> Duke Nukem 3D where I had to drop back to Sound Blaster Pro

That's all the audician32 is, what were you expecting?

red_avatar wrote on 2020-12-02, 19:41:

I bumped into the RMC video as well - I've been looking for a SB16 compatible card with OPL3 and clean noise. I'm very interested in this card BUT I can't seem to find any solid info on how compatible it is.

I recall Phil's Computer Lab raving about how good Audician 32 was but when I tried it, I ran into countless issues on all three machines I tested it on - huge compatibility issues even with the bigger titles like Duke Nukem 3D where I had to drop back to Sound Blaster Pro and 8bit modes to get stereo or any sound at all so you can understand my scepticism at people claiming this card is great when the biggest draw, high compatibility, is not yet been mentioned. A card can have amazing sound but if half the games don't support it ... well you get my drift.

So has anyone done some thorough testing with this card? Are the typically "difficult" titles working? Could software upgrades improve compatibility or are there hardware limits that will mean some games will never sound right? I think these are important questions to ask.

I'm afraid you got confused somewhere...the Orpheus is not SB16 compatible. It's SB/SBPro/WSS compatible.
As for quality, it's subjective but it's probably the quietest/cleanest card I own, and I own a few.

There's very few games that support SB16, and of the ones that do quite a few support WSS so it's a sensible decision to do SBpro and not SB16, because SB16 doesn't do SBpro very well.

As to how Orpheus is, it's very compatible.

>Duke Nukem II : CS4237 chip does not support all ADPCM sample compression modes the game uses. Please use
AdLib sound effects for the game.

>Tyrian and Tyrian 2000 : On most systems the game only works with WSS and DMA0 selected. You can easily change
resources on the fly by modifying the BLASTER variable and running UniSound to re-init the card or use ORPHINIT with an
INI file that specifies DMA0 to be used. This just seems to be the game's sound driver incompatibility with the CS4237.

That's the two known issues. I'm sure there will be others that are not yet discovered, but I think I can say with certainty that there are definitely not "huge compatibility issues" or "countless issues". The Crystal chip used for digital on this card is a known quantity and was chosen because of it's high degree of compatibility without typical Soundblaster issues. And the implementation of OPL3 on the card works great, as does PC-MIDI and the wavetable header.

RMC tested the card on a number of titles without issue. I've not come across any issues on mine.

Really though if you want to be sure then give it 6 months or a year. It's a brand new card, the orphinit software is brand new as well. But I think it's fair to say that the card is extremely compatible and has very few issues.

Boohyaka wrote on 2020-12-02, 20:35:

I'm afraid you got confused somewhere...the Orpheus is not SB16 compatible. It's SB/SBPro/WSS compatible.
As for quality, it's subjective but it's probably the quietest/cleanest card I own, and I own a few.

My priorities are something like this:
1) compatibility with DOS games in general, from old to new
2) OPL3 support
3) lack of hanging note bugs (I use a SC55 and MT-32 and those bugs make them sound terrible)
4) actual sound clarity including the lack of the typical popping you get on some SB16 cards (I use a ground loop filter that cleans up the noise anyway - I get very good sound out of my current SB16)
5) driver stability & memory usage (no use having drivers that make it impossible to run certain games)

Audician and Orpheus seem to have 2, 3 and 4 in the bag but Audician was crap at 1 & 5 with very spotty compatibility and its drivers behaving oddly (especially the mixer) - it did have very low memory usage which was about the most positive thing I could mention.

I can live with some noise and popping if all the rest OK (I grew up with those flaws so to me they're "authentic" if that makes sense). I can NOT live with a crystal clear sounding card if it means sacrificing compatibility with a good chunk of games sadly. My apologies if I sound overly negative but I spent over €100 on the Audician 32 after people on this forum recommended it to me only to find out it had massive compatibility issues and it turned out most people only tested it on the typical big titles like Doom or Duke 3D which every card under the sun works on.

1) This is as far as I've seen and other people have said fantastic
2) It's there and it works
3) No hanging bugs at all, the PC-MIDI card that's integrated has been around for a lot longer than the Orpheus card and it's known to be fantastic
4) Completely different level above the SB16s. There's even the option to go fully optical, although through the jacks on the back I could not hear any pops crackles, white noise etc. Nor could RMC when testing. The card is designed to be clean.
5) Orphinit is great and it won't cause memory problems. There also the unisound driver which works as well.

Velociraptor wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:00:

1) This is as far as I've seen and other people have said fantastic 2) It's there and it works 3) No hanging bugs at all, the PC […]
Show full quote

1) This is as far as I've seen and other people have said fantastic
2) It's there and it works
3) No hanging bugs at all, the PC-MIDI card that's integrated has been around for a lot longer than the Orpheus card and it's known to be fantastic
4) Completely different level above the SB16s. There's even the option to go fully optical, although through the jacks on the back I could not hear any pops crackles, white noise etc. Nor could RMC when testing. The card is designed to be clean.
5) Orphinit is great and it won't cause memory problems. There also the unisound driver which works as well.

Well (1) is still anecdotal until it's actually documented - it would be good if a compatibility list of tested games was available. At most I've seen 10 games being mentioned in this topic out of thousands so there's a LOT of room for untested games to have issues. I'd make a list myself (I made one for the Audician and my current SB16) but the price is a bit too hard to take the gamble ... .

If you know a list of difficult games, and exactly what in them is the issue then I'm sure people will see if Orpheus experiences them. I'll have a pop at a few if/when I get a chance. More out of curiosity than anything else.

Velociraptor wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:07:

If you know a list of difficult games, and exactly what in them is the issue then I'm sure people will see if Orpheus experiences them. I'll have a pop at a few if/when I get a chance. More out of curiosity than anything else.

Well here's a few the Audician had problems with:

Duke Nukem 3D: slow down during playing of sounds (could be fixed by dropping sound quality to 11khz I recall but made it sound terrible)
Cannon Fodder 1 & 2 - would either crash in setup or not detect sound at all
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
Dune: speech only from left channel
Warcraft 2: CD audio keeps restarting and crash after first level

These are the problems I still had logged - I replaced my data when I replaced the sound card with a SB16 which fixed all of the above's issues.

If you want certainty on compatibility with a SB16 you know doesn't have the bad background noise, and you want to solve the intelligent MPU issues and hanging bug you could get a PC MIDI card instead and use that along with your SB16.

The SB16 doesn't do SBpro very well though, this is a SBpro not an SB16 card.

When I rebuild my DOS machine again I'll give some/most of those a try, if nobody else has, because I'm interested to see if there are problems. The games I tested when I did have it built up were all great.

Velociraptor wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:22:

If you want certainty on compatibility with a SB16 you know doesn't have the bad background noise, and you want to solve the intelligent MPU issues and hanging bug you could get a PC MIDI card instead and use that along with your SB16.

The SB16 doesn't do SBpro very well though, this is a SBpro not an SB16 card.

When I rebuild my DOS machine again I'll give some/most of those a try, if nobody else has, because I'm interested to see if there are problems. The games I tested when I did have it built up were all great.

Well the SB16 I have now (CT2230) is pretty much the best one to have - OPL3, very little noise, no hanging note bug. Only downside is it has the clicking IRQ bug but of all the issues, I can live with this one the most. The main reason I was interested in the Orpheus, was the digital output support and what I hope will be better MT32 support without needing to run SOFTMPU. Softmpu needs EMS and some games won't run with EMS and yet still have MT32 music so I can't play those at the moment.

Oddly enough, I haven't really found any game that didn't work properly with the SB16 if I selected SB Pro. I know there's a difference in quality but I haven't really noticed anything weird so far and I've tested over 300 games.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:53:

Velociraptor wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:22:

If you want certainty on compatibility with a SB16 you know doesn't have the bad background noise, and you want to solve the intelligent MPU issues and hanging bug you could get a PC MIDI card instead and use that along with your SB16.

The SB16 doesn't do SBpro very well though, this is a SBpro not an SB16 card.

When I rebuild my DOS machine again I'll give some/most of those a try, if nobody else has, because I'm interested to see if there are problems. The games I tested when I did have it built up were all great.

Well the SB16 I have now (CT2230) is pretty much the best one to have - OPL3, very little noise, no hanging note bug. Only downside is it has the clicking IRQ bug but of all the issues, I can live with this one the most. The main reason I was interested in the Orpheus, was the digital output support and what I hope will be better MT32 support without needing to run SOFTMPU. Softmpu needs EMS and some games won't run with EMS and yet still have MT32 music so I can't play those at the moment.

Oddly enough, I haven't really found any game that didn't work properly with the SB16 if I selected SB Pro. I know there's a difference in quality but I haven't really noticed anything weird so far and I've tested over 300 games.

At least some of the issues reported are possibly system specific or Audician specific .

My experience with Cannon Fodder with a YMF715 is documented here . Re: Sound Blaster 16 & AWE32: From best to worst It basically worked fine once caches were disabled on my P3 1400MHz .

Duke Nukem 3D had no issues for me with the same YMF15 card . The card is an Audiotrix 3D/XG .

darry wrote on 2020-12-02, 22:01:

At least some of the issues reported are possibly system specific or Audician specific .

My experience with Cannon Fodder with a YMF715 is documented here . Re: Sound Blaster 16 & AWE32: From best to worst It basically worked fine once caches were disabled on my P3 1400MHz .

Duke Nukem 3D had no issues for me with the same YMF15 card . The card is an Audiotrix 3D/XG .

I tested the Audician on three systems: IBM 486, HP Vectra and IBM PC 330 and the issues persisted. I even bought a newer model HP Vectra (the Cirrus Logic ship on the old one had some compatibility issues and because the ISA slot was too slow, I couldn't add a different 2D card) but had the same issues there. When I replaced it with the SB16 all sound issues were gone. For the more common games, I found quite a few people who ran into similar problems - Pizza Tycoon is a very fussy game for example and the slow down in Duke 3D is also pretty common but I forgot the reason why. Basiclaly, the Audician is now at the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

If someone can confirm the above games all work fine with the Orpheus, I'm very interested however - just the ability to have full MT32 support would be great. I wonder if I can get the seller to add a second 3.5-to-MIDI dongle though since I need one for my MT-32 and SC55.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-12-02, 19:41:

I bumped into the RMC video as well - I've been looking for a SB16 compatible card with OPL3 and clean noise. I'm very interested in this card BUT I can't seem to find any solid info on how compatible it is.

I recall Phil's Computer Lab raving about how good Audician 32 was but when I tried it, I ran into countless issues on all three machines I tested it on - huge compatibility issues even with the bigger titles like Duke Nukem 3D where I had to drop back to Sound Blaster Pro and 8bit modes to get stereo or any sound at all so you can understand my scepticism at people claiming this card is great when the biggest draw, high compatibility, is not yet been mentioned. A card can have amazing sound but if half the games don't support it ... well you get my drift.

So has anyone done some thorough testing with this card? Are the typically "difficult" titles working? Could software upgrades improve compatibility or are there hardware limits that will mean some games will never sound right? I think these are important questions to ask.

The YMF-71x cards are not SB16 compatible at all. Neither is the Orpheus, or other CS4xxx cards for that matter. They do support SB, SBPro and WSS, though. WSS is what supports 16-bit sound in this case. AFAIK most games from that era use 8-bit samples anyway, so if they don't support WSS, you aren't missing out on sound quality anyway. If you want a sound card that's specifically SB16 compatible, your best bet would be an actual SB16(very hit-and-miss with bugs and not fully compatible with SBPro), an ALS100(pretty hard to find one with good sound and no noise) or a CMI8330 (haven't used any, but it supports SB, SBPro, SB16 AND WSS, I don't know which boards would be a good idea to get though.)

You might be able to patch some games with WSS support if they use Miles and [another system that I can't quite remember the name] . Tyrian comes with WSS support built-in.

Also, Duke Nukem 1 has been reported to not work correctly with Orpheus due to sloppy ADPCM implementation on the CS4237.

red_avatar wrote on 2020-12-02, 21:53:

Oddly enough, I haven't really found any game that didn't work properly with the SB16 if I selected SB Pro. I know there's a difference in quality but I haven't really noticed anything weird so far and I've tested over 300 games.

Aladdin is one such game.

It can't play stereo music with a SB16 but does so with a SBPro or WSS.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-12-02, 22:55:

You might be able to patch some games with WSS support if they use Miles and [another system that I can't quite remember the name] .

Perhaps you mean DIGPAK (The Audio Solution)?

Although I believe there are quite a few more modular driver standards that DOS games supported and for which WSS drivers were available.

digger wrote on 2020-12-03, 00:19:

Perhaps you mean DIGPAK (The Audio Solution)?

Although I believe there are quite a few more modular driver standards that DOS games supported and for which WSS drivers were available.

Yep, seems to be it. I don't really know which games actually support WSS, or can be patched/modded/hacked to support it, though.
Other than Tyrian, of course 😉

TechieDude wrote on 2020-12-03, 00:42:

Yep, seems to be it. I don't really know which games actually support WSS, or can be patched/modded/hacked to support it, though

Mobygames lists around 200 games which natively support WSS.

As for adding WSS support to games which use the Miles sound system, that's pretty easy. Simply copy SNDSYS.DIG from a game which natively supports WSS to the one that doesn't and it will show up as a valid setup option. Here are some of my experiences with this along with the relevant sound samples for comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBNmt9Tz6VY

Nice work, lads! 😁

Great day for video coverage! Bet that waiting list will be growing.

Let's face it -- there will never be a perfect ISA sound card for DOS.