Also, the sad thing is that Virtual PC does no emulation of MIDI hardware whatsoever. So no near-perfect OPL like DosBox has. DosBox really is your best bet.

WOW. I just looked at the card. The gameport IS NOT ELECTRICALLY CONNECTED. There's a gameport on the backplate, but there is no connection between it and the PCB. It's missing a bunch of caps and resistors in that general area, too, so it's not something a simple solder job could fix either.

Okay, so I figured out a few things about the card. First off, the card DOES work flawlessly - sometimes. Every few reboots or so, the sound will stutter under DOS. A cold boot usually fixes it. I was testing the card with my headphones, and when the second channel of a stereo sample came in I would …

I actually want to avoid wavetable synth like the plague.

You might get better support if you post in the dosbox forums here.

Okay, so back to PCI sound cards... The Solo-1 has pretty much been a disaster. First of all, the ESS DOS configuration utility rarely works. When it does work, it insists on setting the chip up for PC/PCI DMA emulation. Since my motherboard doesn't have the sideband pins, that's rather useless. So …

Thanks everyone. I have a Solo-1 on the way now. If I'm unsatisfied, I'll get a YMF card and hope I don't end up with a game that requires real mode DOS.

When I refer to "real mode", I mean Real Mode DOS, as in entering DOS through the "Restart in DOS Mode" feature of Win 95-98se. I do not mean "real mode" as in a CPU mode on the 80286 and higher CPUs. Whether a game runs in real or protected mode is not particularly relevant to whether it will …

I have an i810 chipset. Your posts seem to imply DDMA will only work with 440BX. EDIT: Wait, it says DDMA is needed for real mode. Tie Fighter runs in protected mode, does it not? I would assume later games would as well.

I just bought a Pentium III machine with four PCI slots. Obviously this isn't ideal for DOS, but I'm going to try my best to make do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_AudioPCI According to that article, the AudioPCI has full DOS compatibility. I've also seen good things in these forums, along …