First post, by athlon-power
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I am now in possession of US$36 which can be totally dedicated to vintage hardware. (I still need to buy a Display Port to DVI cable adapter to use the second monitor on my main setup but eh.. that can wait).
Anyways, I'm looking to buy a sound card for my early 1999 machine; this will be one of the few times in which I don't plan on buying hardware released close to 1999, rather, I'm comfortable buying hardware released as early as 1992 and up, for compatibility's sake. The current sound card I have is a Crystal 4281 PCI, so I've been wanting a sound card upgrade for a while now, so much so that I would even keep using that Intel i740 card for the 2 or 3 more months until I am able to get sufficient funds to upgrade to a better video card in the future.
My main thing is that I want to play DOOM (though this can really apply to any game that uses direct MIDI synthesis): I want a soundcard that it can use to generate actual MIDI audio instead of that General MIDI synthesis stuff Windows 98 has (it would also allow me to play DOOM in DOS, without Windows at all, which is something else I kind of want to be able to do).
I would get a SoundBlaster 16, but with the US$32 limit, and the fact that I have to have something that's not going to hang on me - like I've read that some SoundBlaster 16/AWE cards do - and still work with things such as DOOM, it makes things a little difficult as I have to admit that I don't know much about SoundBlaster 16 cards other than the fact that I want an ISA model (again, so DOOM can make use of it in general DOS).
I'm even open to buy any SoundBlaster compatible cards that are decent.
I also want a card that has decent digitized(?) sound, for Windows 98, .WAV/.MP3 music use, and games such as Half-Life, Quake, etc. I'm not sure of the proper term right now, as I'm excited now to be able to upgrade to something that works a whole lot better than that terrible Crystal card, so this may come off as rushed and, for lack of a better term, not very well thought-out.
Where am I?