I did some tests in that regard, but with a Super Socket 7 machine. The ISA cards surprised me, they were not slower, sometimes even the fastest cards. They did not however offer 3D Audio, EAX, A3D and all of that.

Nothing will be crippled. You'll have a perfectly good experience. The only thing you'll miss are specific features like 3D sound and you won't miss them if you never used them.

Yes, but not in performance. If you care about incredibly good MIDI sound straight from the sound card, the worst thing you could do is get a standard ISA card (Unless you have some strange Roland or Gravis Ultrasound hanging around)

The reason being is there is no DMA on ANY ISA cards. This means no soundfonts that can't fit onto onboard memory, and for quality soundfonts that like Timbres of Heaven http://midkar.com/soundfonts/ that are around 250MB in size, you will never be able to fit that on an ISA card.

There are other options for ISA cards. The most reasonable would be to grab some external MIDI device. This can be a fancy Roland synthesizer which are incredibly expensive, a Raspi based one, or a modern enough PC that you can use one of the other options on.

This is Coolsoft's VirtualMidiSynth. This allows you to load soundfonts for use as a software MIDI device. On PCs with great amounts of RAM and CPU speed, this is perfect, but on a slower Pentium 3, that will take some performance off of it. You can use other machines and hook it up via MIDI cables, and this is honestly the best way out of any option for MIDI, PCI or ISA.

You could also stick with stock MIDI on the card. The good cards like Roland and Gravis cards are ungodly in their expense, but an AWE32 CT3670 is one of the best ISA sound cards you can get. It's superior to the AWE64 having real RAM slots, but with the same EMU chip. It also has a wavetable header, and is compatible with everything Sound Blaster 16, and has decent enough DOS support.

[EDIT:] I do NOT mean to say the AWE32/64 has great MIDI. It's not bad, but Roland and Gravis cards will destroy it any day of the week

For PCI, I recommend the Sound Blaster Live! series. These are good PCI cards with great MIDI support, but DOS support won't be there pretty much (Although every DOS in Window game I've tried works perfectly)

IMO, you shouldn't really be doing DOS gaming on a Pentium 3. The slot series of cards are about the end point for most DOS gaming, with a true DOS experience being had on a P5, 486, or Pentium Pro chip.

I find SB Live cards to be very disappointing, not least because of the awful quality and forced nature of it's resampling.

gdjacobs wrote:

I find SB Live cards to be very disappointing, not least because of the awful quality and forced nature of it's resampling.

Wait, what? Your statement has confused me.

Do you man that you find them disappointing, but not because of awful quality or forced resampling?

Or do you mean that you find them disappointing because of those facts?

I don't know why but that just threw me.

Quirks of the language, I guess. The way it resamples is one of the reasons I don't like the Live series cards.

Ampera wrote:

The reason being is there is no DMA on ANY ISA cards. This means no soundfonts that can't fit onto onboard memory, and for quality soundfonts that like Timbres of Heaven http://midkar.com/soundfonts/ that are around 250MB in size, you will never be able to fit that on an ISA card.

What if whoever wrote the music specifically planned it with the limitations of a lower-quality MIDI synth in mind?

Jorpho wrote:

Ampera wrote:

The reason being is there is no DMA on ANY ISA cards. This means no soundfonts that can't fit onto onboard memory, and for quality soundfonts that like Timbres of Heaven http://midkar.com/soundfonts/ that are around 250MB in size, you will never be able to fit that on an ISA card.

What if whoever wrote the music specifically planned it with the limitations of a lower-quality MIDI synth in mind?

That's not that possible.

Yes, you can design a song for a specific synthesizer, but due to the General MIDI standard, A Violin will sound vaguely like a violin no matter where you go.

That's like saying a pie will taste like a cake because they're both desserts.

Find me an example of a MIDI song that only sounds good on a low quality MIDI device. Prove me wrong.

imho some of the descent tracks sound well only on some old stuff - the dirty sound is what makes it sound good

There's at least one demo track for the AWE64 composed using the specific sound effects available in the default sound font. It will sound completely wrong on anything else. I can't think of the name at the moment, though.

More generally, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of stuff written for OPL3 will sound all wrong on an SBLive, since an SBLive uses samples instead of having an authentic OPL3 synth.

Yes, but you need to understand, he is running Windows XP. This is beyond the point of needing OPL3 synth and running older games. Doom sounds GREAT on Timbres of Heaven. If you're looking for great OPL3 sound, an early AWE32 is king. If you're looking for top class DOS MIDI, A Gravis Ultrasound is about the best you can get. But if you're looking for bog standard PCM audio and decent soundfonts for WIndows gaming, there are few better cards than the Sound Blaster Live! series.

There is 0 reason to run ANY DOS games on a Pentium 700, especially with Windows XP

You could go a step further and suggest that any game you'd be likely to be running on a Pentium 700 in XP probably wouldn't be using MIDI anymore anyway.

Not entirely true. I run games on my Windows 2016 PC that still uses MIDI

Ampera wrote:

The reason being is there is no DMA on ANY ISA cards.

It is quite the opposite.

Let me amend my statement.

There is 16 bit DMA

I.E. 16 MiB max, which is already used by the card itself.

PCI has 32 bit DMA allowing for a large range of memory available to the card (500MB effective for the SB Live!)