VOGONS


First post, by Camtheman

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Hello, so I have this Windows 98 system with a gus max 2.1…And ofc the sb emulation is bad so I need a good SB card to use in tandem, but

It only has 1 ISA slot

So my requirements are
Has to be PCI
ideally with a wavetable header
SB/opl compatible

Any suggestions?

Early 90s: IBM PS/2 Server 95/A, Pentium 66, 16MB RAM, XGA-2, IBM SCSI Corvette, SCSI2SD, 3 Com EtherLink III MCA, Resound 2 AdLib MCA
Late 90s: Micron Millenia MXE, ABIT VH6-II, Coppermine 1ghz, 1024MB, Voodoo 5 5500 PCI, GUS Max 2.1, 128GB SATA PNY SSD

Reply 2 of 4, by dionb

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Second the Terratec Solo-1

They come with either SBLink or wavetable, but there's no reason you can't have both. I had one with SBLink and added the wavetable header. 26 pins later and it just worked.

Note however that ESFM isn't a perfect OPL3 replica (although it's generally considered one of the better ones). For real OPL3, you can go for a Yamaha YMF74x-based card. In Windows that also gives you a nice wavetable synth to play with. Downside: no wavetable in DOS and no cards I'm aware of with those chips with wavetable header.

Exactly how well compatibility will be depends on the motherboard & chipset you have. If you have SBLink, you're in a very good place, if not, there are various ISA DMA compatibility options that may or may not work.

Reply 3 of 4, by cyclone3d

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From what I can find, the onboard sound is supposed to support Sound Blaster Pro. Sounds like there might be an option to enable it in the BIOS.

Pics don't show a SB-LINK / PC/PCI header so you are not going to get super duper compatibility with a Yamaha YMF7x4 based card though DDMA should work perfectly fine with that board... I think.

If you want to have multiple ISA slots and are willing to make a case or have a large case you can modify, you can use an ISA riser or backplane to give you more ISA slots.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 4 of 4, by darry

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Yamaha YMF7x4 variants, Aureal Vortex 1 or 2, Avance Logic ALS4000 or CMI8738 based cards could be options, depending on whether your motherboard/chipset supports DDMA and/or PC/PCI (SB-Link) .

EDIT :

For waveblaster daughterboard support on PCI, you have some options :

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (Crystal CS4630 based )
Aureal SQ2500 (Aureal Vortex2 , aka AU8830 based )
Dynex DX-SC5.1 (VIA VT1723 based)

Not sure, of the top of my mind, which of these (if any) have support for the waveblaster header in real-mode DOS .