This card should have it all:

Perfect ISA soundcard, in theory

I have it myself - but the brand of my card is "Philips". Anyway it sounds good, better than the usual YMF-71x ISA cards. (With the later YMF-724 and above PCI cards it's a different thing.)

What's the model number of your card?

Actually I haven't installed the card. It is lying around... somewhere...
But when I look at my drivers collection, the model number could be PCA70PS. Anyway model numbers can be tricky when it comes to cheap consumer cards. I have seen gerwin's card on ebay, labeled as Acer Magic S23, but it was lacking the OPL. CS4232 didn't have the OPL implemented, but the later versions (CS4235, CS4236 a.s.o) did, so it might be that the manufacturer of acer (and Philips) slightly changed the chipset without notice, as the capabilites of the card remained the same.

There is a card on ebay called S23a, but like you said, it uses a later version of the CS chipset with integrated cheesy (cheesier?) sounding OPL3. It's hard to believe I'm having a hard time finding these things, because they must have made tons of them. I guess I'll just have to be patient and one will pop up eventually.

I think you were correct about your Philips model number. Is it exactly the same card as the Acer? I wasn't able to track down any of those either unfortunately.

I did find one card based on CS4232. It is called Reveal SC500 Rev 3. Unfortunately it lacks a wave blaster header and I can't verify if it has a real OPL3 or a clone.

I recently got an Addonics YMF-718-S based card, and I can't get it to work with my Hercules Dynamite Power ET4000W32P based VLB card. This is most unfortunate. The system just won't boot up or even give BIOS S.O.S. I hope I can have better luck with a CS4232 based card.

I keep seeing these Crystal soundcards on ebay with an empty PLCC socket on them:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Crystal-Sound-S-16WP2-L-C … =item562944cd25

Does anyone know what goes into that socket?

I figured what goes into the mystery socket on that card. It's a CS9236 wavetable chip. I guess it must be similar to the CS9233 with the RAM, ROM and support chips integrated.

http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheets2/42/424233_1.pdf

Have you guys seen these before? I think this chip is what separates the AW37 and AW37 Pro cards in the Aopen/Acer line up.

I just bought an Aopen AW35/37 card (the non-pro version without wavetable). Ideally I would have wanted an S23, but I've been looking pretty hard for a few months and came up empty handed, so I finally caved in and bought a Crystal card with integrated clone OPL3. I've heard the comparisons between OPL3 and CQM, and quite honestly I couldn't tell much difference. How does Crystal's version of OPL3 compare to the real deal?

What's interesting, is that the datasheets for the CS4235 and 4237 chip indicate that while they do indeed have integrated FM synthesis, they still have the ability to use an external device. Infact, the cs9233 wavetable chip also has its own integrated FM, so I wonder in a card like the Acer S23A (CS4237B + CS9233) which chip is providing the FM.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I figured what goes into the mystery socket on that card. It's a CS9236 wavetable chip. I guess it must be similar to the CS9233 with the RAM, ROM and support chips integrated.
Have you guys seen these before? I think this chip is what separates the AW37 and AW37 Pro cards in the Aopen/Acer line up.

Very plausible!. at first I was thinking the socket has to few pins for anything else but an eeprom, but the CS9236 has just as few pins (28 or 44). The yamaha YMF704 is a similar wavetable chip but has 100 pins.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I just bought an Aopen AW35/37 card (the non-pro version without wavetable). Ideally I would have wanted an S23, but I've been looking pretty hard for a few months and came up empty handed, so I finally caved in and bought a Crystal card with integrated clone OPL3. I've heard the comparisons between OPL3 and CQM, and quite honestly I couldn't tell much difference. How does Crystal's version of OPL3 compare to the real deal?

It seems CS4232 based cards are much more rare than the other chipsets. I got my S23 from spain, it was the only one I ever saw for sale.
The card gave me a headache because I wanted it to be fully functional in Windows 2000 as well, but the MPU-401 can only be used after initialization in Dos. I wasted quite some time to conclude this. The CS4236B does not have this annoyance.
From what I remember the CS4235/36/37 FM is OK, being on third place of OPL3 clones, after C-Media and ESS. But I need to redo this comparison properly.
I see the AW35 has no wavetable header equipped, does the AW37 have one?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

What's interesting, is that the datasheets for the CS4235 and 4237 chip indicate that while they do indeed have integrated FM synthesis, they still have the ability to use an external device. Infact, the cs9233 wavetable chip also has its own integrated FM, so I wonder in a card like the Acer S23A (CS4237B + CS9233) which chip is providing the FM.

On the terretac Maestro (CS4232 + CS9233) the CS9233 provides the FM. It sounds quite a bit different from a real OPL3.

Hmmm...so it sounds like if I want an S23, I'm going to have to be looking for it in foreign markets. I do remember seeing a lot of S32 cards in the Pentium era in North America, but you're right, I don't ever recall seeing an S23 before.

I haven't quite figured out the difference between AW35 and AW37. Some people say AW35 uses CS4235 and AW37 uses CS4237B. Some people claim it is the other way around. You could be right about the wave table header, but because these cards share the same PCB it's difficult to prove if your theory is correct without some documentation.

I have yet to see a single card with the IDE connector soldered in. If I knew which components to lay down, I wouldn't mind soldering the IDE header onto the card

I can't remember if I found this link here or if I stumbled onto it myself, but I'll post anyway. It has some very good information on crystal chipsets.

http://warped.mentabolism.org/others/crystalos2.html

I got my Acer/Aopen AW37 card in the mail today. It uses the CX4235-XQ3 chip. Unlike the Yamaha, this card was completely painless to install. I think Crystal's version of OPL3 is good enough for my liking as well. I'll probably stick with this card until I can find the S23. At least now I know the crystal chips don't conflict with my hardware.

I wonder if perhaps the EEPROM on the OPL3-SAX card has anything to do with my problems. I was considering to clip it off the card and see what happens. Ideally I'd prefer to just modify the contents of the EEPROM with software, but yamaha didn't provide any software or instructions to do so that I can tell.

I have a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus card that's coming. It has CS4232 + OPL3 and a couple of other goodies. Can the SIMM slots on this thing handle 16mb SIMMs, and if so is it worth my while to fill them?

That is an interesting card you obtained.
here is info on the simms, 4MB ones are the max.
I could not find to many sound banks for the wavefront actually (I have the RIO), IIRC Silent loon has the same soundcard.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/PCsoundcards/TropezPlus-faq/

Shit. What the hell. My Tropez Plus card is having the same problem as the OPL3-SAX. It seems to be some kind of compatibility issue with ET4000W32P. Has anyone ever heard of something like this before?

Anyone have a bios dump of their Dynamite power? I'll need to check my version and see what I have. I'd rather not have to replace this with a different w32p, as this is a particularly nice card.