what sound card do you use in your old pc?

[Soviet Conscript]

well, finally have a mt-32 on the way to get some great sound out of those games. so before it gets here can anyone tell me what all i'm going to need to get this thing running with my dos pc? i have a SB16 installed in the pc so will all i have to do is connect the mt-32 to the joystick port with a midi - joystick adaptor cable and i'll be ready to go? will i need to download any drivers or diffrent patchs?

[Jorpho]

This is an external device, right? I suspect you're going to have to plug it into your audio mixer one way or another, or perhaps the Line In port on your sound card.

Not sure about drivers or patches.

[Ze_ro]

I don't think you need drivers for it. The whole idea is supposed to be that the computer just streams MIDI data out through your MIDI port, and the MT-32 makes sound from it. You'll probably need to supply games with port addresses and such though.

--Zero

[gravitone]

there's quite a bit of games out there that use the mt-32 intelligent mode. You need a real MPU-401 interface card for these games to work. They will not work with the mt-32 hooked up to a midi/gameport on a soundblaster or compatible card. They're pretty hard to find these days. Another option is to get a LAPC-1 which is basically an mt-32 in ISA form. But these are rare and go for a premium these days.

Also, the AWE64 sound quality when it comes to opl3 emulation is pretty bad compared to the real deal. It's better to stick with a soundblaster 16, even though it's output is a lot noisier.

For the best midi sound quality for dos games released from the early 90's on, you will need a roland sound canvas. You can get a sound canvas daughterboard, external module, or ISA card (SCC-1). Almost every games was composed with one of these and produce fantastic sound.

Gravis ultrasound game support is extremely limited. You could add one as a secondary or tertiary card if you'd like, but relying on it as a primary or only card is not a wise choice. Since it's 0% hardware compatible with the soundblaster range. The soundblaster emulation TSR gobs up quite a bit of essentail ram (first 640kb range) and is horribly incompatible.

Moving over to windows 95/98 games, you have a few api's you want to look at. Directsound, directsound 3d, EAX, and A3D. The older soundblasters (awe range and lower) only provide directsound support, and with a limited number of voices. Im not even sure it actually supports hardware mixing. Which means the soundquality is reduced, and provides a performance pennalty. The Live range is good for games that support EAX and directsound 3d. Stay away from these if you use a VIA chipset though. My personal favourite, the Diamond Monstersound MX300 is a great PCI card that uses the aureal vortex 2 revision B chip that has support for EAX, A3d 1.0, and A3d 2.0. Unlike EAX which is just some cheesy reverb/delay, A3d 2.0 offers true positional audio over 4 speakers and sound great with the games that support it. Also provides 64 hardware directsound voices, and 16 directsound 3d voices.

After aureal went bankrupt the only half decent soundchip alternative on the market for a while was the trident 3d wave. There's a few cards out there that use it, including the monstersound MX400. They only support a3d 1.0, and EAX if memory serves me right. I never owned one so cant really tell much about the features and its compatability.

Using ISA cards in windows 9x is fine if you're interested in playback of an mp3 file, or just hearing the windows chime, but for games, are horribly lacking in features. Any dos user should use an ISA based soundblaster and avoid PCI based cards like the plague. And no, and onboard AC97 codec chip is definitly not a good option in either situation.

[PC-ENGINE HELL]

Stay away from these if you use a VIA chipset though.

The line of Muse sound cards released by Hercules actually performed pretty well from what I gather from reading reviews and friends who owned the 5.1 and Fortissimo III. They made a good alternative to SB for people who had run into issues using VIA based boards or who wanted to avoid using their on board audio. I only got to use a Muse Xl first hand though, but that card did do me quite well from around early 2002 to late 2006 until I sold it. It was the only other sound card I was willing to use on Athlon and Duron systems I built back then, other then the Vortex 2 and SB Live. I may pick up another soon for the heck of it, wouldn't mind having one on hand again.

[Soviet Conscript]

*sigh* well the mt-32 showed up and dispite my hope that this would be simple....of course it hasn't been.

can't get the damn thing to work. useing one of these

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-M-AUDIO-FEMA...item519119b461

to connect my sound blaster16 to the mt-32. of course in my haste i ordered the female cable so when it arrived i had to by a short M-M midi cable to bridge and connect. as for the 1/4 mono jacks that the mt-32 uses to output i have 2 mono to stereo 1/4 to 1/8 converters and then i have a stereo 1/4 splitter to let my speakers connect to that.

anyways, as i said i can't get it working dispite what i hook the midi cable up to. i tried both midi in and out. i'm testing with kings quest 4 as i read it requires no patches to utilise the mt-32. i know the game is fine because when i set it up to use the sb16 it plays perfect but if i setup for MT-32 and compatibles when i start the game i get a black screen and a mouse pointer. i get no midi message on the mt-32. acually even when i do a sound test with the sb16 i get no sound like nothing is passing to the mt-32.

anyone have any ideas? btw i'm running it on a 486 under dos 6.11

[Jorpho]

Do you have a Windows computer you can try it with?