Are you asking for a sound card for win 9x + 2k
if so sb-live

http://sound-drivers.org/?id=6614&comp=Advanc … us-bin-0.10.zip

"WDM driver for Gravis UltraSound soundcards. It works under Windows 2000 and Windows 98 Second Edition and supports Gravis UltraSound Classic, Ace, PnP (InterWave) and maybe other Gravis UltraSound soundcards (GUS MAX)."

Driver source:
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/alsa/manua … md960214.tar.gz

Davros wrote:

Are you asking for a sound card for win 9x + 2k
if so sb-live

If you don't plan to play DOS games, this is the way to go.
Live!'s DOS compatibility is just awful.

leileilol wrote:

Davros wrote:

Are you asking for a sound card for win 9x + 2k
if so sb-live

If you don't plan to play DOS games, this is the way to go.
Live!'s DOS compatibility is just awful.

I have at least three entirely different SB Live! examples, none of which were usable in either of two Asus P5A (ALi Aladdin5) motherboards, and there was also a Via MVP MB that wouldn't work properly with at least two SB Live! cards I tried. The latter one ended up working with an SB PCI 128, after a couple of false starts with drivers that didn't work correctly.

If it's true that AGP drivers on the Asus P5As are a frequent cause of various instabilities and conflicts, I haven't tested those Live! cards when any s7 MB was running PCI video instead. On previous PCs with the 440BX chipset, my best recollection is I used other audio cards with better success than I had with Creative's cards at the time (particularly that Intel built mainboard I had and hated so much).

I haven't had much in the way of PCI video to test with . .

I have an SB AWE64 in my Win9x/2k box, and it works fine for me. It's not exceptional, but the MIDI quality is pretty good.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I have an SB AWE64 in my Win9x/2k box, and it works fine for me. It's not exceptional, but the MIDI quality is pretty good.

Same here... almost. I have a AWE32 in a Socket7 board under Win98SE, and it works just fine. Audio is not the cleanest, but all the utilities (including the AWE soundfont manager) work as expected, and MIDI can sounds great out of it with the right soundbank.

QBiN wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I have an SB AWE64 in my Win9x/2k box, and it works fine for me. It's not exceptional, but the MIDI quality is pretty good.

Same here... almost. I have a AWE32 in a Socket7 board under Win98SE, and it works just fine. Audio is not the cleanest, but all the utilities (including the AWE soundfont manager) work as expected, and MIDI can sounds great out of it with the right soundbank.

Me too. I actually like the sound of AWE32 and the threble/bass control within windows. I also use it as a main MP3 device 😉 Of course, I dont have anything "awesome" to compare it with; but it sounds better then external USB C-Media and some intel AC 97 integrated solutions.

I'm not sure right now (I don't spend this part of the day in my "shop" -- spare bedroom) which AWE64s I have here already, that sounded so staticky & fuzzy. They did work for me in both Win98se and Win2000, the latter using WinNT 4.0 drivers, but the sound quality was too poor.

There are two different CT model numbers showing up, 4380 and 4500, and both are labeled AWE64. The sharpness of the audio reproduction in W2K is far less important, but if anything, the drivers I found seemed to produce better quality in W2K than the others did in Win98se.

As to my spare bedroom, it's on the southern side of the house, and locally we set new records this summer for the number of days over 100 degrees F. This is an old house, with window AC units. I don't think there's one of those big enough and powerful enough to handle that room when it's 102-103-104 on the other side of the (too many) windows for a couple of days in a row, let alone for stretches of 5-6 at a time!

I do my assembly and testing, starting in the pre-dawn hours, from 5:30 AM until perhaps 10:30 AM. 😜

you could try something with a vortex 2 chip a3d 2.0 ftw 😉

I am in my spare room (shop) at this unearthly hour. Woke up and just couldn't get back to sleep! I've used an Aureal previously, although not a Vortex 2 / 8830. Right now, the PC I'm connected to the 'Net with to be here now is that Intel SE440BX motherboard and Slot1 CPU, just loosely breadboarded together with an 8 MB ATI AGP video card of some sort, three 64 MB DIMMs of PC-100 RAM, and an Intel Pro /100 S network card.

According to Intel's abbreviated Acrobat manual, the max RAM is 384 MBs, using 128 MBs per memory slot. I'm looking through the assorted, poorly categorized parts in here for a possible extra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. That's what I ended up using in the Asus P5A system that was supposed to have been used in the 250 MHz speed class for Freespace 1 & 2.

(It won't keep track of my Logitech Wingman joystick or i-rocks slim KB -- both USB, and chosen partners because of the size of the KB tray on the PC Cart the PC will be used on, but I'm considering testing it with only PCI as video because of repeated complaints aimed at the Acer ALI chipset's AGP implementation. It's already installed into a very tall, very skinny, old type PC Tower, with a pedestal base under it.)

If you use DOSBox to play games in Windows then all you really need is good MIDI device. MS GS soft synth is lousy and even SB MIDI devices are bad. I use Yamaha soft synth SYXG100 under Windows ME and my MIDI sounds fantastic even compared to Sound Canvas SCD-10 daughterboard I had in my old PC P90. This synth unfortunately won't work under Windows XP or later but SYXG50 version 4.0 will. If you can find any of them you will have the best music for old DOS games. No need for buying old ISA sound cards.

RavenlordM wrote:

If you use DOSBox to play games in Windows then all you really need is good MIDI device. MS GS soft synth is lousy and even SB MIDI devices are bad. I use Yamaha soft synth SYXG100 under Windows ME and my MIDI sounds fantastic even compared to Sound Canvas SCD-10 daughterboard I had in my old PC P90. This synth unfortunately won't work under Windows XP or later but SYXG50 version 4.0 will. If you can find any of them you will have the best music for old DOS games. No need for buying old ISA sound cards.

At present, it's my intention to try playing Windows32 games in the matching hardware for their time period, roughly 9-10 years ago. Other than the two series of deep space fighter flying fantasy simulators for DOS from Origin and from Lucas Arts, I haven't got much from before Windows9X's dominance on my lists.

However, if there's a simpler way to play those than what I'm about to do, I might consider trying them a different way.

There's also a comment from Davros I haven't acknowledged. There was a single Vortex 2 from Aureal on eBay. The auction ended a few minutes ago.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem … utorefresh=true

There was only one other bidder. It's an "As Is" sale, no guarantee, therefore, let's all knock on wood togther now -- "knock-knock" here's hoping it's still working when I get it!

Aureal is a great choice, as many games around 1999-2000 support A3D.

If you really want to have nice MIDI in DOS games you can always get an external synth like an SC-55 or SC-88. The Aureal card probably provides MPU-401 I/O via the joystick port.

Or run DOSBOX and a high quality soundfont thru some form of Creative sound card and completely blow away those old GMIDI cards/boxes. I have a SCB55 / SCD-15 along with quite a few other MIDI options and lemme tell ya that those ancient cards with tiny ROMs don't hold a candle to some of the soundfonts that I've used.

For example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuRcnnLq0OQ
http://rapidshare.com/files/126411773/SW_TIE_ … M-180_.mp3.html

You also get the added flexibility of being able to choose the soundfont that you think sounds best for each game. There's no perfect patch set, not even Roland's benchmark set.

Of course the old cards/modules are more "authentic" in that the composer probably used one when creating the game soundtracks. I wasn't impressed enough with the Roland sound to see this as much of a big deal though frankly.

I spent a ton of time playing with soundfonts in the 1990s on my SB PCI 128 and SB Live cards in Win9x. I still prefer my MT-32 and SC-88 😀

I don't have access to my synths right now though, so I'm using Windows' built-in software synth for General MIDI (which supposedly uses Roland Sound Canvas samples of some kind) and Gulikoza's CVS build of DOSBox for MT-32 emulation.

I looked up the two Roland models numbers on the 'Bay, and I don't think I have spent as much, total, the past two months of collecting parts for two of these ancient beasts (of course, I already have stuff like RAM, old CD drives, hard drives too small for new systems, cables, screws, speakers, etc.)

What I don't have is more than the one truly "period" tall & skinny tower case that the P5A currently resides in. I don't want a horizontal AT-286 style case because for me, that would be mid-1980's, and XTs / ATs. When I moved to 32-bit computing, I started using towers (1988, maybe 1989). By 1997 or so, when the oldest of the games on my priority list of stuff I never tried was released, I didn't even have any horizontal "desktop" cases in the junk storage shed outside (yard tools & stuff you don't worry about being stolen, because a lock would be a waste of time to put on it when a can opener could cut through the wall . . )

When I passed on the oldest of my Pentium level hardware to my nephew, I wasn't thinking about eventually being retired and having a lot of time, and comparatively little money . . I never thought I'd want the systems' old enclosures, certainly.

Does DOSbox also emulate a classic era WinTel system with a way to run Windows inside it, just as well it does for a plain DOS machine?

DOSBOX can run Windows 3.1 fairly well. There's a guide on the forums here on how to set it up. I don't have any Win 3.x games so I haven't tested it thoroughly....

I just barely include any 16-bit Windows in the definition, although I did use Win3.0, Win3.1, and WfWG3.11, before January or February of 1996, when I got around to putting my copy of Win95 on my number one machine, probably being a 486DX/2-66. I kept a particular 386-40 an extra long time, though, so I might not yet have been into 486s then . . I wasn't keeping any kind of PC progress record, and there really have been a *LOT* of PCs go through here!

Anyway, I suppose I had Win95 (OSR2) in mind, not any 16-bit Windows version. Incidentally, I just shocked it into silence (SE440BX won't display the boot menu now. I had three 64 MB DIMMs in it, and one of the three 128s I just tried seems to have been defective, but doesn't show up in POST's count-down).

With only one 128 MB DIMM, W2K was in super slow motion for a while there, until I added a (apparently good) second 128. If I do anything with the 430TX board, assuming it's not bad, I won't bother with any dual-boot because it maxes out at 128, effective, due to the way it works (likely to be slower with more RAM, according to the documentation).

(P. S.) I'm adding this in edit. One of the AWE64s, a CT63-something, was nearby, and the Crystal Sound Fusion chip was not working, so I decided that I could handle some static and fuzziness. If you recall the references to trying three Creative AWE cards in the P5A's ISA slots, all those and the drivers I used produced an undesirable amount of plain noise mixed in with the desired sounds, even ordinary Windows stuff sounded bad.

In the SE440BX, with Win2000's own drivers, the sound effects for Windows are totally clear and free of distortion or noise! I wonder if conflicts of some sort caused them not to be usable, while Turtle Beach's Santa Cruz drivers somehow avoided whatever that conflict was.