SGM wrote on 2024-10-31, 06:19:

This reminded me that I always see "ERR012: AWE initialization failed." below the AWEUTIL info text, when I boot to Windows 95 (the text behind the cloudy Win95 boot picture). But the card works perfectly fine with Win95 and all the DOS games I played via Win95, and it shows no errors. I have 8 Mb RAM installed on the card.

That seems quite strange. I haven't tried an AWE32 with Windows 95 yet, so I don't know what the effect would be.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-10-31, 06:32:

There are a few DOS games that ship with custom soundfonts, which will be used automatically on AWE cards with sufficient memory. Magic Carpet 2, Hi-Octane and Eradicator are some notable examples.

As I recall, Eradicator can even load .SF2 soundfonts in pure DOS, which is quite rare.

Good to know! Personally, I've never even played any of those games though. I'll do some research and see what others might be out there.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-11-01, 00:08:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-10-31, 06:32:

There are a few DOS games that ship with custom soundfonts, which will be used automatically on AWE cards with sufficient memory. Magic Carpet 2, Hi-Octane and Eradicator are some notable examples.

As I recall, Eradicator can even load .SF2 soundfonts in pure DOS, which is quite rare.

Good to know! Personally, I've never even played any of those games though. I'll do some research and see what others might be out there.

A list already exists 😀
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … pport_AWE_synth

although most only require the default 512kb. I think only Final Fantasy made use of more memory.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-01, 00:26:

A list already exists 😀
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … pport_AWE_synth

I just noticed that the table wasn't sortable, so I changed that. This makes it easier to pick out games which use soundfonts, sort games by year etc.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-01, 00:26:

I think only Final Fantasy made use of more memory.

Eradicator can do that as well. It ships with two soundfonts, a smaller one which takes up just 512 KB, and a larger one which is 2 MB in size. The game checks how much memory your AWE card has, and automatically loads the appropriate soundfont. More details can be found here.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-01, 00:26:

A list already exists 😀
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … pport_AWE_synth

although most only require the default 512kb. I think only Final Fantasy made use of more memory.

Thank you for pointing me to that, saves me a lot of time digging. 😀

Looking at that list there really are very few games that use custom sound fonts. And it looks most of the games I have either played or would play are beyond the specs of this particular PC.

I might save this for when I build my next 6-sound card PC with a Socket 7 / Pentium MMX setup. 😁