PCI Soundcards for Ultima 7
And other great DOS programs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.