guess P2 most likely going to be focused on windows 9x. Then again, also depends on whether you're going to expand this setup further through external GM and/or MT-32 modules.

I've already gotten several different SB16s to work side-by-side with the GUS in the Pentium II system. I'm not going with the AWE64 Gold that I have, or anything after the early AWE32, because Creative decided to cheap out and stop putting real OPL chips on the boards. I've got some posts in the OPL3LPT thread about this.

I didn't mention my Roland stuff because it didn't seem relevant to the thread I'm trying to start, here...but:

* True MPU-401 w/ MIF-IPC-B on the 386

* Another true MPU-401 w/ another MIF-IPC-B on the 486

* HardMPU on the Pentium II.

Roland MT-32, SC-55, and SC-88 all racked up and ready to go, going through a bunch of rackmounted audio gear. The entire setup is going to be glorious nerd porn once I've got it completed. Haven't shown anyone yet what I've been building.

And no, no Windows installs on any of these machines. I probably will build a vintage Windows 95/98 box at some point, but it's not going in this rack. This is an MS-DOS only rack. =)

tpowell.ca wrote:

For the 386, I would just use a cheap Sound Blaster 2.0 clone.
386-era games usually are Adlib OPL2 games, some with SB mono digitized sound effects at best.
No point investing big money in that rig.

Well, the primary purpose of the 386 system is to play late 80s and VERY early 90s games...largely Sierra/Dynamix games. Hence why it's getting one of the true MPU-401s paired with an MT-32. Seems like SB Pro 2.0 is a great choice for that system, but I just don't know if there were any games that ran WELL on a 386 that also used 16 bit samples.

Thankfully for me, I can reverse the left and right channels from the SB Pro's output easily. 3.5mm --> dual 1/4" TS connectors FTW!

I'm not investing big money in any one rig...I just invested big money into the entire thing. I'm thinking of this rack as a kind of Holy Trinity of DOS Gaming. Three machines with overlapping responsibilities and a single common purpose, all packaged neatly together and using the same monitor, keyboard, mouse, gamepads, external Roland MIDI modules, etc.

In that case, I would put the SB16 in the PII rig, and the rest still stands: SB clone on the 386 and SBP2/GUS on the 486.

My 486 rig has an ESS688F with genuine OPL3 and is SBPro compatible. The card is less noisy than an SBPro2 and has a proper line-out.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I would definitely not count on the GUS as your only soundcard.

Definitely not. It was always going to be a GUS card paired with *some* particular Sound Blaster card, no matter which machine the GUS ends up in.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think that the GUS and SBPro2 are the best combo.

Are you suggesting that I put the GUS and the SBPro2 in the 386, or the 486? I had always expected to put the SBPro2 in the 386, if anywhere. The 486 is definitely getting a Vibra card, despite whether or not the GUS ends up in it.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Even in the mid-90s with games like Duke3D and Quake, samples were still only 8bit and usually 11kHz.

That is an intense claim to me. I'm going to have to investigate this. Why on Earth would they do that, when Id had Trent Reznor doing a full blown 16-bit CD-audio soundtrack for Quake?!

tpowell.ca wrote:

The SB16 (non-AWE32/64) really has very little reason to exist in any vintage build since I would assume that your PII build would be running Windows 9x, and thus could easily use an SB Live or Aureal PCI card.

Well, as I just pointed out, I'm not running Windows on any of these machines. Even if I were, I still wouldn't want to use any sound card that has fake OPL on it.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Juste one note: the SBPro does not have an MPU-401 compatible midi output whereas the SB16 does. If you plan on buying a Sound Canvas and/or MT-32, the SBPro will give you trouble, and the Gravis with its terrible MegaEm tool, I won't even consider for midi output.

Right. See my other post. 😉

aquishix wrote:

Are you suggesting that I put the GUS and the SBPro2 in the 386, or the 486? I had always expected to put the SBPro2 in the 386 […]
Show full quote

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think that the GUS and SBPro2 are the best combo.

Are you suggesting that I put the GUS and the SBPro2 in the 386, or the 486? I had always expected to put the SBPro2 in the 386, if anywhere. The 486 is definitely getting a Vibra card, despite whether or not the GUS ends up in it.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Even in the mid-90s with games like Duke3D and Quake, samples were still only 8bit and usually 11kHz.

That is an intense claim to me. I'm going to have to investigate this. Why on Earth would they do that, when Id had Trent Reznor doing a full blown 16-bit CD-audio soundtrack for Quake?!

For point #1, I would put that combo in the 486 since it is a more flexible machine speed-wise and supports a much wider range of games, many of which would support stereo digital sound and/or the GUS.
I don't know of many games that date back to the 386 era, that don't run on a 486 and are native GUS compatible.
A Vibra card will not give you proper SBPro compatibility (no stereo sound) and has a nasty sample ringing bug.

For point #2, CD audio (Quake 1 soundtrack) is the same on the SBPro and Sb16. Both are stereo, and are routed via the internal analog mixer. If there is any difference in sound quality, its strictly due to the way each card handles/mixes analog audio and the analog output stage.
As for the sound effects, here is an exert from the Quake TECHINFO.TXT:

SSPEED
Syntax: -sspeed <speed>
Description: This will ask the sound code to set the playback speed
within the constraints of the capabilities of the card. This is
11025 Hz by default and usually from 8000 to 44100. Making this
faster requires more CPU horsepower, and has no actual benefits,
because the sounds only contain 11 KHz data. Making this slower
degrades sound quality, but improves performance and saves memory.

This explains why the sound effects in Quake sound so bad.

I believe that Duke3D and most other games use 11kHz as their default sampling rate for sound effects.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Even in the mid-90s with games like Duke3D and Quake, samples were still only 8bit and usually 11kHz.

aquishix wrote:

That is an intense claim to me. I'm going to have to investigate this. Why on Earth would they do that, when Id had Trent Reznor doing a full blown 16-bit CD-audio soundtrack for Quake?!

That's a good question. 8-bit 22kHz mono or 16-bit 11kHz mono would be twice as big but have significantly better quality.
I don't think it would really matter in terms of performance on a late 486 or Pentium 1 machine.

Cloudschatze has listed some titles with higher mixing/sample quality: A List of DOS Games with 16-Bit Sound
SB16/SB32/AWE32 cards are nice for those, but a lot of 8-bit material won't sound quite as good as earlier cards due to DMA bugs that weren't fixed until the AWE64.

tpowell.ca wrote:

A Vibra card will not give you proper SBPro compatibility (no stereo sound) and has a nasty sample ringing bug.

Mono compatibility should do fine, as games produced in stereo (all?) have separate SB16 support. The ringing bug is a bit worse with some, very faint with other Vibra chipsets, and probably preferable to the clicks and pops in the other types of SB16. (No SB card offers 16 bits, a real OPL, and totally bug-free single-cycle DMA in older material.)

The SB Pro 2 is a nice chunky sounding card (pretty clean, too) and the GUS makes a very cool combo. Perfect digital SFX, FM and tracker soundtracks for the first half of the 90's. Neither of them is a good MIDI interface, though, so a third card or at least SoftMPU is quite necessary. Like them a lot for the 486; 386 would be fine, but some great GUS games can use more power.

SB16 support is most relevant for the PII; a good Vibra or, even better, an AWE64 works there. You can definitely make a case for it on the 486, but most people are happy with an SB Pro (clone).

firage wrote:

Cloudschatze has listed some titles with higher mixing/sample quality: A List of DOS Games with 16-Bit Sound SB16/SB32/AWE32 car […]
Show full quote

Cloudschatze has listed some titles with higher mixing/sample quality: A List of DOS Games with 16-Bit Sound
SB16/SB32/AWE32 cards are nice for those, but a lot of 8-bit material won't sound quite as good as earlier cards due to DMA bugs that weren't fixed until the AWE64.

tpowell.ca wrote:

A Vibra card will not give you proper SBPro compatibility (no stereo sound) and has a nasty sample ringing bug.

Mono compatibility should do fine, as games produced in stereo (all?) have separate SB16 support. The ringing bug is a bit worse with some, very faint with other Vibra chipsets, and probably preferable to the clicks and pops in the other types of SB16. (No SB card offers 16 bits, a real OPL, and totally bug-free single-cycle DMA in older material.)

The SB Pro 2 is a nice chunky sounding card (pretty clean, too) and the GUS makes a very cool combo. Perfect digital SFX, FM and tracker soundtracks for the first half of the 90's. Neither of them is a good MIDI interface, though, so a third card or at least SoftMPU is quite necessary. Like them a lot for the 486; 386 would be fine, but some great GUS games can use more power.

SB16 support is most relevant for the PII; a good Vibra or, even better, an AWE64 works there. You can definitely make a case for it on the 486, but most people are happy with an SB Pro (clone).

The thing about Cloudschatze's table is it represents the possible output from the soundcard compatibility list (of each game) not the actual game samples' quality.
For example Duke3D is 11khz 8bit mono. I checked. The early Westwood games (C&C, Red Alert..) are 22khz ADPCM which is basically 12bit-ish quality-wise. Quake is 11khz, not sure about the bit depth.
What makes these games sometimes sound better with higher sampling rates is just that there is less filtering and added aliasing, giving you the illusion of extra frequency information that was never really there.

I really can't think of any game that uses high quality samples that merit the use of a 16bit 44kHz capable sound card that can't also benefit from being run on a Pentium or greater architecture. At which point, Windows 9x with a PCI sound card makes more sense than any ISA card.

Some of them are limited to the quality advantage you get from higher quality mixing of lower rate samples, but I went through a bunch of games there with higher quality samples. It's not a non-existent edge in several major titles.

I agree with the SB Pro for 486 class machines in general, but they are in middle ground. Since the 386DX/40 area is covered and the big jump is from 486DX2/66 to a PII, I can definitely see a 16-bit card there.

firage wrote:

Some of them are limited to the quality advantage you get from higher quality mixing of lower rate samples, but I went through a bunch of games there with higher quality samples. It's not a non-existent edge in several major titles.

I agree with the SB Pro for 486 class machines in general, but they are in middle ground. Since the 386DX/40 area is covered and the big jump is from 486DX2/66 to a PII, I can definitely see a 16-bit card there.

Makes sense.
Even my K6 setup has 3 soundcards. There is no single perfect solution and it also strongly depends on which games you intend to play.

tpowell.ca wrote:

My 486 rig has an ESS688F with genuine OPL3 and is SBPro compatible. The card is less noisy than an SBPro2 and has a proper line-out.

What specific model of ESS688F? Is it the ESS688FC, by chance? I'm looking at a few cards on eBay and it looks like I could order one from Russia and wait a month to get it.

So about this 'genuine OPL3' -- does your card have a separate OPL3 chip, or does it have a licensed OPL3 core inside the ESS688F chip, like the CT1747?

I want to be very sure about this before I order one of these cards, because if it turns out to be merely "OPL3 compatible" like the SB16s were after CQM was invented at Creative, I'm not even going to consider getting one.

This page concerns me: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/opl3-copies/

"... And the fact that companies like ESS, Crystal, OPTi, or Aureal couldn’t produce 100% accurate OPL3 clones strongly hints that there’s something fishy about these chips. ..."

There are ESS and OPTI cards with genuine discrete OPL3 ICs , you just have to look on the pcb and see if it's there or not... Some even have clone OPL3s that one can replace with the real deal.
Sadly these cards are a minority but nothing some eBay watching can't solve

This is the card I bought (Compaq X047):
http://hardwarium.ru/?p=83

Just be careful. I've only seen (and bought) this card once on eBay. Most of the other Compaq cards seem to be the ES1869 without the Yamaha chip.

keropi wrote:

There are ESS and OPTI cards with genuine discrete OPL3 ICs , you just have to look on the pcb and see if it's there or not... Some even have clone OPL3s that one can replace with the real deal.
Sadly these cards are a minority but nothing some eBay watching can't solve

I'm quite used to looking for genuine OPL chips on the PCBs of SB16 cards...😉 Just never seen one on one of these ESS cards! Now that I've seen one, I know that it's not a fruitless search from the outset.

I got a decent soldering iron recently with a .4mm tip, and I think that might be precise enough to do that kind of soldering work. What ICs should I be on the look-out for that are OPL3 clones?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Opti-82C928-A-AD1848 … cQAAOSwXq5Zrqs1

Is that an example, for instance? I've never seen an OPL chip that didn't have the little stylized OPL logo on it.

tpowell.ca wrote:

This is the card I bought (Compaq X047):
http://hardwarium.ru/?p=83

Just be careful. I've only seen (and bought) this card once on eBay. Most of the other Compaq cards seem to be the ES1869 without the Yamaha chip.

Thank you VERY MUCH for posting that image. Now I'm armed for the search.

Just made some audio captures of the line-out from the card.
Seems the card outputs up to 11kHz (with a 22kHz sample sourcefile) and then, like on the SB16 cards there is a brickwall/lowpass filter kicking in.
On the FM output, there is NO filter and the output is steady up to 22kHz with no dropoff.

I'm liking this card more and more with the exception of the DOS drivers which suck ballz. 😀