I have an MSI 661FM3-V socket 775 board with an AGP8x slot, two PCI slots, and SiS661FX / SiS964 northbridge and southbridge respectively.
Unfortunately it doesn't have an ISA slot or an SB-Link header.
I have the AOPEN AW744L II, which has OPL3 in pure DOS, and good GM/XG support in Windows.
Are there any PCI sound cards I can use to get General Midi in real-mode DOS with this setup?
Any card with external wavetable connector.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
I don't use a PCI sound card for DOS, but any card that can listen on port 300 or 330 can use external midi. I run my midi out to roland UM One USB midi interface on another PC and then use MUNT or the Roland VSTi plugins.
The SBLive / Audigy cards can provide General MIDI in pure DOS using ECW sets. It doesn't sound that great to me, but it works.
A better (and slightly more expensive) solution would be to get one of Serdaco's Chill adapters + whatever wavetable daughterboard you like, and then plug that into your Yamaha card.
Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?
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matieo wrote on 2021-05-28, 11:04:Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?
Doesn't that require an SB-Link header on the motherboard though?
ESS cards also had software solution to pass ISA DMA via PCI, like some other manufacturers at that time. SB-Link standard was designed to work directly without a driver, just like a real ISA sound card, i.e. no memory managers shenanigans and waste of conventional memory.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
The ESS Solo-1 doesn't have General MIDI capabilities under pure DOS. It only supports FM synthesis. See the product sheet here:
https://www.alsa-project.org/files/pub/manual … ess/DsSolo1.pdf
Of course, you can connect a wavetable daughterboard or an external MIDI device to it, but the card has no inherent GM of its own.
retroboy87 wrote on 2021-05-28, 13:54:matieo wrote on 2021-05-28, 11:04:Have you looked at the viability of the ESS Solo 1?
Doesn't that require an SB-Link header on the motherboard though?
SB-Link is 100% absolutely not mandatory with ESS Solo-1; in the Phil's video (which seems to have confused the hell out of everyone not familiar with the card) he's just showing that capability as a side note, proving it exists or something.
While it does work fantastic (I'm using it all the time on a SB-Link -capable i815 mobo and am yet to discover a single DOS game refusing to work perfectly with it - other than the DOOM engine games, which work correctly in Windows with VxD drivers, but require the DOS32/A extender in pure DOS for some reason - but that's really the only exception I ever found), there are also at least two other strong chip/hardware-based legacy DMA compatibility measures, as was already mentioned (with the correction that it's not done by software, but by the chip itself, which makes it a truly CPU speed-independent solution).
Soundblasters PCI / Ensoniq Soundscape PCI has great GM waveable sound in DOS. But FM-emularion is terrible so I can't reallly reccomend it. I also don't know if it will work with your mainboard but as these cards are widely available and quite cheap it may be worse a try. (They are like Radeon 92xx or GeForce MX cards - you don't find them, they'll find you)
