This page should answer your questions:

http://www.it-he.org/sound.htm

and this page should provide you with what is probably a better solution:

http://queststudios.com/smf/index.php/topic,3041.0.html

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.

MikeRoz wrote:

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.

While the i810 may support DDMA, as you have seen support for DDMA is chipset specific. The last iteration of the DOS drivers (3.16) probably do not support it on the i810.

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 support a particular sound card.

I would reccommend trying an ESS Solo-1 based card. They work surprisingly well with DOS games. Ebay usually spits these out for 1 buck.

Great Hierophant wrote:

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 support a particular sound card.

Hmm...what if I started the game in a dos box from Win98?

ux-3 wrote:

I would reccommend trying an ESS Solo-1 based card. They work surprisingly well with DOS games. Ebay usually spits these out for 1 buck.

So any Solo-1 will work, and has a hardware OPL-3 clone? I don't need the SBLink or anything? That seems too good to be true...

MikeRoz wrote:

Great Hierophant wrote:

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 support a particular sound card.

Hmm...what if I started the game in a dos box from Win98?

Games work fine through a Win 9x DOSBox. You will only run into trouble with a game that cannot run in Win 9x.

ux-3 wrote:

I would reccommend trying an ESS Solo-1 based card. They work surprisingly well with DOS games. Ebay usually spits these out for 1 buck.

So any Solo-1 will work, and has a hardware OPL-3 clone? I don't need the SBLink or anything? That seems too good to be true...

I haven't tried them all! 😁
I have a standalone PCI card and two mobos with onboard ESS-Solo1. You will have to install the card through windows. That will also put Dos drivers in place. After that, you need not boot to windows, you can simply use dos. Dos volume can be set with a mixer.

ESS ISA and PCI card have 99.9% SB Pro compatibility (:D since I did not test every ESS chipset made, I cannot say 100%).
Tested ESS 688, 1788, 1868, 1869, 1898, 1938 (Solo 1); they work perfectly in DOS.

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.

Can anyone discuss how true the ESS devices OPL3 sound is? The YMF cards give a true OPL sound, which is not surprising as they come from Yamaha, which created the original OPL chips.

As a comparison, the Vortex 2 (AU8830) chip has good Sound Blaster Pro emulation. However, its OPL will not fool anyone familiar with the real thing.

The Aureal Vortex2 is my favorite "DOS" PCI sound card, but that assumes only that you have a wavetable board on it. No FM needed!

MikeRoz wrote:

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.

The best decision is to buy a MB with ISA for PIII + Creative card.

The best decision is to buy a MB with ISA/PCI for a Pentium + a good ISA soundcard (so it's probably not from Creative)
On the other hand there is no best decision anyway.

elianda wrote:

it's probably not from Creative

There were different cards from Creative. But if to have only one sound card - AWE is the best for DOS sound, giving good quality and excellent compatibility with old games.

Speaking of old games, AWE is not even SB Pro compatible nor GM compatible.
I prefer cards with a SB Pro / WSS compatible Codec and a GM solution. Real GM compatibility is better than having 16 Bit sound in the few games that really utilize it and don't support WSS.
Just to name a few: EWS64 Series, Maxi Sound Series, any combination of a Codec card and Wavetable like Terratec Base 1 + DB50XG...

The AWE is much more a windows soundcard. You can't even load a soundfont from DOS.

elianda wrote:

Speaking of old games, AWE is not even SB Pro compatible nor GM compatible.

I heard something like, but myself never met games where was no SB16, was SB Pro, and AWE did not worked as SB Pro [how many are such games is a good question]. GM is not very important, for me at least, I like FM music - it have special old-days charming.

EWS64 Series, Maxi Sound Series

Having WSS do not compensate the lack of SB16 support, - it's not a big problem to find popular DOS game having SB16 and not having WSS. I doubt that controversal situation is more common.

If FM quality and identity at that cards is the same as at OPL [because there should be games with FM and without GM], so the choice is: GM vs 16 bit sound. It's a case of individual taste most likely.

Nekto wrote:

I heard something like, but myself never met games where was no SB16, was SB Pro, and AWE did not worked as SB Pro [how many are such games is a good question]. GM is not very important, for me at least, I like FM music - it have special old-days charming.

As forum member elianda wrote above, there was never a Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound card (SB16, SB32, AWE32, AWE64) that was also backwards compatible with the Creative Labs 8-bit ISA SB-Pro (1 or 2) sound cards. However, 3rd party ISA 16-bit cards which were backwards compatible with the 8-bit ISA Sound Blaster Pro sound cards did exist.

dvwjr

I have to admit I usually plug a GUS for 16 bit digital. Most games that really utilize SB16 support also GUS or are patchable and GUS is preferable over SB16.

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 I did some reading (translator required) and used a DOS utility with the ability to manipulate PCI device registers to manually kick the card into DOS compatibility mode. DDMA is not supported by the 815 as far as I can tell, and I have no PC/PCI pins - thus, TDMA was my only option.

TDMA with the DMA policy bits set to 001 finally made digital sound work in Tie Figher's sound card setup program. Unfortunately, the sound was too fast. The pitch wasn't distorted, so the only thing I can figure is that it started playing the second half of the sound far too soon. Interestingly, this was the only working digital sound implementation that would break if the IRQ was changed in the Tie Fighter setup program.

TDMA with the DMA policy bits set to 1xx (last two bits can be anything) improved things somewhat. There was still an audible pop as the second half of the sound file started being played, and it just seemed the slightest bit off. Running the game and watching the first cutscene in this mode made it sound like the characters were talking over themselves ever so slightly. Also, the digital sound would be garbled whenever FM music was being played over a sound effect. Interestingly, digital sound would still play if the IRQ in the setup program was changed to something other than the IRQ being emulated by the card.

The sound problem could be fixed by changing the card from a SBPro to a SB2.0 in the Tie Fighter setup program. Unfortunately, this also made the game mono. Makes me wonder if stereo is somehow the problem.

Music and digital sound could be made to get along by changing the music device to Adlib (default device for the SB2.0 anyway).

The only good news is that, when it worked, I could not tell the chip's OPL3 clone apart from the real thing (at least, the emulated one in DosBox; the real thing is too far from memory).

I'm willing to bet that a lot of the problems I'm having stem from the fact that I'm using an OEM Gateway board with little to no BIOS configuration options. So while the 815 may work fine with these cards for most people, I'm kind of out of luck. Or my card could just be garbage. Sounds fine in Windows 98 though.

I'm going to look into finding an ISA motherboard I can put my old SB16 into. Hope it still works.