I think you are seeing sound driver limitations. The VXD drivers are only accepting two simultaneous sounds/channels. Vortex and other hardware accelerated PCI cards usually offer many hardware streams and so allow more to play at once. SBLive cards on VXD drivers have a panel for setting how many wave streams they expose. If I remember right, WDM changes behavior by moving the mixing into the OS, so a driver's limitations are no longer an issue. There is also the Windows Directsound acceleration slider that controls whether Directsound does things in software or uses the driver features, but I believe that will only affect Directsound usage.

Not all PCI sound cards have hardware acceleration. Ensoniq AudioPCI is limited to 2 sounds on at least some of the VXD driver releases.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have only been testing DOS games in my Socket 7 machine with the ESS 1868f and the SB Live. Since last night I've done some more testing and found that the SB Live can play more than one Wave stream at once even with VXD drivers, so if I disable the ESS and use the SB Live's SB16 emulation then CD audio streaming in DOS games still works.

Windows games however will not work, even if I set the ESS as the preferred sound device in the Multimedia Control Panel, and the SB Live as the Analog Audio output device in Daemon Tools (or vice-versa). If I alt-tab out the game the music will be playing, but as soon as I go back in it mutes it. So the solution of having two sound cards only works for DOS games.

So my questions now are:

1. Are there any ISA sound cards that can do two Wave streams at once, or is it just a PCI thing?
2. Are there any other sound cards besides the Vortex that support CD audio streaming in Windows games using VXD drivers?

APT97 wrote on 2024-11-01, 17:23:

1. Are there any ISA sound cards that can do two Wave streams at once, or is it just a PCI thing?

terratec EWS64 allows to set up to 32 wave channels, this is done via the card's synth/DSP chip.

But those are sounds only from the local memory on the card. The ISA interface is still providing only one single channel, and it is up to the driver to software mix several together. I have only seen one ISA ESS chip advertise capability of two simultaneous PCM outputs on hardware level, each using its own DMA channel. Techincally YMF71x can do one WSS output and one SB output since the two can use separate DMA channel and it is how it provides softsynth MIDI in DOS games under Windows.

The Interwave cards like the GUS pnp provide one DirectSound voice on the codec and 4 additional DirectSound voices on the synth chip in Windows 98. That way you can play a mp3 file and hear the annoying navigation sounds all at the same time 🤣.

There is a catch, though. All that data has to go over the ISA bus and it slows the system down, compared to using something like a Sound Blaster Live that is on the PCI bus.

I am troubleshooting my own related issue to this discussion. I have a single sound card in my retro pc, a vibra 16 (SB16). I currently use the official Creative VXD drivers for SB16 in Win9x, which works great... except of course with running redbook audio for dos games running from virtual discs mounted through Daemon tools.

I guess my trouble might be that I need a compatible WMD driver? I found this topic Sound Blaster 16 WDM Drivers (attached). Incompatible with DOS games. Please help. in which a user found one from a shifty sounding Russian source, but according to his own description, it didn't work for him with dos games, so I haven't tried it. Another user in that topic posted a copy of the official creative VXD drivers and said he's never had problems with CD audio through daemon tools while using them, but of course, when I use these, they don't seem to fix that issue on my end. Any suggestions on what I might try next to try and get redbook audio going for dos games through daemon tools with my card? For what its worth, I can play redbook audio from the mounted disc image in something like a windows CD player app, but it won't work when running a Dos game like Carmageddon or Ignition.