ychh0 wrote on 2020-01-19, 04:38:Yes. It must be bus speed. Normal ISA clock speed is 8MHz I remember. How about 486 system? If the bus speed of 486 system is the same as 8MHz, the bus speed will not be a problem for SB 2.0 in the 486 system, isn’t it?
ISA is 8MHz, period. (Plus/minus a fraction depending on the systems front-side bus and the divider. E.g., 33MHz / 4 is not 8.000, but it'll do.)
The speed issue with early cards is not the bus, it's how fast the sound card's onboard controller responds to commands issued by the CPU. The CPU and the sound card can only speak at 8MHz to each other, but faster CPUs with faster caches will chew through instructions faster than a 286 will. So, it might say "Hey Sound Blaster, you there bro?" and then walk away before the slow SB 2.0 has a chance to say "uhhhh, yup. Iiiii'mmmm heeeerrree alllllright." Or it might give the SB DAC or the OPL2 a list of things to do faster than the DAC or OPL2 can write them down, which overruns them and leads to glitches.
IMO, there is no reason to put more than one Sound Blaster card into a computer. If you want stereo, don't add an SB Pro / SB16 to a Sound Blaster 2.0. Just use the Pro/16. Same for the AWE. An AWE is an SB16 + onboard wavetable MIDI. People talk about the problem of not having true stereo SB Pro compatibility with an SB16/AWE, but if you make a list of all the games that support SB Pro but not native SB16, it will be a short list.
486 + SB16 = <3 Add a Goldfinch or replace with an AWE if you'd like. Stick the SB Pro in your 386 / 486SX. The SB 2.0 goes in a 286 or 386SX.