This is an 8bit Adlib / sound blaster / sb pro compatible, looking at the CS4252 chip. Not the most desired one, but does the job in most cases. It seems to have a LS245 opl3 clone. These also do the job pretty well. Also it seems to have the CS9322 wave table onboard. That makes it a nice card to play with 😀

waterbeesje wrote on 2024-03-13, 16:46:

This is an 8bit Adlib / sound blaster / sb pro compatible, looking at the CS4252 chip. Not the most desired one, but does the job in most cases. It seems to have a LS245 opl3 clone. These also do the job pretty well. Also it seems to have the CS9322 wave table onboard. That makes it a nice card to play with 😀

so its not even 16 bit? like the sb 16 ? How could i identify the exact model number? I cant really find a driver for it..

the Crystal drivers found here will work for this card: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=9 … menustate=49,41
it uses a CS4232 chip that is SB/SBPro/WSS/MPU compatible
there is no OPL3 on that card - the card uses a CS9233 chip that is basically onboard wavetable synth that also emulates OPL with laughable results...
the whole card is similar to the Magic S23A card shown in this video: https://youtu.be/RtccwvqEoys

That card will have basic DOS and Windows compatibility (SBpro2, WSS, MPU401) along with actual MIDI synth on it.

It has one serious problem : there is no OPL2/3 on it (that LS245 is actual LS245 not a clone OPL3) and it relies on emulation through CS9233 which does an absolutely horrible job at it since it is a sample based chip. The 512KB sample ROM has usable Roland SC55 like soundset on it.

RagingSquirrel wrote on 2024-03-13, 16:49:

waterbeesje wrote on 2024-03-13, 16:46:

This is an 8bit Adlib / sound blaster / sb pro compatible, looking at the CS4252 chip. Not the most desired one, but does the job in most cases. It seems to have a LS245 opl3 clone. These also do the job pretty well. Also it seems to have the CS9322 wave table onboard. That makes it a nice card to play with 😀

so its not even 16 bit? like the sb 16 ? How could i identify the exact model number? I cant really find a driver for it..

WSS is 16b, in fact in theory it's slightly better than SB16 (48kHz vs 44kHz).

Not that any of that makes a lot of difference in practice - by far the majority of games only use 8b 22kHz anyway (i.e. SBPro2).

The lack of OP2/3 isn't as bad as it sounds, as FM synth is usually used for music, and most games also support using MPU-401 MIDI for that. This card has a wavetable MIDI synth onboard, not a great one, but it will do the trick and sound better than FM synth in most cases. Also, unlike buggy SB16, this card does not have hanging note or audio slowdown issues when playing MIDI.

i pretty much have this exact card in one of my retro builds right now. it is a very desirable and quiet card, at least in my opinion. sb16 options are noisy...the awe64 gold is the only creative card i ever bothered to keep and i'll take this crystal/dream wavetable card over it any day. as someone mentioned it has pirated sc-55 samples so choose the mpu-401 music option in games and you won't be disappointed.

unisound.com provides effortless dos driver support for it. also, when you install this card under win9x with the right driver packages you can get 2 additional softsynths (conexant wavestream and crystal softsynth) installed alongside the hardware wavetable in the windows midi mapper.

stanwebber wrote on 2024-03-14, 02:07:

i pretty much have this exact card in one of my retro builds right now. it is a very desirable and quiet card, at least in my opinion. sb16 options are noisy...the awe64 gold is the only creative card i ever bothered to keep and i'll take this crystal/dream wavetable card over it any day. as someone mentioned it has pirated sc-55 samples so choose the mpu-401 music option in games and you won't be disappointed.

unisound.com provides effortless dos driver support for it. also, when you install this card under win9x with the right driver packages you can get 2 additional softsynths (conexant wavestream and crystal softsynth) installed alongside the hardware wavetable in the windows midi mapper.

Thank You for your answer.. can you please link the drivers you used for dos and win 3.11 and for win 95, because i tried to install the drivers provided on this site, but i couldn't make it work under Win 95 .. i haven't tried in dos or Win 3.11 because i cant find a driver for it .. also i am not an expert on installing drivers in dos.. i assume i have to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys .. but if you could explain it to me how to do it exactly it would be great .. Thank You ..

for dos obtain unisound from this forum post and extract it to a location in your path:
UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b
add the following 2 lines to your autoexec.bat:

1set blaster=a220 i5 d3 t4
2unisound.com /v99 /vw99 /vf99

dma 3 seems to be hardcoded on my card (especially with wss), but you can try d1 in your blaster variable.

i think win98 includes the cs4232 drivers with the conexant wavestream softsynth, but i may be misremembering. in any case here is a link to some cs423x drivers with the crystal softsynth:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qosz1peMHEc_ … ew?usp=drivesdk
here is a link to another driver package i've used:
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=925

Hi .. Thank You i had to take out the card for now.. because Win 95 didnt booted with the drivers i installed last night .. I started the system in safe mode and deleted all the sound devices in device managger .. after restart it booted in to Win 95 but the system froze every time the cs4232 device being recognised (maybe i got a faulty card idk...) anyway now i uninstalled all the sound related drivers and took out the card itself ... i will try agaiin on fryday when i have more time.. i downloaded the dos driver you linked, but on the google drive link i cant download because the browser claims it has a virus detected... the other link you gave is the one i downloaded.. can you sent tthe google drive driver in an other way ? maybe on mega or somewhere else please.. Thank You for your help

there are ways to get around a blocked download due to a flagged virus on google drive. i just downloaded the file myself using brave browser (chrome) on my android phone. sometimes switching to desktop view will allow you to get a prompt to download anyway. in any case i got the driver files (7mb compressed) from the full iso available here: https://drivers.dosreloaded.de/index.php?b=So … al_audio+cs4239

try unisound in pure dos. it's quick and should give you an indication if there's a hardware fault on your card. duke nukem 3d (or elder scrolls daggerfall) setup.exe is my go to for quick soundcard testing.

That's an awesome sound card to find installed in PC. I love the variety in music played through all the odd-ball wavetable solutions back in those days. This thread has some great examples in it:
My Wavetable Sample Thread
You'll see at least one other card in that thread with the CS9233 wavetable chip onboard like yours. They sound great and are very close to the feel of an original Roland Sound Canvas (the gold standard basically), for reasons mentioned by others earlier in the thread.