Creative AWE64D PCI

[Great Hierophant]

I have seen pictures of the Creative AWE64D PCI card.  Apparently this card, and very few other cards, use the SB-Link connector on the motherboard to provide support for Distributed DMA and Serialized IRQs, which were on the ISA but not on the PCI bus.  Also, it seems that this card may have been designed before Creative bought Ensoniq and transformed the AudioPCI into the Sound Blaster 16 PCI.  Also, it clearly would have been before the Sound Blaster Live! cards.  On the other hand, this probably was an OEM product as I never saw it in stores.  I would guess that some of Creative's aprtners pressured Creative into releasing a PCI version of their AWE series to save on costs and slots.  I wonder how close and compatible it is to the ISA based AWEs.  I also wonder if the SB-Link improves compatibility compared to the TSRs needed to get the Live! and Sound Blaster PCI cards working in pure DOS. 

[BlueMax]

I think one of the very few vendors to even distribute these cards was in Dell boxes. 

I can't tell you more than that... 

[Sedryn]

I actually purchased a couple of these cards so I could test the DOS compatibility but I was never able to acquire an SB-Link cable (didn't come with the cards I bought off eBay).  I've toyed with the idea of rigging my own cable but haven't gotten around to it.

One thing I did notice:  there don't seem to be any pure DOS drivers available for these cards - just Win9x drivers.  So, one could assume that the Win9x drivers install some DOS driver components.