why don't you just buy normal bx motherboard with isa slots?

robertmo wrote:

why don't you just buy normal bx motherboard with isa slots?

Because I am considering Micro-ATX boards, and there are very few of them furnishing a Slot 1. They are very hard to find.

However, if I was able to get a board with an ISA slot, what should I put in it? My choices are a Sound Blaster 16/AWE64, Roland MIF-IPC-A or a Gravis Ultrasound Ace/PnP.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Because I am considering Micro-ATX boards, and there are very few of them furnishing a Slot 1. They are very hard to find.

But why do you want to by a micro ATX if they don't have isa??

Great Hierophant wrote:

However, if I was able to get a board with an ISA slot, what should I put in it? My choices are a Sound Blaster 16/AWE64, Roland MIF-IPC-A or a Gravis Ultrasound Ace/PnP.

You have all the cards and you can plug which ever you want when ever you want! 😀

robertmo wrote:

But why do you want to by a micro ATX if they don't have isa?? […]
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Great Hierophant wrote:

Because I am considering Micro-ATX boards, and there are very few of them furnishing a Slot 1. They are very hard to find.

But why do you want to by a micro ATX if they don't have isa??

Great Hierophant wrote:

However, if I was able to get a board with an ISA slot, what should I put in it? My choices are a Sound Blaster 16/AWE64, Roland MIF-IPC-A or a Gravis Ultrasound Ace/PnP.

You have all the cards and you can plug which ever you want when ever you want! 😀

In short, I need to condense and only have space for one system, so the best needs to be in there.

typical BX board has 3 isa slots 😉

More like 1-3 ISA slots. 😀 The older a BX board, the more it usually has.

I'm pretty sure all my BX boards have 2 ISA slots, and I think I have 4-5 different models.

If I was going to have just a single system, it would have to be a full size board and case. Going micro isn't going to save that much space, what are you living in a camper?

Interesting! I recently build a similar system. It's based on a P4 board from via that has an universal AGP slot, so I can use my Voodoo5 with it. Case is a Silverstone Sugo SG01-f, which can also house long cards (Maybe when I have the time i post some pictures to System Specs).

As I was not sure how to force the via onboard audio chip to work in real dos, I choose a Vortex2 and a Yamaha YMF-724 based pci card for sound.
Anyway my major idea was to use this assembly for
a) Glide games and win98 games that will profit from the Voodoo's 4xFSAA (and the p4, 2,4GHz)
b) really old dos games. I want to use the Yamaha chip with a patched version of dosbox, (h-a-l-9000's Megabuild 5), so I can take advantage from the opl-passthrough.

So far it works, even the passthrough feature. I set it on "hardware", and it sounds very good - warm, like a real OPL but with less noise in the background! (but also quite similar to the dosbox opl emulation - may be thats a characteristic of the YMF724 chip?).
So far I didn't try neither of the cards in true dos. As far as I know, the YMF724 will not work in true dos, only if you have a "SB-link" or "PC/PCI" connector on the mobo, which has to be connected with the opposite on the soundcard. You may find more information here:
http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/emi/engli … h/xg/WF192e.pdf

I can only guess, Great Hierophant, why you choose a Slot-1 board. I suppose you want to be able to shift between a realtively slow (p2-266 or Celeron 300) and a - relatively fast cpu (a Tualatin by using a slot adapter?), but if so, you should also take a S370 board into consideration. On most of them (mainly the ones with via chipset) you could use a via C3 Samuel with 500Mhz. And this cpu is really, really slow (ranks around a K6-2 300 I would guess).

How interesting... I was just testing 4 cards which arrived today. 2 SB PCI128, 1 ForteMedia 801 and 1 Crystal 4280. All working so far. Best sound quality, the Creatives. DOS GM support too.

AFAIK SB64 and SB128 cards of creative are based on the Ensoniq Audio PCI card. When creative bought ensoniq they rebranded some cards, and replaced the original driver with their own (which was - especially the SB emulation - of course based upon the ensoniq ones).

I have a card that looks exactly like this one (including the converters)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Audiopci.jpg
- but I remember that there was somewhere a small creative stamp or something like this on it, and that I was not able to install the esoniq drivers (it allways demanded the SB64 drivers - why?).

Installing the ensoniq drivers would give you the ability to use the ensoniq wavetable patch set files (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_AudioPCI).

The Creative SBPCI 64, SBPCI 128, and "Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI" are very similar to the original Ensoniq AudioPCI but there is at least one major difference. The Creative cards use ES1371 or ES1373 usually, AC97 versions of ES1370. This imposes a restriction on sample rate, resulting in the chips having sample rate convertors that turn all input into 48KHz output. That's not ideal and not what ES1370 does. 😀

ES1371 PDF
ES1370 PDF
I'm unclear on what ES1373 does differently.

Actually ES1370 has a quirk too. Its 48 KHz is actually ~47 KHz and is thus very slightly off pitch. It's such a slight difference that you really need to directly compare to notice. And it's only there in 9x because in XP the driver doesn't report support for 48KHz and as a result Windows mixer will resample at least 48KHz audio down to 44.1 kHz. As you may realize, this makes the card undesirable for DVD/etc as the audio is usually 48 KHz.

An original Ensoniq AudioPCI (ES1370) can be essentially renamed into a SBPCI 64 with a driver update that Creative released. You definitely want that driver because it adds useful features.

BTW, that Wiki photo is my scan. 😁 You can see that card among my Soundscape cards in my Ensoniq thread (sig).

Should the ensoniq drivers work with your card? And what if I have the ES1371 chip?
I'm a little bit confused - is it better to have the original card with the original drivers or the creative ones? (The ensoniq drivers only support SBPro, righty?) And what about the Midi sound?
Does the Live! use the same SB emulation and equals therefore the ensoniq card when it comes to dos compability? If so - to comeback to the original question - is it allways better to use a Live! instead of an ensoniq AudioPCI?

Btw - there is this interesting comparison on the web (hope this link was not allready posted a hundered times...):
http://www.alasir.com/reviews/soundbench/index.html
(AudioPCI ranks higher than Audigy 2!)

The original card's behavior won't change with the Creative drivers. I can't remember anymore what the benefit is of the Creative drivers for the Ensoniq original card, but there are some. Maybe improved 3D audio support? Yeah I think it might add DS3D & A3D 1.0 support. I actually was quite a AudioPCI follower back in '97-'98 but it has been so long I've forgotten a lot. 😁

The Live and Audigy cards use the Ensoniq AudioPCI DOS driver but with a few modificatons. The biggest difference here that comes to mind is that the original Ensoniq AudioPCI supported Ensoniq Soundscape for 16-bit DOS audio but not SB16 (SBPro is max). However, the Creative version of the driver supports SB16 but not Soundscape.

Live! has vastly superior MIDI and 3D audio capabilities in Windows 9x. Also, Live! can mix 32 hardware channels whereas AudioPCI does 2. So if those are important to you, Live! is the way to go. DOS support is essentially the same aside from having to use SB16 instead of Soundscape. DOS MIDI is the same for both cards as it uses the ECW-based softsynth.

I believe the ES1370 card may have superior signal quality compared to Live!. Not only is the Live!'s front speaker out somewhat lacking in quality, but it also resamples everything to 48KHz and this causes audio quality problems too.

I believe the ES1370 card may have superior signal quality compared to Live!. Not only is the Live!'s front speaker out somewhat lacking in quality, but it also resamples everything to 48KHz and this causes audio quality problems too.

I have read that the resampling of the Live! and Audigy cards is a well-known issue. As I understand it, anything other than straight recording or playback will be resampled to 48kHz. Is this true of all AC97 sound cards?

According to Wiki's page on the AC97 spec:
" AC'97 1.x compliant indicates fixed 48K sampling rate operation (non-extended feature set)"

It also seems that other aspects to the spec (ACLink) rely on that fixed rate.

I don't really understand why a high-end sound card would need to follow this spec. I'm guessing that it was adhered to because of concern over OEMs requiring it. A lot of SBLive!s were in big box PCs.

Have to find some more Live!'s. Had 2, sold 1 some years ago. Classic 4 channel Sb Live! Value. Kept it in my main computer until '07, when I got my current main PC with onboard HD audio.
Sounded better than the ADI 5.1 codec I had in my previous rig. Another reason for not using it right now is that I got a microATX mobo, only 2 PCI sluts, only 1 accesible because of 2-sluts height video card. Damn, I hate those mobo makers which do not put the nearly useless (for now) PCI-Express 1x slut between PCI-Express 16x and regular PCI slots; And bigger heatsinks on hot-running nVidia MCP chipsets.

Live! sounds fantastic if you run the kx drivers and swap the front output to the rear jack. That's actually the default configuration with kx. I have no doubt it is better than all onboard analog audio if you do that. There is no noise, the signal quality is superb, and you can rig up a 10 band EQ with the kx DSP.

And of course you also get its superb MIDI synth which is excellent for DOSBOX.

It seems like the Yamaha YMF-7x4 boards are the best option for a PCI sound card in terms of compatibility, but only if your board has a PC/PCI connector.