would be better if its accessable in dos, and opl2/3 compatible.
i know yamaha724/744/754 does, but the dos driver is somewhat troublesome, on my board it simply can't detect/initialize. i also suspect if that dos driver depends on win95/98 installed on your harddisk.
i've heard good things about the als4000, I want one myself 🤣
Regarding the ALS4000 PCI Sound Cards : Try looking at this thread : The ALS4000 PCI Sound Card - PCI SB Compatibility in Newer Systems.
I'm also in the process of trying out the Aureal3D card (Vortex 1) which has native dos and win3.x support. Will post the results soon.
aureal, ensoniq and some other cards may work in dos, but don't have a real fm synthesize. they just use their wavetable synth to fake the fm playback, and the performance is inaccurate to the original opl2/3.
There are heaps of threads in the archive, just a bit tricky to find them 😁
If you are dealing with a PCI system, it's likely quite modern (in retro terms) with a Pentium 3/4 or an AMD Athlon...
So I would use this machine to focus on the later DOS games that used General Midi for music and Sound Blaster 16 for speech and sound effects. These modern games are highly compatible with PCI sound cards.
A cheap candidate is the Ensoniq AudioPCI and it's Creative siblings. IMO excellent General Midi and high quality digital audio (even SPDIF if you want) for a very low price. Downside is that it doesn't work with all games because it needs EMS memory.
The Aureal Vortex 2 card is also very good. But it doesn't come with onboard Midi, so you need to purchase a Midi daughterboard.
For games that use FM there is simply no way around building a dedicated machine with ISA slots. It's as simple as that...
All the modern games support Midi. Either through MT-32 or General Midi. It's really only the early games that have no Midi support at all.
wrote:There are heaps of threads in the archive, just a bit tricky to find them :D […]
There are heaps of threads in the archive, just a bit tricky to find them 😁
If you are dealing with a PCI system, it's likely quite modern (in retro terms) with a Pentium 3/4 or an AMD Athlon...
So I would use this machine to focus on the later DOS games that used General Midi for music and Sound Blaster 16 for speech and sound effects. These modern games are highly compatible with PCI sound cards.
A cheap candidate is the Ensoniq AudioPCI and it's Creative siblings. IMO excellent General Midi and high quality digital audio (even SPDIF if you want) for a very low price. Downside is that it doesn't work with all games because it needs EMS memory.
The Aureal Vortex 2 card is also very good. But it doesn't come with onboard Midi, so you need to purchase a Midi daughterboard.
For games that use FM there is simply no way around building a dedicated machine with ISA slots. It's as simple as that...
All the modern games support Midi. Either through MT-32 or General Midi. It's really only the early games that have no Midi support at all.
yeah your idea is reasonable, but i just want to KNOW which cards are kind enough to retain a fm synth engine in the pci era.
FM801-based cards have DOS drivers and FM synthesis. It's not a real OPL3 though.
If you happen to have a SB-Link / PC-PCI connector on your motherboard and on your YMF7*4 card, you can make the DOS Drivers work smoothly by attaching a small SB-LINK cable.
Illustration
--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul
wrote:If you happen to have a SB-Link / PC-PCI connector on your motherboard and on your YMF7*4 card, you can make the DOS Drivers work smoothly by attaching a small SB-LINK cable.
Illustration
yeah i knew about that sblink thing, but its so rare that i have never seen a cable or anyone using it in my life. 😢
