And of course the ct3670 could be flashed to an awe64 disabling the IDE. I'm partial to this card as it is the quietest ISA sound blaster I've ever used! Not that I've had more than a couple of them

sydres wrote on 2026-01-24, 02:16:

Thank you fazeshift for your input. For some reason I have had multiple hanging note issues with the audician and am not sure if there is something wrong with it or the drivers. I purchased it sealed in box a couple years ago. I had used it next to the ct3670 for opl3 stuff. The ct3670 almost always ran the Roland GS and Yamaha modules perfectly. But not everything I threw at the RA-50 because of its mt-32 capabilities and I didn't want to run softmpu so I got the picogus rather than paying for an mpu card. You might be right about the 16 bit stuff not being worth the difficulties of the creative pnp stuff.

Oh, I did not realize the Yamaha/Audician cards had any MIDI hanging note issues. Mine has been a solid performer. I also just figured out that my particular card seems to be different from the vast majority of the "A151" Audician cards out there. Mine has a YMF718-S, but I could not match the PCB layout to anything on TheRetroWeb, DosDays, etc. and the FCC ID label was clearly a counterfeit for a totally different sound card. I purchased it in 1997 for under $20.

The PicoGus has also been excellent for MIDI out. I can confirm it coexists well with my Yamaha card.

It is great if your CT3670 has bug-free MIDI out (supposedly they have same DSP version as AWE64, so no hanging notes), which leaves CQM as the main negative.

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-01-27, 04:39:

This is only my opinion, but I have a CT3600 in several of my machines (Ekos 486DX2-66, and Gateway 2000 G6-180) and I have no major complaints about them. The only thing I will say is that it has a bit of background hiss (which honestly could be due to aging components on the cards), and unfortunately the midi interface isn't MPU-401 compatible unless you use AWEUTIL which uses waaaaayy to much conv. memory in my opinion. Other than those two negatives, I like the CT3600. It's not a bad option overall.

If I could keep only 1 ISA sound card, it would probably be my CT3600. The background hiss was always on-par with other ISA cards. I may re-cap mine, but for preservation - it doesn't sound any worse than when I got it new. It is just a bummer that it doesn't pair well with external MIDI modules.

Also, I recognize the name/logo. Did you ever blow the dust off that CT3600 since the Gateway video? 🤣

Thanks fazeshift. As far as I know the audician 32s don't have hanging notes but mine does in Doom and a couple other games when using my external ra30 and my Yamaha mdp5. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue. I only ran the drivers on the cd and a driver I had downloaded from somewhere, or if the card has a hardware issue. I scored the card a couple years ago new sealed in box with driver disk and manual right after I got a sealed in box ymf719 pci card.

Fazeshift wrote on 2026-02-19, 16:26:

Also, I recognize the name/logo. Did you ever blow the dust off that CT3600 since the Gateway video? 🤣

Haha, I sure did! I actually have recently gone through my old machines and cleaned them all out and cleaned/inspected the power supplies. I ended up evicting alot of dust bunnies 😂