First post, by keropi
- Rank
- l33t++
Ah, the WF192-XG... A card that I bought in an instant when it appeared in the Greek market , after being a satisfied SW20-PC user 😁 I was passing by a computer store , and in the display they had it! The familiar name drawn my attention, and bought it the next day. Up until then I had no real intention to change my ISA SW20-PC , I knew little of the internet and frankly I was not aware of the PCI advantages in windows or the WF-192XG's existence...
I did enjoy it, and I also noticed that it had better sound output quality than the SBLive! I was forced to buy some years later due to EAX...
So what's the deal with this card? is it just another simple PCI sound card? No. It has some nice features coupled with Yamaha quality:
Digital Audio: 16 Bit DAC, 16 Bit ADC, Full Duplex
Wavetable Synthesis: 128 software channels + 64 hardware ones (hence the 192 in it's name)
Wavetable size: 4MB (2MB in hardware, 2MB in software)
Physical Modeling: 1 Voice (S-VA)
Effects: 8 Types Reverb; 8 Types Chorus, 36 Types Variation, Echo for MIC-in
MIDI Modes: General MIDI, TG 300B (GS Emulation), XG
Software Compatibility: DirectX 5 or later, DirectSound, DirectSound 3D
The card couples as a nice windows midi card (for it's price that is), supporting the well-known XG midi extensions , Sondius-XG (an algorithm developed by Yamaha and Standford University to allow realistic replication of acoustic wind instruments) and finally is DLS compatible.
It is also compatible to SoundBlaster Pro in Windows DOS box while it supports real DOS mode thru PCPO and DDMA. (I still have the PC-PCI connector cable, though I never tested this function...)
So back then , for a nice price you were getting a PCI soundcard with hardware DirectSound3D support, Sensaura technology for pseudo-3D positional audio and a descent half-software midi solution (if you had the cpu power to enable the extra nice features that is - a PentiumII/266 was necessary for the Sondius-XG extensions and a pentium/166mhz for the extra 128 midi channels). Not bad! 😊
So after the SBLive! failures in my VIA Apollo133 mobo, I thought: let's plug the WF-192XG once again!!! I had to find drivers for it, so in a Yamaha sub-site (they have TONS of sites!!!) found the latest WDM ones for Win98SE that I am using. Installed OK, sound is OK! But wait.... Some stuff missing??? Where is the DirectSound3D support? (installed DX8.1b , tried dxdiag got a message that this card DOES NOT have a hardware 3D sound buffer...!) I was puzzled for a second there, and I downloaded POWERYMF , a 3rd party configuration program for that kind of Yamaha cards (now FREE , http://www.yohng.com/powerymf ) only to find out that DirectSound3D option was greyed out.
None of the Yamaha sites had the old 1040 driver version that I was remembering , I *assume* that due to copyrights or other legal issues, they just replaced their drivers with working ones BUT WITHOUT the sensaura/3D extensions. The only solution was to get an old copy of the drivers.
That proved quite a task, to actually get a WORKING copy of said drivers. Finally after downloading with 6kb/sec from a Japanese university ftp server, I got them!
I have mirrored them for anyone interested , those are the WF192-XG drivers , I cannot really guarantee they will work fine in other models/makes cards that use the same chipset: RS DOWNLOAD LINK or MU DOWNLOAD LINK
So what you get with those drivers? Only these many tabs and hardware DirectSound3D support:
* So does it worth it?
IMHO yes, as it is not plagued with SBLive! bugs that lead to problems with older mobos.
* Is it better than Aureal-based cards?
Don't know, I assume Aureal cards would have better 3D positioning and in hardware too, the WF192-XG supports A3D and EAX in software mode AFAIK/AFAIR ...
here are some in-game benchmarks (taken from www.firingsquad.com)
also some winbench benchmarks (from dearhoney.idv.tw)
SBLive! is the best option it appears when it comes to cpu utilization... 😏
More on the matter as I slowly progress 😊