Retrorepair wrote on 2023-04-15, 21:24:
To address the stereo thing, Fast Tracker 2 seems to output stereo with this card. If that can surely games can too?
Of course, if one software product can output stereo on that card, another software product that tries the same way to output stereo can also do it. On AZT 1605-based cards, there are two ways to output digital sound: Either you bypass the AZT 1605 and directly program the AD1848 digital sound playback chip, or you interface with the AZT 1605 and have the AZT 1605 set up the AD1848 to play sound. The programming interface of the AD1848 is often called "Windows sound system" or "Microsoft sound system", because the hardware solution suggested by Microsoft to get 16-bit duplex 48kHz stereo audio for Windows multimedia applications was an ISA card with the AD1848 and some simple glue logic to route the IRQ and DMA signals to software-programmable ISA pins. You can select the I/O base address of the AD1848 using the setup program for your Sound Galaxy (default is 534), and configure many modern applications to use this card in WSS mode. This will result in the capability to play back 16-bit stereo sound.
On the other hand, at I/O address 220 (unless you reconfigured the SB base address) you interface with the sound blaster emulation built into the AZT 1605. This chip translates SB 2.0 commands into the necessary programming of the AD1848 chip, so software that expects a SB 2.0 can play back digital sound with this card, without needing to support the AD1848 interface. The AZT 1605 does not support SB Pro stereo, though.
TL;DR: If you can choose WSS/MSS in your game, you can get stereo sound. If your game only supports SB / SB Pro (and maybe SB16), this card will play back mono.