I have an Iwill KK266 Plus here with onboard CMI8738. The manual lists some " legacy audio SB Pro support". I wonder if this will be worth using over my ESS Audiodrive? I'm not good at all when it comes to old sound cards.

javispedro1 wrote on 2022-04-15, 12:29:

Sorry... what? I am utterly confused, that is an mp3... […]
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Reticular wrote on 2022-04-14, 13:09:

I was wondering, would you be willing to record this track thru 686B?
https://www.mediafire.com/file/r2y18devw6668j … cotex1.mp3/file

Sorry... what? I am utterly confused, that is an mp3...

This thread is about FM synthesis (or rather the software emulation of FM synthesis in these VIA chipsets). We are not really comparing the quality of the PCM output.
But if you want my opinion, the cards you already have are miles better for PCM. They just lack FM synthesis.
But if good quality FM synthesis is what you want, this is not really the good thread either!
Better get a nice software synthesizer (e.g. NukedOPL) or another card with actual hardware FM synthesis (e.g. ISA SoundBlasters).

I am catching the stereo out out of the menitioned soundcards(PCM) and i have a processing technique for finishing a track, but for some reason the sounds you attached sound so good i started wondering how would some of my tracks sound thru that motherboard/chipset/soundchip. That is why i attached an mp3, i would hear the difference for sure but maybe you need a wav or you cant play it thru DOS(now that i am thinking about it).
(i dont need the synth right now, but i will get an OPL3 for sure..)

Anyway, i plan to record outputs from Amiga/Atari etc., but i liked how 686B sounds.

sorry for parachuting in a thread

Hi. I have Matsonic 7188D motherboard but cannot install sound in dos. After running INSTALL it says that there is no VIA sound device detected and VIAUDIO tells that i should enable sound blaster in bios but everything is enabled. No clue what is wrong.

VIA 686B AC'97 audio can't handle too many channels in DOS. Apart from that it isn't bad at all. Definitely usable if ISA slot is not available. Those highly integrated boards are a good choice for DOS games and early Windows 98 games up to about 1999 (which still had software rendering).

javispedro1 wrote on 2022-02-10, 16:46:

Did anyone notice how terrible Monkey Island 2 sounds with VIAFMTSR ?

It sounds like if it was saturated or being clipped, even with everything set at the lowest volume. I'm unsure if this is a VIAFMTSR issue or something else in my setup (it's a T5710).

I think the VIAFMTSR is a very shonky TSR to be honest. It's very unusual for anything AC'97 to have SB Legacy support at all, and we're in SB PCI 128 territory here.
I have had a lot of compatibility issues with VIAFMTSR even on a true EPIA board.

Having said that I haven't had issues with Monkey Island 2 - have you tried forcing a different sound mode on startup?

Just in case someone stumbles upon this like I did, while the documentation says VIAFMTSR.COM is just for FM emulation, in my case without the TSR I did't have FX sounds either (tested this with Duke Nukem 3D setup program).

How did you all get this to work, I can't get any sound to come out in DOS on my Duron machine with an Aopen MK33 mainboard which should have a VIA 686A.

Enabled Legacy Audio and Soundblaster in BIOS. It says that the VIA DOS FM TSR is installed when I boot into DOS and wishes me a good day, but testing with Descent and Duke3D (which work in Win98) give me no sound at all in DOS. Descent even autodetects the card, but no luck.

Ganheddo wrote on 2025-06-28, 19:52:

testing with Descent and Duke3D (which work in Win98) give me no sound at all in DOS. Descent even autodetects the card, but no luck.

This sounds like the mixer is stuck at being muted. As far as I know, recent versions of UNISOUND are able to set up the VIA Soundblaster Emulation, even if the BIOS does not do it, and is also able to unmute the mixer. Give that a try.

There are several better tools now for enabling the Legacy Sound Blaster emulation on the 82C686A/B/VT8231 even if there is no support in the BIOS.

You can use the VIASBCFG tool to initialize the sound hardware
And then oerg866's VIAFMTSR replacement, V97TSR which uses the DOSBox OPL core and is much more accurate than VIA's, and can also be loaded high.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2025-06-29, 01:49:

You can use the VIASBCFG tool to initialize the sound hardware

Probably that is the tool I actually thought of when I suggested to try UNISOUND. Thanks for the link!

Thanks guys, simply running VIASBCFG.COM did the trick! Looks like I need to run it every time, so I put it in autoexec.bat after VIAFMTSR and SET BLASTER. I wonder how this was supposed to be done back then, before they had tools like these. Maybe it's a BIOS issue that it starts muted, or there's a way to set the volume with VIAFMTSR.

Anyway, Descent works great. Duke3D music sounds ass when set to Sound Blaster 16 AWE or 2.0 Pro, but works fine with regular, 2.0 or Pro.

Gonna try and see what I can loadhigh because I do need more conventional memory. Will try V97TSR, even though the readme said something about memory efficiency still being on the todo list.

Edit: VIAFMTSR seems to load high just fine and I am now comfortably above 600k free conventional memory even after loading the CD driver. Let's hope it's all compatible and bug-free when I play the games I want to play.