If only they have clones of SW60XG.... 🙁

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

If only they have clones of SW60XG.... 🙁

What's so special about that card?

@swaaye
[AWE32 isn't any better:
AWE32 and Dark Forces]

Tried it on my ol' rig (IBM PC 330, Intel 430HX, Intel Pentium 200MMX, 128 Mb EDO RAM). On AWE32, AWE64, and some SB Pro compatible+GUS ACE.
The GUS music sounded a lot better. Sounded good on my Yamaha SW20-PC (when it was working!)
🙁

Every Creative wavetable offering is pretty awful for DOS games, IMO... And that doesn't even take into considering the static, pops, clicks and other crap that comes out of those cards. Or how if you attach a SCD-10 or -15 you'll almost certainly have issues with it because the MPU-401 port is bugged on just about every card they've made. They are just not quality products.

I like my Ensoniq Soundscape cards. Their analog circuitry is just so much better. Games simply sound better. If only they had daughtercard headers!

SCD-15 on a Aureal-based card is quite nice tho. Most of them have very decent output quality. I wish they were SB16-complaint, but SBPro is ok and their compatibility is excellent for a PCI card.

5u3 wrote:

Great Hierophant wrote:

Is it not possible to use a Soundfont on an ISA-based AWE product in DOS? If you can load it, you should be able to hear it. Some DOS games should have been able to load their own Soundfont banks.

Nope. As swaaye already mentioned, no useable soundfont loading utility exists for DOS. And I'm not aware of any DOS game using extra soundfonts for their MIDI music on AWE cards.
The GUS suffers from a similar problem, but Gravis at least offered plenty of tools and a free SDK, so its capabilities got a bit more attention in the game world.

I think its time to revise our opinions:

leileilol wrote:

Eradicator does use SF2 for providing high quality sound effects on an AWE32/64. Magic Carpet 2 also has a SF2 used for its midi soundtrack, and it is automatically loaded if you have an AWE32/64 and selected the appropriate driver in its setup program.

I'd have to say these use soundfonts and features of the EMU8k.

I know of no hardware reason why Soundfonts could not be used in DOS.

Yay!

Amigaz wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

If only they have clones of SW60XG.... 🙁

What's so special about that card?

Nothing. Except that it is a stand-alone MIDI card instead of daughterboard. Putting daughterboard on the sound card caused my CH Pro Throttle stops working. Apparently it fucks the 2nd joystick axis function. 🙁

Great Hierophant wrote:

leileilol wrote:

Eradicator does use SF2 for providing high quality sound effects on an AWE32/64. Magic Carpet 2 also has a SF2 used for its midi soundtrack, and it is automatically loaded if you have an AWE32/64 and selected the appropriate driver in its setup program.

I'd have to say these use soundfonts and features of the EMU8k.

I know of no hardware reason why Soundfonts could not be used in DOS.

Yup. Isn't it possible to load Soundfonts in Windows, and playing them back in DOS? You know, just like Thrustmaster joysticks; you can load the mapping configuration in DOS, and you can still use it in Windows games.

Yeah I said earlier that you can load Soundfonts in 9x and then play the games with them. You need to turn on MPU-401 emulation in the AWE control panel and set the game to General MIDI. I believe if you set the game to AWE32 specifically, it will use the awful ROM instead.

It may actually be possible to load the soundfont in 9x and then exit to DOS and still have it in the card's RAM. I think even a warm reboot is safe. I'm not positive, but I seem to recall that working way back when.

One really has to wonder why Creative couldn't just put together a DOS uploader for soundfonts. The lack of hardware MPU-401 support was fascinating too. Probably them wanting to control the market by ignoring Roland's "standard" and defining their own AWE standard. Typical Creative.

The AWE32 did have MPU-401 support just like the Sound Blaster 16. The problem was that the ports could not address the EMU8000 hardware. The reason why is because there was no hardware at the other end of the port to interpret and process midi commands.

ahh k. I would use an AWE32 for my SCD-15 hosting needs if only it worked on there! My AWE, SB32, and 2 SB16s just gave me stuck notes, wrong notes, and other bad things. Nevermind that they have some terrible output circuitry on those Creative cards that gives static, pops, clicks, etc. The people who whined about Live!'s lacking frequency response and IHD resampling nonsense missed out on these babies. 😀

Great Hierophant wrote:

I think its time to revise our opinions:

leileilol wrote:

Eradicator does use SF2 for providing high quality sound effects on an AWE32/64. Magic Carpet 2 also has a SF2 used for its midi soundtrack, and it is automatically loaded if you have an AWE32/64 and selected the appropriate driver in its setup program.

😳 Well, I admit this is news to me. I didn't think it was impossible (there are many demo scene productions using the AWE RAM for tracker music samples), but after checking out dozens of games only supporting the crappy ROM on the AWE, I simply couldn't imagine a game programmer attempting it.

Here is a text file explaining the use of EMU8K RAM-based sound effects in the game Eradicator:

1        SB32, AWE32 AND AWE64 ERADICATOR SOUND CARD SUPPORT INFORMATION
2
3Eradicator has specific support for the above sound cards from Creative Labs.  
4The SB32, Awe32 and the Awe64 cards have a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) 
5created by EMU Systems.  This DSP is a 32/64 voice synthesizer with 3D sound 
6placement capabilities.  
7
8In the sound options menu for Eradicator there is a menu item labeled
9AWE32/64 HI-RES SOUND.  If this feature is enabled and your system has one of
10the cards mentioned above Eradicator will take advantage of this hardware to
11enhance the audio quality of Eradicator.
12
13The Awe32 and Awe64 come with 512K of on board RAM.  The SB32 does not come 
14with any on board RAM but RAM can be added to this card and also to both Awe
15cards (up to 28 Megs).  If you have an SB32, you must add RAM in the form of
16standard SIMM package(s) for Eradicator to take advantage of the cards 3D 
17sound capabilities. See your sound card manual for details. Currently if you 
18try to enable your SB32 it will seem as if the HI-RES sound feature is 
19enabled but you will hear piano, strings and other instruments playing from
20the ROM instead of from the RAM unless RAM has been added to your SB32.
21
22Eradicator uses one of two sound font banks to load sound effects for the game into
23the RAM on the above mentioned cards.  There is a 512K bank named ERAD512K.SF2
24and a 2 Meg. bank named ERAD2MEG.SF2.  Eradicator will automatically load one 
25of these two banks into your sound card based on amount of sound card RAM 
26available.
27
28If you wish to customize these sound font banks with your own .WAV files you
29must use Vienna version 2.0 or greater.  Below is a list of the sound effects
30in the sound font banks.  Note that the division line part way thru the lists
31indicates where sounds for the smaller 512K bank end.
32
33Preset  Name    Description                      Looping
34------ ------- -----------------------------     --------
35  0    TURALRM  TURRET ALARM                       NO
36  1    DRCLOSE  DOOR CLOSE                         NO
37  2    DROPEN   DOOR OPEN                          NO
38  3    EYEDIE   CHARACTER DIES                     NO
39  4    POWERHUM POWER CONDUIT                      YES
40  5    CONVEY   CONVEYER BELT                      YES
41  6    EXPLODE1 EXPLOSION                          NO
42  7    EYEALRM  LIL BUDY EYE ALARM                 NO
43  8    GLASSBRK BROKEN GLASS                       NO
44  9    LSDTREAD LSD TREAD                          NO
45  10   SPIDER   ELENA'S SPIDERS                    YES
46  11   EXPLODE2 EXPLOSION                          NO
47
48  END OF 512K BANK
49  -----------------------------------------------------
50  12   EYEBLINK LIL BUDY EYE BLINK                 NO
51  13   LIFT     ELEVATOR LIKE LIFT                 NO
52  14   BIGBOOM  EXPLOSION                          NO
53  15   FLAME    FLAME POTS                         YES
54  16   WIND     WIND                               YES
55  17   THUNDER  THUNDER                            YES
56  18   ALARM    ALARM                              NO
57  19   BARRELMV BARREL MOVEMENT                    NO
58  20   ZAPS     ELECTRICAL ZAPS                    NO
59  21   AXE      AXE SWING                          NO
60  22   PWRHUM2  POWER CONDUIT                      YES

61  23   GLASS2   BREAKING GLASS                     NO
62  24   SDROPEN  SLIDING DOOR OPEN                  NO
63  25   MNUDOOR  MENU DOOR                          NO
64  26   TURLAS   TURRET LASER                       NO
65  27   GRINDER  MECHANICAL GRINDER                 NO
66  28   GDIE     BOSS GOOR DIE                      NO

Great Hierophant wrote:

I know of no hardware reason why Soundfonts could not be used in DOS.

You are correct. However it took me a while to figure out that there was no way to load the SoundFonts (SBK or SF2) files and just 'leave' them in memory for some other DOS program to use. What ever program loads the AWE32 soundfonts has to stick around since all of the pointers to said SoundFonts are part of the currently running DOS program.

Now, you could of course write a TSR which would load the AWE32 SoundFonts and provide an interface for other programs so they could benefit from the loaded AWE32 SoundFonts that the TSR was controlling. Oh, wait. 😮 Creative did that and called it AWEUTIL.

So your three choices for using better sounding sample in either SBK or SF2 format for the AWE32 family was to either have a game or application which would have a custom loader for SoundFonts for its own use; use the Creative AWEUTIL TSR to load the SoundFonts, provide an NMI activated MIDI interface and for DOS let the somewhat large TSR just 'stay resident' to do its job; or finally as outlined by member swaaye
run Win9x to load the AWE32 SoundFonts and provide an emulated MPU-401 interface to the AWE32 for its Dos VDMs and leave Windows in memory to play your DOS games with SoundFont enhanced AWE32 MIDI.

Here is a an attached DOS app, an AWE32 MIDI player which will use loaded SF2 SoundFont files while the song is playing. The MIDI player is called AWEPLAY and the ZIP file is attached.

dvwjr

Targaff wrote:

Yay!

Congrats!

Got one myself http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem … :MEWN:IT&ih=016

I think it's worth mentioning that protected mode games don't work with AWEUTIL and probably not with the Windows 9x-based MPU401 emulation either. If these games don't have native AWE support, you won't be able to use the synth at all. I believe that was a problem with early versions of Doom.

Tricky cards to use built by the cheap, evil Creative and sold for WAY too much money. 😀

Amigaz wrote:

Got one myself

Heh, I was watching that one and forgot to bid, glad we didn't end up bidding against each other.

Creative should be SHOT for how they handled their monopoly back in the 90s 🙁