What video card are you using?

Its a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428-80QC

Should be very much fast enough

Do you have Creative's WaveSynth/WaveGuide software installed?

IIRC, that relies on the CPU and needs at least a Pentium 90 to work correctly, per Creative's readme.

ah that might be it! I have that installed. Yeah then, the awe 64 is probably better suited for a pentium system.

I felt it might have been a little overkill for a 486 even though a fast 100mhz one.

It works great in many games though - Doom 1/2 warcraft 1/2 so it seems some software trigger slowness more than others.

claesbas wrote on 2021-09-21, 22:49:

ah that might be it! I have that installed. Yeah then, the awe 64 is probably better suited for a pentium system.

I felt it might have been a little overkill for a 486 even though a fast 100mhz one.

It works great in many games though - Doom 1/2 warcraft 1/2 so it seems some software trigger slowness more than others.

Some DOS games doesn't run well within Windows and must be run in MS-DOS mode. This slowness also happens on faster computers with that game on Windows regardless of the sound card, you can witness this with the AdLib settings too.

For DOS AWEUTIL will let you use MIDI emulation but has compatibility issues (especially with protected mode games) and only supports SBK for soundfonts. However there is a utility which is a work in progress that attempts to mitigate a major issue with AWEUTIL and it's called DOS32AWE.

claesbas wrote on 2021-09-21, 22:49:

ah that might be it! I have that installed. Yeah then, the awe 64 is probably better suited for a pentium system.

You can uninstall WaveGuide/WaveSynth and still load soundfonts. In that case, you will lose the extra 32 voices that are generated by software, effectively turning your AWE64 into an AWE32.

Personally, I didn't notice any difference in DOS games when doing so.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-09-22, 03:28:

You can uninstall WaveGuide/WaveSynth and still load soundfonts. In that case, you will lose the extra 32 voices that are generated by software, effectively turning your AWE64 into an AWE32.

Personally, I didn't notice any difference in DOS games when doing so.

That software only affects Windows programs and causes digitized sounds to somehow have lower volume. That's the main reason why I find it useless.

Mostly marketing for a refined AWE32 PnP card. 😀

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-09-21, 23:23:

For DOS AWEUTIL will let you use MIDI emulation but has compatibility issues (especially with protected mode games) and only supports SBK for soundfonts. However there is a utility which is a work in progress that attempts to mitigate a major issue with AWEUTIL and it's called DOS32AWE.

So just so that I can understand this a bit better... Does this tool allow med to load Soundfonts sf2 in DOS and use them directly in DOS? I have the SIMMCONN ram extender here with a 32mb dimm installed so I can load those nice large sf2 files (some sound incredible in games like Decent, Warcraft and Doom).

This would solve all my problems as I have no speed issues at all when I run things from DOS instead of Win95 (80% of my games run fine though in Win95).

claesbas wrote on 2021-09-22, 12:56:

So just so that I can understand this a bit better... Does this tool allow med to load Soundfonts sf2 in DOS and use them directly in DOS? I have the SIMMCONN ram extender here with a 32mb dimm installed so I can load those nice large sf2 files (some sound incredible in games like Decent, Warcraft and Doom).

This would solve all my problems as I have no speed issues at all when I run things from DOS instead of Win95 (80% of my games run fine though in Win95).

It will allow you to use soundfonts but not the SF2 ones unfortunately. You must download and use SBK files instead which there aren't many good ones.

To enable the General MIDI emulation in DOS you must execute the following command:

1AWEUTIL /EM:GM

This will load the default General MIDI SBK soundfont which is SYNTHGM.SBK. There are other such as GS (SYNTHGS.SBK) and MT32 (SYNTHMT.SBK), all of them being located on a SFBANK folder within your AWE64 directory. You can also uninstall it when finished (don't restart the computer without using this command prior):

1AWEUTIL /U

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-09-22, 13:03:

It will allow you to use soundfonts but not the SF2 ones unfortunately. You must download and use SBK files instead which there aren't many good ones.

I see! Ok, well its something better. I will check some of the SBK files and see how they sound.

What is the reason for the SF2 limitations briefly? Why are they only working in Windows? I see so many incredible retro developments and with the popularity of AWE64 cards here and all those amazing SF2 files, one could have though a DOS tool would be available. But its probably my wishful thinking and lack of understanding... 😀

claesbas wrote on 2021-09-22, 13:22:

I see! Ok, well its something better. I will check some of the SBK files and see how they sound.

What is the reason for the SF2 limitations briefly? Why are they only working in Windows? I see so many incredible retro developments and with the popularity of AWE64 cards here and all those amazing SF2 files, one could have though a DOS tool would be available. But its probably my wishful thinking and lack of understanding... 😀

The best one I've seen is FINEGM.SBK. You must put the file into the SFBANK folder, rename the original SYNTHGM.SBK to something else and the new one to SYNTHGM.SBK. From now on the new soundfont will be used if you run AWEUTIL with /EM:GM parameter.

As for SF2 soundfonts, technically this should be possible to do it in DOS as there are few games that do it such as Eradicator with custom samples. Wish that there was an enhanced version of AWEUTIL that could do this considering the retro development of sound cards especially the AWE64 Legacy.