The ESS should be much better sounding for FM. I'd probably recommend it as the DOS card out of those two, not much reason to use one for sfx and the other for music. You should be able to get them both going at once

Agree with bertrammatrix,

SBLive in dos is better then nothing but don't think anyone has ever said its amazing.

The ESS will be much better in dos.
You can 2 (or more) soundcards installed. You can either have it disabled in Windows Device manager or just make sure the Live is the primary playback sound card.
I doubt you'll need the Live! in dos but I have a menu allowing me to select if I want to use the SBLive! or my ISA card in dos... just in case.
In dos soundblaster effects will sound the same on either card, I wouldn't bother about splitting opl on 1 card and sound effects on another

G40 wrote on 2025-10-30, 14:21:

Hey guys, […]
Show full quote

Hey guys,

Have just configured a machine for retro gaming with a Soundblaster Live - installed custom drivers following this guide: Guide: Installing Windows 9x and DOS drivers on Sound Blaster Live! cards (version 3.1)

Basically it seems to work well - older dos-based games such as Day of the Tentacle work and so does newer stuff such as Unreal. That said there are a couple of Creative drivers missing in device manager but I think these are likely to be joystick or MIDI related - so far they haven't caused any issues...

I am however finding FM emulation a bit nasty on the Soundblaster and I'm conscious that the ESS (Terratec?) card I have stashed would do a much better job.

Can I install it alongside the Live? Would it be better to disable Live DOS drivers altogether and just use the ESS for DOS, or use the ESS for OPL3/AdLib and the Sound Blaster for sound effects?

Anyone have experience?

Cheers!

i use an SBlive and its a great card with very good compatibility. the fm synth is not the worst ive heard but its also no the best, for FM i want genuine sounding yamaha opl3, and for that a cheap cmedia CMI8738 will do the job, only downside with the 8738 is soundblaster sfx doesnt work on chipsets without ddma under pure dos though fm synth works fine.

i use the SBlive for sfx and GM, and the CMI8738 for adlib/opl3. i plan to replace both with a yamaha XG when i find one at a reasonable price, last one i saw on ebay was £150 🤣

Thanks guys!

DudeFace wrote on 2025-10-31, 17:11:

G40 wrote on 2025-10-30, 14:21:

Hey guys, […]
Show full quote

Hey guys,

Have just configured a machine for retro gaming with a Soundblaster Live - installed custom drivers following this guide: Guide: Installing Windows 9x and DOS drivers on Sound Blaster Live! cards (version 3.1)

Basically it seems to work well - older dos-based games such as Day of the Tentacle work and so does newer stuff such as Unreal. That said there are a couple of Creative drivers missing in device manager but I think these are likely to be joystick or MIDI related - so far they haven't caused any issues...

I am however finding FM emulation a bit nasty on the Soundblaster and I'm conscious that the ESS (Terratec?) card I have stashed would do a much better job.

Can I install it alongside the Live? Would it be better to disable Live DOS drivers altogether and just use the ESS for DOS, or use the ESS for OPL3/AdLib and the Sound Blaster for sound effects?

Anyone have experience?

Cheers!

i use an SBlive and its a great card with very good compatibility. the fm synth is not the worst ive heard but its also no the best, for FM i want genuine sounding yamaha opl3, and for that a cheap cmedia CMI8738 will do the job, only downside with the 8738 is soundblaster sfx doesnt work on chipsets without ddma under pure dos though fm synth works fine.

i use the SBlive for sfx and GM, and the CMI8738 for adlib/opl3. i plan to replace both with a yamaha XG when i find one at a reasonable price, last one i saw on ebay was £150 🤣

Not really considered the CMI8738 before but watching a couple of videos I have to say I like the way it sounds, it seems to be a good cheap option.

I bought the ESS for music making / MIDI sequencing / chiptune applications - the FM chip sounds very nice and clean but for retro gaming perhaps it's not the most authentic sounding card.

I'm kicking myself for selling the YMF-724 card I had not long ago. For music making I found it crude sounding in comparison to the ESS but it would probably also be a better bet than the ESS for old games. At the time I was just trying not to accumulate too much stuff... Current prices are crazy!

Struggled with this... have been messing about for hours - and am now back to square one (well almost - see below) using the SBlive.

First attempt at installing the ESS alongside the Live resulted in a broken SBlive install - Device Manager reporting that the Creative card was now using ESS drivers.

I then decided to cut my losses - remove the SBlive and concentrate on getting the ESS to work. I initially got audio under Windows but no DOS drivers showing - I realised I'd used the "wrong" drivers - it was showing as a WDM card, with no DOS device.

At this stage I tried running Gods. Interestingly I got some audio/samples during the opening credits which hadn't played when using the SBlive - but no OPL3 - when I'd run it with the Creative card I only got the FM sound.

Then found the correct drivers but struggled to get them to install as Windows kept reverting to the newer WDM drivers. In the end manually specified the correct driver file which worked - I now had all the dos drivers showing.

Tried Gods again - this time only FM, nice sound but was out of time (I think because the game was attempting to play the digital audio I'd heard previously).

Then tried Day of the Tentacle. Was OK previously but wouldn't boot up at all with the ESS drivers installed. Tried Monkey Island 2 - same thing, it hung at a blank screen.

At this stage I decided perhaps the SBLive wasn't such a bad card after all! Pulled the ESS and manually removed references in config.sys and autoexec.bat

Installed the SBLive - it automatically found the correct drivers under windows but I removed and reinstalled the DOS drivers via the setup utility.

First test for the Creative card was Gods, timing issue cured, but still no samples played back in the intro sequence. FM not as nice obviously!

Following further testing it seems machine is back to normal with the Live apart from one thing - no SFX audio in Day of The Tentacle - when it tries to play back speech the game gets stuck. Previously it ran OK although it did hang once or twice towards the end of speech sections. Also it has always reported a low memory error at boot up. A test with Sam and Max hit the Road from the same CD confirms the audio is fine with that game...

I dont play the first 2 Lucas Arts games you mentioned so not really sure, after quick google using scummvm?
Both are popular games so no doubt someone here will know better.

For Gods it seems like it needs the soundcard to be IRQ7, Maybe this is true for the above 2 games as well?
GODS Intro Music - Sound card roundup

With DOS games, relying on auto resource configuration IMO often ends with an unusable setup. Especially with titles like DOTT that expect the sound card to be at DMA1 only or Gods that expect IRQ7 only.

It's unclear if you are running DOS apps in the 9x environment or using pure DOS - I will assume the former

Take the SBLive out, and once the SOLO1 is installed, go into the device manager properties and go to the resources tab, uncheck use automatic resources. Force the card to be at base address 220, IRQ7 and DMA1. If you are using the SOLO1 for any General MIDI tasks also force the MIDI address to 330. The hardware resources are unfortunately not labelled so you just have to go, well this hardware address has the options for 220, 240, 260, 280 so that's the base address. This hardware address has options for 300, 310, 320, 330 so that's the MIDI base address.

When setting the IRQ to 7 it will probably tell you that there is a conflict with the ECP printer port, it's OK it will reassign to IRQ5 on next reboot. Some cards will have multiple DMAs and IRQs and often it's impossible to tell which one is the primary playback one inside the resources tab so you might have to do a little bit of trial and error. Usually the first DMA/IRQ is the playback and the second is record.

Once the SOLO1 has settled in and is working as expected with the manually assigned resources, then you can re-install the SBLive! and it will find new resources automatically around the SOLO1, which is fine because windows apps no longer care about what underlying resources are being used. Remove the SB16/DOS emulation if it's still installed as it will probably conflict with the SOLO1.

@NeoG very informative post, thank you.

NeoG_ wrote on Today, 07:14:

It's unclear if you are running DOS apps in the 9x environment or using pure DOS - I will assume the former

Correct assumption!

chinny22 wrote on Today, 01:53:

For Gods it seems like it needs the soundcard to be IRQ7, Maybe this is true for the above 2 games as well?
GODS Intro Music - Sound card roundup

Good find, thank you!

I thought I would have a play with the settings for the Creative card to "prove" the above before swapping cards.

Can confirm that forcing the card to DMA1 has cured the speech issue with DOTT, which is brilliant, so thank you!

I didn't have any luck setting it to use IRQ7 - any attempts to alter the setting resulting in a "this resource setting cannot be modified" message.

It's true that currently the parallel port is set to IRQ7 - and the only other IRQ available for it would conflict with the USB interface - so I did try disabling parallel in Bios - still it's not possible to set the IRQ manually. I think perhaps this is a quirk of the SBlive?

I did wonder about swapping slots and seeing what would happen but perhaps it's better to see if switching IRQs is possible with the Solo1

Will update if I get any further. Might just play some games tonight though!

Just had a little mess about with the Solo1. No Joy.

It defaulted to DMA1 on install but I could not force it to use IRQ7. Same message from device manager. I managed to set the hardware addresses as suggested as far as I could tell.

Despite being configured for the game correctly I got the same blank screen on boot from DOTT.

I noticed that after disabling the printer driver the USB interface started using IRQ7 so tried disabling that but the ESS was still stuck on IRQ5.

Tried a different slot which did nothing to IRQs but did make Windows decide it wanted to use the WDM driver.

As predicted no samples in Gods.

Have gone back to the Live. Stuck on IRQ10 but apart from the (very minor) Gods issue it works without fault. Shame the OPL3 emulation is poor but generally gaming on the machine is fun and it seems pretty compatible with a range of titles and eras.

I welcome bright ideas but I'm inclined to give up on the ESS for this application - I'd prefer "real" OPL3 anyway...

Sometimes you have to scroll through a couple of the hardware profiles from the dropdown list before one will let you change a specific parameter. For the SB Live emulation, make sure you are changing the hardware resources of the SB16 emulation device and not for the Live card itself