Unfortunately there is no way to get SoundBlaster compatibility for MS-DOS on a PCI sound card without some kind of emulation. This is because the original SoundBlaster works in a way that is not reproducible on a PCI bus.
The DOS drivers for the SB16 PCI provide an emulation that should work OK with many games, but they need EMM386 being loaded (which conflicts with some games), and they are said to be quite difficult to set up.

You either have to live with the emulation or use a real ISA SoundBlaster card on a mainboard that has fully functional ISA slots.

Setting up EMS or NO EMS is alright, with Windows 98SE ready-made PIF/BAT files to reboot the PC into EMS or NO EMS modes.

Many old skool sound cards had to be 100% Sound Blaster Pro compatible. Am sure Creative Sound Blaster 16 will do a good job. Am more interested in getting PC coder demos running. But what am concerned is whether the card will work on a P4 775 today's motherboard. I see www.creative.com still got Sound Blaster 16/AWE32 DOS drivers.

Sorry, I didn't explain it clearly: The original SoundBlaster 16 (and AWE32/64) is completely different from a SoundBlaster 16 PCI. The SB16 PCI doesn't even have a chipset made by Creative, it uses the Ensoniq AudioPCI chip (Ensoniq was bought by Creative at some point). So the SB16/AWE32 DOS drivers available on Creative's website wouldn't work with a SB16 PCI (and as far as I see, Creative have dropped DOS support for these cards).

You also mentioned you want to run PC coder demos. With a SB16 PCI this is going to be a rather difficult task, because -
- SoundBlaster support (even for real oldschool ISA SB16 cards) is rather poor in most demos, compared to Gravis Ultrasound support (Gravis Ultrasound cards were standard in the demo scene).
- Many demos will not run correctly with protected-mode memory managers - such as EMM386.
- SB16 cards cannot correctly emulate SBPro DACs, so you'll have to revert to mono SB sound (but that is an entirely different problem).

Is there any original Sound Blaster (16/AWE32/64) that is PCI ? What card would you recommend if I wanted to just make it 100% Sound Blaster compatible?

I used to have various non-Creative sound cards ISA in the past, and I had to select Sound Blaster compatible when setting up PC demos and games. This is all I want to do on my P4 no-ISA-slot motherboard PC...

Just get an old computer.

I move about and like to travel light. I really don't want to lug around 2 PCs. It's enough to have one tower-PC. I found iBASE MB865 has ISA, PCI and AGP 8x slots.

dhruba.bandopadhyay wrote:

Is there any original Sound Blaster (16/AWE32/64) that is PCI ?

Nope.

dhruba.bandopadhyay wrote:

What card would you recommend if I wanted to just make it 100% Sound Blaster compatible?

Any soundcard will do, together with DOSBox or VDMSound 😉

dhruba.bandopadhyay wrote:

I used to have various non-Creative sound cards ISA in the past, and I had to select Sound Blaster compatible when setting up PC demos and games. This is all I want to do on my P4 no-ISA-slot motherboard PC...

I think we all understand your dilemma, but getting 100% hardware SB functionality is just impossible on a PCI-only box. If there was some easy way, DOSBox and VDMSound wouldn't exist.
Your P4 system should be fast enough to run anything with these emulators at decent speed, why not give them a try? They're free, comfortable to use and work really well.

1. DOSBox is getting better and got some ok results from it. Though 3D via DOSBox is very very slow. And if the DOS app has fast refreshes or updates then DOSBox can't handle it.

2. VDMSound is okay but doesn't always work very. I ran Blood before and it was jerky. VDMSound is a discontinued project. It will not run under 64-bit Windows unfortunately.

3. VirtualPC has very bad support for DOS sound and joystick. Searching on the web & google groups I find people reporting this as a fact. They all say DOS games run chuggy.

4. I have yet to get DOS sound to work in VMWare. Just installed Windows 98SE. Getting DOS sound to work looks fiddly (from web & google group searching). And performance wise is again chuggy.

> Though 3D via DOSBox is very very slow

Sounds like you didn't configure it right, if it's not a relatively new DOS
game/demo, a modern pc (x86) should suffice to run most stuff.
But you're right, some demos have seriously odd screen refresh
techniques which to emulate would slow down everything considerably.

Thanks for your replies:

I have learnt that the last Creative Labs Sound Blaster card that comes with DOS drivers was Audigy 1. I have also tried DOSBox & VirtualPC. VirtualPC has stated that it has very bad DOS support and won't improve. DOSBox is not good at 3D DOS games, has jerky sounds and can't do programs with extremely fast refresh updates.

I have yet to get MS-DOS/Windows98SE working in VMWare.

But am hoping to grab a few Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 PCI/ISA off eBay to stick in my near-future iBASE MB865 or some other Intel 865 chipset motherboard. Intel 865 chipset motherboards were the last to support Windows 98SE. I have a socket 775 P4 3GHz so I don't want that to go to waste.

Windows 98SE CD is indeed bootable with CD-ROM support. (but obviously not made for EMS loading games and sound).

Is it possible to take original 3 MS-DOS 6.2 floppy disks, and burn them onto CD? Has anyone done this before? Install/setup files or already-installed MS-DOS?

Give these a shot.

http://easymamecab.mameworld.net/html/snddosdr.htm

The old Ensoniq DOS driver (renamed Creative) may not be perfect, but it does surprisingly work quite well often enough.

Re: pure DOS,
You could probably rig up a boot floppy or boot CD with a Win98SE boot disk. Just clear off the useless stuff, rework the config and autoexec files a bit, add your drivers for mouse, cdrom, audio, smartdrv, etc. Would work ok I think. You must have a FAT32 partition tho.

Nero can burn bootable CDs by using a bootable floppy or floppy image as a reference for boot files.

creative vibra 128 soundcard has dos drivers which work perfectly by them self in pure dos. (as well as dos emulation within windows) just make sure that you install vxd drivers when in windows.

The link I gave above is those exact drivers for DOS. They aren't perfect but they are very good. Perfect can only happen with an ISA Sound Blaster 16 (ideally non-PNP).

I could bid for that ISA Sound Blaster 16...

Try a SBLIVE PCI, and real mode dos driver (SBEINIT.COM) versions (3.04, 4.00, or 5.00) I was skeptical before I got this card but it has worked perfectly with every dos game I tried (over 40+games). You can switch between general midi or mt-32 with the configuration and it uses an 8 meg default.ecw soundbank. I prefer it now to my SB16 ISA card.

Everything PCI, Audigy on down, use the same DOS driver with some tweaks to allow loading with the specific hardware.