I would suggest you read this:
PCI Soundcards for Ultima 7
http://www.it-he.org/sound.htm

Thank you! I'm reading all of this in detail now 😀

Edit: As I suspected, there's almost no PCI sound cards with full native wavetable support in dos 🙁

My suggestion is to buy a MS-DOS machine and ISA sound card. Good luck. 😀

Thanks.. I already have a rather nice machine with ISA & 1952 Mhz CPU, I was just hoping to try PCI and end up with a lot faster system, possibly. I'm pretty much at the wall with the fastest ISA system I can get for a reasonable price at the moment. If I could find a PCI sound card to use, It would open up a whole other range of system choices.

What do you need a fast ISA system for?

@kithylin, to start with, what motherboard are you using exactly?

From my experience, getting pci sound card dos emulation to work on anything newer than a socket 370 pentium 3 motherboard just doesn't work unfortunately. I believe this has to do with if the motherboard supports NMI. I have tested both a sound blaster live and a diamond mx300 with no luck at all. Both these sound cards worked fine in dos using my slot 1 and socket 370 motherboards but failed on my socket 478 and 775 motherboards.

I do have to say though, as much as the sound blaster dos emulation was fine using these cards, pci sound cards are just not as compatible as an isa sound card. For example, the sound blaster live dos emulation would crash my day of the tentacle, fate of atlantis and Sam and max games but worked perfectly using my awe 64 gold. Might have something to do with games with speech though but either way, you're better off using an isa sound card if you have the available slots.

What system choices would a pci sound card give you that an isa sound card wouldn't?

PeterLI wrote:

What do you need a fast ISA system for?

Hopefully to play ms-dos games in VESA/SVGA modes at decent frame rates, while also having good sound quality. And I only have fast ISA systems because of the lack of compatible PCI cards for DOS, so.. that's the obvious reason why.

borgie83 wrote:

@kithylin, to start with, what motherboard are you using exactly? […]
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@kithylin, to start with, what motherboard are you using exactly?

From my experience, getting pci sound card dos emulation to work on anything newer than a socket 370 pentium 3 motherboard just doesn't work unfortunately. I believe this has to do with if the motherboard supports NMI. I have tested both a sound blaster live and a diamond mx300 with no luck at all. Both these sound cards worked fine in dos using my slot 1 and socket 370 motherboards but failed on my socket 478 and 775 motherboards.

I do have to say though, as much as the sound blaster dos emulation was fine using these cards, pci sound cards are just not as compatible as an isa sound card. For example, the sound blaster live dos emulation would crash my day of the tentacle, fate of atlantis and Sam and max games but worked perfectly using my awe 64 gold. Might have something to do with games with speech though but either way, you're better off using an isa sound card if you have the available slots.

What system choices would a pci sound card give you that an isa sound card wouldn't?

You've already said it, if I could figure out how to get a PCI sound card with decent quality working in true mode dos in a PCI system, then the choices would probably be almost endless? anything from the mid-range P4 systems up to current stuff if I wanted to try. I have a sound blaster live too and I've tried to get it working in DOS in, hmm.. AMD-754, AMD-939, P4-478, 775, many fast systems, but it never would work right in any of them.

Do you have any idea -why- sound blaster live emulation software doesn't work on these modern systems? Because I have two different Live! series cards here, if I could figure out how to get one of those working in a modern system that'd be great.

Ultimately it just may not be possible to have wavetable support under dos for any PCI sound card ever, at least in more faster / modern systems.

kithylin wrote:

Do you have any idea -why- sound blaster live emulation software doesn't work on these modern systems? Because I have two different Live! series cards here, if I could figure out how to get one of those working in a modern system that'd be great.

Probably because these motherboards dropped support for Non-Maskable interrupts. The last Motherboard I have that supported SB-Live pure DOS emulation was a KT400 one from MSI. (In storage for years now)

You could also consider lowering your expectations regarding resolutions and FPS, and enjoy them the way they run on a Pentium III. Most DOS games are 320x200 after all. 640x480 is already hi-res in the DOS era.
On the other hand, we all pursue weird things here. 🤣

Yeah.. I know I'm pursuing odd things here and It's probably a waste of time trying, but well. I don't know how to explain it. It's kind of a thing of all these years I've always played dos games and seen that VESA setting there, and been like "I wonder what that looks like." But almost every system I ever owned all through out that era never could run it well, most systems I tried it on, even 640x480 would result in 1-4 FPS and unplayable.

Now a days a lot of this fantastically fast hardware for these older systems is really utterly dirt cheap these days (I scored my voodoo3 3000 AGP card for one of my systems last year for $7.55 after taxes) so if I can just maybe figure out what works.. maybe I could find something affordable and enjoy some VESA modes I've never seen before.

So bottom line is you're saying most of the newer chipsets dropped NMI and no sound card will work on em no matter what we do? That's sort of a relief to know, I can stop wondering and trying then. Maybe I can try and focus instead on figuring out what the last chipset to support NMI is and find a system based around that.

What about nforce3-150 maybe?

The Vortex 2 cards have full wavetable support under DOS. Many can also drive an external MIDI module.

For DOS games in 640 x 480 I would start with a Pentium 3 system and see how you go. Make sure you run FASTVID or other utilities to boost graphics performance.

P3 boards pretty much always come with an ISA slot.

What games in particular do you want to run? Some games might have support for 3D cards like Voodoo as well.

You might want to have a look at the ALS-4000 thread : The ALS4000 PCI Sound Card - PCI SB Compatibility in Newer Systems

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The Vortex 2 cards have full wavetable support under DOS. Many can also drive an external MIDI module. […]
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The Vortex 2 cards have full wavetable support under DOS. Many can also drive an external MIDI module.

For DOS games in 640 x 480 I would start with a Pentium 3 system and see how you go. Make sure you run FASTVID or other utilities to boost graphics performance.

P3 boards pretty much always come with an ISA slot.

What games in particular do you want to run? Some games might have support for 3D cards like Voodoo as well.

Most of the "newer" ones, duke3d, quake, R.O.T.T., BLOOD, Descent2, etc.

Malik wrote:

You might want to have a look at the ALS-4000 thread : The ALS4000 PCI Sound Card - PCI SB Compatibility in Newer Systems

Did you have any success with OPL2/3 in newer games with this sound card?

The gigabyte socket 370 motherboards are great and some support tualatin 1.4ghz pentium 3 CPUs. The ones that don't can still be used with this cpu using a pin modded pentium 3 found here:

http://m.ebay.com/itm?itemId=281238323137&roken=cUgayN

I personally use this cpu and it works great and is about the most powerful cpu you're going to find to use on a motherboard that supports NMI (unless you use industrial boards which I don't know much about). This way you get to use your sound blaster live pci sound card combined with a powerful cpu. Your voodoo 3000 will go great with this system.

You can have a look at my build in this thread which might give you some ideas.

My latest Windows 98 Pentium 3 rig.

kithylin wrote:

Most of the "newer" ones, duke3d, quake, R.O.T.T., BLOOD, Descent2, etc.

Well Quake and Descent 2 can run on 3DFX Voodoo.

Duke3D runs fine at 640 x 480 on a decent Pentium 3 machines. I would imagine the same goes for the other games.

I really think you should build a P3 machine based on the BX440 with a 1 GHz CPU and FastVID. Likely it will do everything you want.

I'm sorry, I think everyone here for some reason is misunderstanding all of this. I have another thread about VESA performance, that is -NOT- the point of this one. I started this separate thread -ONLY- to discuss PCI sound cards with full dos support in faster systems. That is, P4 and newer, AMD 754 (maybe 939) and newer, or current-gen modern systems, to try and get proper dos sound on it.

And I'm interested in SVGA/VESA modes well beyond 640x480, at least 1280x1024 in several games I've found support for and a few others, so most definitely a P3 (even with a 1.4 Tualatin chip) isn't going to be anywhere near fast enough. I already have an AthlonXP chip @ 1952 Mhz and that's not even fast enough for 1280x1024 in some games.

It's just I've had to settle on a system with ISA because after years and years of searching, I have never been able to find a fully sb16 compatible / OPL2/OPL3 wavetable compatible real mode dos card for any modern system. I've tried emulators and vmware, and none of those work either. Through this thread I've learned that it may be impossible on newer systems though due to lack of IRQ support so this entire search may be futile anyway.

It seems (to me) that if any such sound card ever does exist it'll be an exact 1 model from 1 maker type thing, possibly difficult to locate too.

Also regarding voodoo (which is kind of off-topic on this thread, but I'll reply to it anyway):
Also I've seen the voodoo version of Doom2 and it looks horrendous compared to 1280x1024 vesa mode, in my opnion. It (voodoo mode) only runs in 640x480 and can't be forced higher than that.

There's a 3dfx / glide version of BLOOD but it's highly unstable and also looks far worse (also forced at 640x480) than 1280x1024 VESA mode does, and it crashes frequently and is unfinished / unstable.

I do agree with Mau1wurf1977 regarding a 440BX motherboard. Overall great compatibility. I only recommended the socket 370 because I thought you wanted to use a more powerful cpu.

@Mau1wurf1977, I use a Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard in my Pentium 2 rig. I've checked the cpu support for this motherboard but the 1ghz 100FSB Pentium 3 cpu is not listed. Have you got any experience with this motherboard and if so, have you tried a 1ghz cpu in it?

The boards I have are from AOpen and Gigabyte. And maybe it was a Celeron, I can't remember anymore 😀

But anything around 700 to 900 MHz will do the trick. Any more performance and you really need the 133 MHz FSB, but here it gets hard finding an ISA slot. I found the VIA chipset boards very weak when it came to high resolution graphics under DOS.

So I always try to stick with Intel.

I do admit I would like to try a high-end P3 system some day for the hell of it, and I have spent several days and searched for one on ebay. It seems to be rather difficult (almost impossible?) to find Socket 370 boards that support the 1.4 ghz, 512KB, 133 FB Tualatin CPU, and (hopefully) supports a little overclocking too. At last not in the $75 or less range. That's kind of another topic though.. maybe I'll make a topic on that in a little while and see if folks can spot something on ebay that I don't, some how.

Start with a Slot 1 BX440 first. They should be easy to find. I recommend going with a "package" that comes with board, RAM and CPU or a complete PC. Saves you a lot of money on shipping.