VOGONS


First post, by munky

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Hey folks - I'm building my gaming rig (Win98SE) and have this Creative Sound Blaster SB0060 PCI card.

My question is this: its seems as though there are multiple drivers available for this card. Any advantages to one over the others? For example, better sound or better SB16 emulation? Or are they all equal? So far, these are the options I found:

- sblive2.zip from here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/115903-compil … for-windows-9x/
- Sound Blaster Live! ISO from here (will this even work???): Creative Labs Sound Blaster ISA Cards' Drivers Collection (Old Thread)
- Creative's default drivers (SBLiveW9xME.exe or something like that...I'm at work and don't have the PC in front of me)
- Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 ISO from a torrent
- LiveWare! 3.0 ISO (did not detect my card anyway)

The games I'm playing are Wolf3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and ROTT to name a few. I also need joystick support. Thanks for your help!

Reply 1 of 3, by Jorpho

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If I'm not mistaken, driver installation will provide you with two options: VXD or WDM. VXD in theory has better performance and may have improved compatibility in some obscure situations; WDM is much, much more stable.

Either way, the music in DOS games like Wolf3D will sound all wrong if you do not set the sound font correctly. The details escape me at the moment.

Wolf3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and ROTT

There is very, very little point to building a specialized box for any of these games, as there are perfectly reasonable ways to run them on any modern machine with a minimum of difficulty and even with beneficial enhancements if you are so inclined.

Reply 2 of 3, by munky

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Do you have any info on the sound font stuff?

As for the games I listed, running them in Dosbox sounds better than the SB0060 (at least with the drivers I'm currently using). If someone can point me in the right direction to get it sound better, that would be great. It'll have to be Dosbox for now...

Reply 3 of 3, by Jorpho

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If I'm not mistaken (again), you don't even need DOSBox. The source code for each of Wolf3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and ROTT was made publicly available, and all have freely available native Windows ports that should work even better than DOSBox. Chocolate Doom, at least, was specifically made to replicate the original DOS experience as closely as possible.