I’m a big fan of the Creative ‘Goldfinch’, which I’ve been using successfully with a Sound Blaster 16 (CT2290) for a while now in this system. The documentation for the Goldfinch suggests that it’s compatible with any Sound Blaster compatible sound card, so I was curious to see how it worked with other cards, primarily in DOS, but also Windows 95 because I load soundfonts into the Goldfinch’s onboard 8MB’s of RAM.

Of the sound cards I tried (SB Pro 2.0, YMF719, a couple of ESS Audio Drives, a Jazz16 based card, and a PAS16), only the PAS16 worked without issue in DOS. The PAS16 + a Goldfinch struck me as a pretty nice combination, so I proceeded to attempt to get it working in Windows 95, but here I ran into a problem – the Goldfinch’s MPU-401 emulation doesn’t work with the PAS16, and thus I can’t use sound fonts.

The PAS16 I have is the Studio model (650-0060-2A), and it’s picked up correctly by the Windows 95 ‘Add new hardware’ auto search. This guide describes the various configuration options provided by the driver, and I needed to use ‘Basic configuration 2’ to get sound blaster emulation working. This is the most complete configuration, but it doesn’t include resources for the PAS16’s MPU-401 device, and I think this is the cause of my issue.

Under the Windows 95 AWE utils dialog, there is an option for ‘Allow MPU401 Emulation on this device’, and this can be set when using the SB16, but will not stay set with the PAS16. My assumption is that the Goldfinch uses the sound card’s MPU-401 functionality to do its emulation, and given I can’t configure it on the PAS16, then the Goldfinch can’t use it.

Does anyone have a) experience configuring the PAS16 in Windows 95, and b) a better understanding of how the Goldfinch utilises the sound card it’s pared with? Is the mixer and MPU-401 relevant to the Goldfinch? They seems to be.

Thanks.