PCI Soundcards for Ultima 7

And other great DOS programs


Synopsis and index

The types of PCI soundcard currently out there seem to be as follows:

Aureal Vortex 1 (Diamond S-90 etc, some motherboards) [Reviewed]
Aureal Vortex 2 (Videologic Sonic Vortex etc) [Reviewed]
Crystal Semiconductors CS462x, CS4280 (Genius Soundmaker 32 etc, notebooks) [Coming Soon]
EMU Systems 401K (Creative Soundblaster Dead! etc) [Outline]
Ensoniq (Creative Soundblaster 16-PCI etc) [Reviewed]
ESS Maestro-1, Maestro-2, Canyon 3D (Terratec DMX etc, notebooks) [Reviewed]
Trident 4D DX/NX (Addonics SoundVision, other cheap cards) [Reviewed]
Yamaha YMF-724 (Waveforce 192, Busby etc, notebooks, motherboards) [Reviewed]

I have reviewed most of the above, paying for them out of my own pocket (during a series of manic shopping sprees) in the hopes of finding a soundcard that fulfills all my (somewhat peculiar) needs.

Having spent so much money and having amassed a substantial collection of soundcards, many of which I will probably never use again, I have decided to publish my experiences on the Web, along with some tips on making the things work, in the hopes that someone will find them useful.

Personal Conclusions

Stop press - U7 in Windows If you are looking at this page to try and make Ultima 7 work, I suggest you look HERE for U7win, a very clever piece of software that performs the impossible task of making Ultima 7 run inside Windows 95/98.

It uses the hybrid breakpoint+emulation technique used by VMware, Win4Lin, Plex86 et al. There is also a second version for Windows 2000 that *may* work under Linux (but it is slower).

I should point out that this is only a solution for Ultima 7 and Serpent's Isle.. if you have some old Demos, or other games, you will still need to shop around for a suitable soundcard.

The Cards The two cards that worked best for me were the Yamaha YMF-724, and the ESS Maestro-2.
The YMF-724 unfortunately ceased to work as a Soundblaster Pro when I replaced my motherboard, and the Maestro-2 is rather noisy.

I am currently using an Aureal Vortex-2 and an ISA Soundblaster 16.


Creative Soundblaster Dead!

Supported OSes: DOS, BeOS, Linux (With ALSA), Windows 95
DOS wavetable: Yes
Needs EMM386: YES
Needs D-DMA: No
True FM synthesis: Don't know
Can not run: Ultima 7, No!, Crystal Dream 2, probably many more

Rating: 1 - Needs EMM386, buy ONLY if this is not a problem

Description

I have not bought an Creative Labs Soundblaster Live!, so I can only relate what I have heard, and what I know from the few minutes I had with one.

The card has to have EMM386 (or another VCPI server) loaded in order to work in DOS mode at all, so many demos and 'FRM' programs such as Ultima-7 will not run.
You must have another card in a second slot if you wish to run these programs, many people do this.

To run in DOS:

I've heard you must run SBINIT.COM


Creative Soundblaster 16-PCI

Supported OSes: DOS, BeOS, Linux 2.2, Windows 95
DOS wavetable: Yes
Needs EMM386: YES
Needs D-DMA: No
True FM synthesis: No
Could not run: Ultima 7, No!, Crystal Dream 2, probably many more

Rating: 1 - Avoid! Avoid!

Description

The Creative Labs Soundblaster-16 PCI is a peculiar beast, chiefly because it is not Soundblaster compatible in the strictest sense, and certainly not Soundblaster-16 compatible by any stretch of the imagination.

The OPL-3 chip does not exist, instead it attempts to emulate it using the wavetable system, producing a foul cacophony for any program which uses the adlib to play .mod files, for example 'Magic Boy', Inertia Player and GLX.

The card has to have EMM386 (or another VCPI server) loaded in order to work in DOS mode at all, so many demos and 'FRM' programs such as Ultima-7 will not run.

Pagan might work, I didn't get that far. As soon as the drivers demanded EMM386, the card was removed and thrown into the loft with OS/2, Windows 98 and all the other useless products.

To run in DOS:

You must run SBINIT.COM


Trident 4W

Supported OSes: DOS, Linux 2.2, Windows 95
DOS wavetable: Yes
Needs EMM386: No
Needs D-DMA: No
True FM synthesis: No
Could not run: Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Ultima 7, Pagan, Crystal Dream 2 by Triton, No! by Nooon, Destination Goatland by Noice

Rating: 2 - It crashed an awful lot of software

Description

The Trident 4W is a reasonable card, but not very Soundblaster compatible at all.
For starters, it does NOT emulate a Soundblaster Pro, but a version 2 Soundblaster, which is mono!
It also needs to steal 4MB of your memory in order to operate at all. You can specify how much it will steal, but you should give it 4MB, otherwise all the wavetable music will turn into piano concertos.

As with the SB16-PCI, there is no FM chip, instead it uses the wavetable.
Trident make a big thing of their Virtual-FM(tm) system, which unfortunately, is a total crock from what I have heard it do.

Many well-behaved DOS programs utterly refused to run, Ultima 7 and Pagan crashed, and Wolfenstein 3D played all its sound effects at double-speed.

(This card is the one I used for the logo, since it was the least valuable of all the cards I still have, putting it in the scanner was no problem

To run in DOS:

I've forgotten!


Diamond S-90, Aureal Vortex 1 (au8820)

Supported OSes: DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Linux 'coming soon'
DOS wavetable: No
Needs EMM386: No
Needs D-DMA: No
FM synthesis: Tinny
Could not run: Pagan, Modplay, Crystal Dream 2 by Triton, No! by Nooon, Destination Goatland by Noice

Rating: 3 - Fair, but dogged by hardware problems

Description

This card was my first impression of the Aureal Vortex chipset, and it was not a very good one.
I have since come to the conclusion that the specimen card was defective, and it was returned to the store.

The card has an OPL-2 clone which provides FM support for games such as Simon the Sorcerer, System Shock and Eye-of-the-beholder 2, which sound best this way.
Quality was poor however, since several operator cells in the chip were dead, and the sound in general was a little tinny.

Simon the Sorcerer, a typical 'well-behaved' DOS program ran very poorly indeed, skipping frames and playing the music at approximately half speed.
This was not the only problem. Ultima 7 ran, but the music was slowed down by the mo'slo program it needs to run.
Pagan rebooted during the intro. I tried this many times, and it either froze or just reset in different places each time. When I booted MSDOS 7 instead of DR-DOS, the game died with the error message 'stack overflow, system halted'.

Some 'less-well-behaved' programs set the PC clock from 18Hz to 22050Hz and play digital music. These programs all crashed very quickly.

To use in DOS:

You must run ASP4DOS.COM
You may also need to set WINBOOTDIR= to the path containing this program, if it's not in C:\WINDOWS or you're not using MSDOS 7.x.


ESS Maestro-2

Supported OSes: DOS, Linux 2.2 (late versions), Windows 95
DOS wavetable: No
Needs EMM386: No
Needs D-DMA: No
FM synthesis: Tinny
Could not run: System Shock needed some help before it worked. (conflict with SCSI CDROM)

Rating: 4 - Works well, but low sound quality

Description

I had difficulty obtaining a specimen for this card, but I managed to get one from a local dealer. (One of my prior attempts got me the Trident 4D card)

The chip has an OPL-3 clone inside it, which sounds disappointingly tinny and cheap, a little like the Vortex.
The card ran all my software without a hitch, except for System Shock (until I copied the CD to my hard disk, then it worked).

The card does everything it claims to do, but the actual sound quality leaves something to be desired.
One day it decided to move itself to IRQ 10 and I could not move it back in DOS nor Windows 95.

To run in DOS:

You must run c:\maestro.com
The MSTRINF.INI file must be in C:\


Yamaha YMF-724, made by Busby UK Ltd

Supported OSes: DOS, Windows 95, BeOS (needed a patch)
DOS wavetable: No
Needs EMM386: No
Needs D-DMA: YES
True FM synthesis: Perfect, genuine Yamaha OPL3
Could not run: No! By Nooon crashed halfway through

Rating: 4 1/2 - Near-perfect, but ONLY IF YOUR MOTHERBOARD IS SUPPORTED.

Description

This card was at first an absolute dream, running all my software except for No! by Nooon, which locked up halfway through.
Sound quality was absolutely crystal-clear and the FM synthesis was powered by a genuine Yamaha OPL-3 and utterly flawless.

When I replaced my 430TX motherboard, I discovered to my utter horror, that the card will ONLY work as a Soundblaster compatible if your motherboard chipset supports Distributed DMA!
My new motherboard (VIA MVP3) does not, at least not how the card was expecting, so with great reluctance I put the sound card back in its box and the search for the perfect soundcard began again.

I may in future run this alongside another card for it's superb FM synthesizer.

To use in DOS:

cd ds-xg
setupds /s
(or 'setupds' for first time install)

To make U7 work, I had to run U7 once, quit, run setupds /s and then start U7 again, or it quit to DOS with an XMS-related problem.


Sonic Vortex-2, Aureal Vortex 2 (au8830)

Supported OSes: DOS, Windows 95, Linux 'Coming Soon', BeOS 'In development'
DOS wavetable: Needs wavetable daughterboard
Needs EMM386: No
Needs D-DMA: No
True FM synthesis: Tinny
Could not run: DOSDOOM, DOOM LEGACY, all Allegro-based programs, Destination Goatland, No! (doesn't detect card), Crystal Dream 2

Rating: 3 - Poor FM quality, more modern DOS games need tinkering to run

Description

As with the Vortex-1, this card has an OPL-2 clone which provides FM support for games which sound best this way. Like the Diamond, the FM is very tinny and some of the operator cells are either dead or seriously attenuated, so it looks like Aureal has a design problem here.

Simon the Sorcerer worked properly this time, apart from the faulty FM synth.
Pagan runs properly, intro and all, and programs that use a high interrupt frequency do work now, although Crystal Dream II, Destination Goatland and No! all failed to work with this card.

You may need to choose Soundblaster 2 or 1.5 instead of Pro to make some programs work.

Here's the bad news: modern DOOM engines will not run unless you use another DPMI host. For some odd reason, CWSDPMI (that is needed to run DJGPP programs in pure dos) does not work correctly with this card, and you will get no sound. I fixed this by replacing CWSDPMI with PMODETSR, an alternative extender, and the problem was cured.

To use in DOS:

You must run AU30DOS.COM
You may need to set WINBOOTDIR= to the path containing this program, if it's not in C:\WINDOWS or you're not using MSDOS 7.


(C) 2000 J.P. 'Doug' Morris

The sound cards and chips referred to in this document are trademarks of their respective companies.
The names of the companies are also trademarked. There may be other things that are trademarks, and they be acknowledged hereby.

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