First post, by Boohyaka
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi guys,
So this is a bit of a two topics in one, but I remember reading on here some time ago about a tool that was able to test and print out an ISA soundcard capabilities (basically if SBPro/SB16/WSS/Covox/Disney Sound Source etc. is supported). My google-fu has failed me and I haven't been able to find it...so my first question is basically if such a tool does exist or did I dream it?
Secondly this is the occasion to talk about this sound card that has been sitting in a drawer for some month, as it may be a pretty good card after all. Here's a proper picture:
While I could easily find information about the ALS100 chip (and got some great info about it from dionb in one of my first topics on this very website), I had some trouble finding information about this particular card. Yesterday, by sheer luck I ended up on a topic with an archive.org link to that manufacturer's website with catalog scans of their products, and could find that very card and identify it properly for the first time:
So in the end, it is an ASOUND Pro 3D-32PnP as the pictured model is definitely exactly the one I got. That's the most precise and complete information I've ever had about it. Googling all kind of variations of this name gives very few results unfortunately. Looks like it wasn't that popular, while they do have a couple of other cards that were more common it seems (AS004, AS007 (ASOUND Gold) mainly).
According to the specs this is actually a potentially pretty good card, with supposedly proper SB16/SBPro/Adlib compatibility, WSS1 and 2 and the integrated Dream Wavespace samples.
Something that got my attention was the "FM Synthesizer" section of the catalog that mentions "Yamaha OPL3 FM technology". When I first posted about this card, dionb and others mentioned it didn't look like it featured any proper OPL3 or clone (such as LS262) often featured on ALS100 based cards, and that the FM portion was probably handled by the CS9233 chip. As I see no other chip that fits the bill either with my limited knowledge, and the CS9233 apparently supports FM from what I could read, that would make sense. But in that case would it make sense that they mention "Yamaha OPL3 FM technology" in the specs, wouldn't that be deceiving to customers? Obviously I'm not that naive and am sure the marketing from a Taiwanese company in the 90's would be fine with a little "creative interpretation" as long as the proper keywords were on the press release, but still this got me curious and wanting to double-check.
And to loop the loop with my initial question - would there be anything 100% objective to test and benchmark this card for its FM capabilities? Or is it only a subjective matter of "sounding somewhat different" when you listen to it?
In any case I want to test that card a little more in my next build as soon as I'm able to. Thanks to archive.org (again..what an amazing and priceless resource) I was able to find some drivers off their now defunct official website. Unfortunately the website got very few captures (only 13, half of them being 404) and the latest driver package named 3d122696.exe wasn't captured, and googling didn't help either. But I got the previous one from 1 month before. Now I need to figure out how to submit drivers to vogonsdrivers 😀 if this card does what it's supposed to do, that the FM sounds good, and the card isn't too noisy, this will definitely find its place in a build 😀
As a small gift, please take a look at this link, when the Internet was a simpler (and arguably happier) place, and when I could have done a company website in a couple of hours as it wasn't that different from my own geocities page haha