Creative Sound Blaster 16 vs ESS Audiodrive 1868f

Creative Sound Blaster 16 vs ESS Audiodrive 1868f - support in games

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First post, by Danger Manfred

Danger Manfred Offline

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Joined: 2022-08-15, 03:35
Location: Germany

Is it just me or is the Audiodrive the better SB16?
I'm not even talking about the bunch of bugs or noise that you can avoid using an Audiodrive - there are 86 games specifically supporting the Audiodrive, which has the same specs as the SB16 in itself (16 bit stereo, 44.1 kHz), and I do not know how many that support an SB 16, but I have often heard that most games that support it still only used lower quality samples just like on a Sound Blaster Pro.
Which the Audiodrive is compatible to, and unlike all SB16/AWE32/AWE64 cards it doesn't reverse stereo channels when configured that way.
So, it would depend on how many games actually make use of the SB16's specs - is there any information on the web that I missed during an extensive Google search?
Am I making another big mistake?

Reply 1 of 1, by NeoG_

Posted on 44 minutes ago

NeoG_ Offline

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If I was limited to a single card, I would probably use an ESS186x over an SB16. The native ESS support in games is not good though IMO, it enables some kind of filter that completely kills the fidelity of game audio. Better using SB Pro compatibility.

The quality improvement of 16-bit mixing in DOS games is not worth the tradeoff to me. But since I do have multiple cards, I can use another card to cover the downsides of the Sb16.

98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6850, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer

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