(Retro) sound card recommendations?

So I'm building a retro PC. I'm aiming for rougly 1999-era specs, but might want to run older titles too, especially Sierra adventures. Which happen to rely on MIDI. Back then I didn't put much thought into which sound card to use, but now - having heard what e.g. a Roland MT-32 synth can produce - I realize my ignorance.

Now, a real MT-32 is a bit over my budget, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be necessary anyways since it's from '87 so there's been 12 years of technical progress, but I don't know what to look for, so... Which cards with good MIDI support from around that time would you recommend?


Edit:
OK, I've been doing some reading... I remember MIDIs always sounded pretty shitty for me, but maybe that was just an user error since most if not all all cards made after, like, '95 seem to have decent midi support - just no OOTB, but apparently loading a different "sound font" could have improved things? Seems like there's quite a few of those out there. However, I have no idea how one is supposed to use them from DOS...

 

I always fancied the Sound Blaster 16 but I can't tell you if you can consider to be *good* MIDI support.

 

I had a gravis ultrasound throughout the 1990s. Whenever I play dos games via dos box these days, the sound always seems lacking and not as good as I remember it - frankly, I think the gravis ultrasound was a fairly premium soundcard at the time - I think there was something about it triggering samples, so even midis sounded much richer and more vibrant like mods or S3Ms, than being completely synthesized with really tinn and artificial sounding sfx.

A video illustrating the gravis and comparison with other cards in certain dos games
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=figScJtkQk8

 

Take a look at the cards mentioned by this example:
http://www.sierraplanet.com/kingsquest6/technical.html
Especially look at the doc near the bottom of that page.

The Roland seems to be a higher-end MIDI device, but I've never actually used one. Other standard options are the SB16 or AWE32. All games have little variations and it isn't quite as good as sound compatibility is today. You probably have those fond memories of playing games on your PC back in the 90s, probably not all the frustration of getting the game to work properly.

Regarding the PC you want to build and since you want to play DOS games, the hardware here is important. Make sure your CPU doesn't have an L2 cache, or else you'll need to disable it in order to play some games.

 

Thanks everyone. I was hoping that maybe something comparable to the MT-32 made it into later cards... Apparently not. Well, at least that explains why the actual Roland devices are still relatively expensive.

I think one of the cards I had was an AWE32 - and it still sounded like crap. I'm leaning more and more towards user error though... Anyways, seeing how SB cards are much cheaper than I expected, I'll just go ahead and grab one to experiment with those soundfonts once I find out how they're loaded/used. The SB Live matches my "target" period so here's hoping I can track down some decent DOS utils for it... The Windows side should be fine since I know the necessary tools are right on the driver CD, and even if that doesn't work out I can always fall back to a software synth.

Thanks for the hint. But actually I use an intentionally "crappy" laptop for most DOS games. I just can't switch around the sound hardware on that one, obviously. With this machine I'm going for 3DFX and early D3D stuff - good MIDI music would have been a bonus.

Still, mind giving some more details on that one? Can't say I've heard about your L2 trick... I know about the "error 200" issue with code using the Pascal runtime (some internal counter overflow), and games running too fast since they didn't expect a really fast CPU are a no-brainer too. Does your trick have something to do with either of those (if so I'm guessing the latter, since it'd slow everything down), or is it something else entirely?

 

Have you checked the VOGONS forum at all? They had a great website/project going that let you hear recordings of many different Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster compatible cards. I used that to find a chipset i liked and bought a PCI card that used it for $3 shipped on eBay new in the box, sounds almost exactly like a real Yamaha FM

 

Yes, I've been to Vogons, amongst other sites. I've compared quite a few common cards, but none seem to come close to the MT-32:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-uAf_xMQSQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZXVqrSo7AA
(I hope these are the correct videos, I'm at work where I have no sound so I can't really check.)

I also found a sound font imitating the MT-32 (without special effects though)...

Guess I'll settle for the second best solution for the time being (as I mentioned they turned out way cheaper than I expected), and hope to score a real Roland device some time (Someone managed to score a MT-32 for ~€25 recently, lucky bastard).
Or maybe I'll just stick with a Sound Blaster, since the extreme difference in fidelity seems to be mostly limited to Sierra adventures, which run great with ScummVM and MUNT.

 

There is simply no replacement for the MT 32 all said and done. There are some other similar Roland MIDI units but they don't sound the same at all. I have another cheaper Roland device, that essentially works the same way as the MT 32, but has very different sounds and noticably lower quality.

 

Regarding how things sounded, also consider what kind of speakers you had back then. Were they any good?

You may encounter some DOS games that run too fast. Disabling the L2 cache can fix that problem, but the BIOS of the system needs to have that option. It is even mentioned here, although the list is vastly incomplete:
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_CPU_speed_sensitive_games

 

AWE32 is a tricky one. They use really nice hardware so if a game works well with it, it can sound great. But its Yamaha OPL implementation sucked and was too buggy so you get a lot of crap sound in a lot of games, unfortunately.

Basically unless you're building up a collection I'd avoid it. Hold out for something with a real Yamaha on it.

 

For a 99 build? Probably a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold would be your best bet. Sound blaster 16 is more for early-mid 90's gaming, and the MT32 is more for late 80's-early 90's gaming.

The AWE64 GOLD only came in ISA, though, so something to look out for.

Specific models in the Sound Blaster 16 line of cards are sought out because of their OPL3 chips inside. The CT1740 is probably the best model Sound Blaster 16 you'll get, as it's 100% pure OPL3 (i.e. a real ymf262 inside).

 

I've found it hard to come by a decent timeline of Sound Blaster models... For the moment I've got a SB PCI128 (CT4810) and a SB Live! (non-5.1, otherwise unknown model) on the way - I guess they might probably both be a bit too recent, but for the moment they'll do.

ISA, really? I though that'd mostly gone away by '99. Huh.

...and yet that one, as well as the AWE64, can often be found for less than €10 shipped? God damnit, sound cards are really cheap... Maybe it is time to start a collection?

 

SB16s are pretty bad in general, get an SB Pro2.

SB16's have bad SB Pro backwards compatibility. So games with SB Pro support, but without explicit SB16 support will have to be played in mono.

 

^Aka CT1600
Its a great card, but Id say it depends on what you want to play. Some SB16 have very good acoustic quality ( Better than CT1600) and do not have the Hanging note bug. If you want to combine Sound blaster/OPL3 compatibility with General midi out for some Sound Canvas goodness, they might be a better choice.

Also, isn't there now a way to use Intelligent mode on sound blasters? I think someone made a patch for this recently.

 

I have been reviewing and making comparative recordings of various cards, so far one of the Top card is the CT2290.
This is possibly the best SB16
You can read my review here
https://sites.google.com/site/soundcardcomparison/

 

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=36023

AFAIK it needs EMM386 for V86 mode, which may cause some issues with some specific titles.

Edit: Read the thread, and it looks like there's no overlap. Games that fail with EMM386 don't require intelligent MPU (e.g. Ultima 7).

Also looks like he's working to make the utility work with the SBMIDI driver, and hence with SB Pros. Fascinating.

 

I've got Sound Blasters:

AE64 Gold - Excellent sound card for DOS games, makes some games sound tons and tons better (duke nukem, descent to name a couple), very high compatibility, no noise - I bought this one for my P1 166mhz retro rig, very happy with it!
Live! player 1024 - I would recommend this one for you as it's PCI and has Sound Blaster 16 emulation, also has EAX audio for later 2000 era games. No noise, excellent feature set - good all rounder.
Audigy 2 ZS - This one was bought with a power rig I built in 2003 and is still the best card I own, has EAX HD and a shit ton of features, though not so much for compatibility with DOS games, especially older DOS games.
Recon 3d - I know this one isn't retro but I just wanted to steer people away from this one in general, hideous sound quality (noise) and hardly any features. Terrible, aviod aviod aviod!

Just my two pennies.

 

Be wary, SB16 emulation in Live! cards needs EMM386 loaded, which means it won't work with certain titles, such as Ultima 7.

Also it emulates OPL FM very badly.

 

I found an AWE64 still installed in the old machine I wanted to use, so now I ended up with three generations of SB cards to pick from.

And another thing: I'm surprised how little noise this box makes, due to the passively cooled graphics card (a Voodoo 3 3000 - these were the last ones to have fanless variants available, I think) and CPU (I replaced the Celeron - which had a small fan - with a "real" P3, which came with just a (huge!) heatsink). No case fans either, and I intend to use a CF card instead of a HDD - so the only moving part will be the PSU fan, which is barely audible. This thing is going to be absolutely whisper quiet. Well, at least I hope so - We'll see how everything holds up under some stress.

 

That's the config I have in my P1 166 rig now, Voodoo 3 3000 - AWE64 gold - 32mb RAM - intel HX Tyan motherboard with hacked bios to allow my 128GB HDD to be recognised. I picked the voodoo 3 because it's the most powerful in the range to be passive cooled and anything more wouldn't make sense considering the bottlenecks in the system. A voodoo 3 is in fact overkill for this computer but it was cheap so fuck it, lol.

My P1 has a small fan on there though which sounds a bit like a WWII tank driving over rough terrain. Not sure what I could use on there to cool it passively, not looked into it.

Is compact flash as fast as an IDE HDD?? I'd be tempted to get one in that case, also what's flash memory's life span/reliability?

Yeah, it does sound awful in certain old games, but like I said, it's got a very wide compatibility range which includes support for sound in most old games and newer features like EAX for newer games - relatively newer of course.