Hi everyone,

in case anyone's interested, we have added some new recordings to our soundcard comparison page at http://sound.dosforum.de/.

Thanks to Lennart, we now have recordings of the Creative Waveblaster 1 which, in my opinion, actually isn't that bad. It could use some reverb, but apart from that, the sound is pretty decent. The Waveblaster 2 seems to be much worse, from what I've heard.

I have also added recordings of Pinball Dreams using the Gravis Ultrasound and AWE32, so there is an example of the GUS at its best: MOD music (you can expect a very similar difference in quality in games such as Silverball, Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit or Death Rally - and many demo scene productions of the time).



I have also added links to Swaaye's, Salient's and Enigma's soundcard recording pages (and also to other resources such as this great website).


If you find a mistake or something that we absolutely should add, I wouldn't mind a message :-)


I have also made recordings of an OPL3 and some clones a while ago... I'm a little tempted to add that to the comparison page as well:

For the time being, the recordings can be found here:


http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6846&p=23137 (It's in German, but I think you'll be able to understand what is what, at least).


Kind regards,
Stephan

Apparently, the forum software doesn't automatically underline hyperlinks. Thus you can only see the link when you hover over it with the mouse.

I help myself by simply putting "u"-Tags around the link.

If anyone is interested, I have made another recording:

WC2 intro on the Terratec EWS64XL (Crystal CS4236).

For some weird reason, I seem to be getting some slight clipping on the EWS, regardless of the volume of the "wave" channel in the EWS mixer. It's noticeable in some places, e.g. "arise, grandson" a few seconds into the audio file.


All in all, the differences seem to be quite subtle indeed, except for the SB 1.5 which is noticeably "brighter" but also contains more audible artifacts ("noisy" playback, clicks and pops). Could it be that the cause of this is simply a low-pass filter that has a higher cutoff frequency or weaker roll-off?

Hi,

My guess would be that Descent was composed for General MIDI, more specifically the SC-55.


I think the game sounds best on a good GM device. I'm not exactly sure whether I prefer my SCC-1 or the DB50XG for Descent 1 and 2. They both seem to have their strengths, but I'm leaning slightly towards the Sound Canvas since I have a slight preference for the Roland's synth drumkit in Descent.

If you look at the year Descent 1 was released (1994) it seems plausible that the soundtrack was composed on a Sound Canvas since the DB50XG didn't arrive (according to Wikipedia) before 1995 and the MU-10 and SW60XG not before 1996.

The GUS soundtrack, while good, seems somewhat inferior to GM in my opinion.

As far as FM synthesis is concerned, I think Descent makes pretty good use of the OPL3 but I prefer the GM or even the GUS soundtrack.

What I find remarkable, is, that in Descent 1, the actual arrangement of the music seems to be different in places when you use Adlib. For example there seems to be an arpeggio at the very beginning of the title track that is not present in the other versions.


It seems people have some very different opinions about what sound device is best used with game X. Some people seem to prefer FM synthesis for Tyrian, which I always considered a "GM" game, as well.

My version of the card (which looks like this) does have jumpers for PORT, IRQ and DMA as well as enabling and disabling the different CD-ROM interfaces on the card.

It has peacefully coexisted with a Soundblaster AWE and a Roland SCC-1 in my machine.

From my experience, every software that is compatible with a "real" GUS runs on the Primax as well - the card even works with the very same drivers.


I have a GUS Extreme as well and I have to say that the ESS Audiodrive works very well for Soundblaster Pro compatibility. I have yet to find a single game that refuses to work with it.

Of course, it is best used in systems that don't already have some kind of Soundblaster installed.