Sound Blaster 16 Value

[Vickiana Sconyers]

AsI m buying a computer without an onboard sound card, I m thinking about using my old Creative Sound card from 21 years ago and buying a pcie riser adapter instead of a modern sound card (I m interested in one with hardware fm synthesis support rather than one emulated through pcm and sampling).

Please note in that case that it s not only about hardware accelaration and is also about sound quality because of not using pcm sound at all.

I know that by 1995, Creative abonned fm synthesis and started to use a low quality compatible hardware alternative based on cqm synthesis in order to cut down costs in their pci version of Sound Blaster 16 cards. But as processing powered evolved, cost to include it again should have decreased which doesn t means later models like mine don t include it.

I also know Creative provided a tsr in order to let dos programs perform sound synthesis (I lost the driver CD).

But I fail to understand if it was for emulating everything or just reroute irq for accessing the hardware?

Back in 2006, I was too young to pay attention about this in Windows 98se hardware settings and as Windows doesn t support hardware synthesis since Windows Vista and Linux never had support for such things with pci card, this is something I ve no idea on how to figure.

No, the Soundblaster Live! doesn't have any hardware support for FM synthesis. Soundblaster 16 emulation is provided by trapping accesses to the Soundblaster and AdLib ports and then emulating their functionality in software. There is no OPL or CQM chip, or even a Soundblaster PCM compatible chip.

Note that in the MS-DOS and Windows VxD drivers this emulation is based on generating PCI #SERR errors, which get turned into NMIs by the chipset. However this doesn't work on newer motherboards, basically Pentium 4 or newer because by the time the NMI has arrived at the CPU, the CPU has gone on to execute the next instruction causing that one to appear to have accessed the SoundBlaster or AdLib port.

Is it possible to make awe64 value sound card to work in old dos games that only support basic sound blaster/adlib?

I tried King's quest 5 game yesterday and it didn't find sound blaster in my system and returned to dos.

My card is most likely a pnp model, because bios finds it as pnp when computer star.

I know a pnp card isn't generally a good thing, but I don't have many isa sound cards.

it is a pentium 2 and it does have win98 installed, but it boots to dos mode and hard drive volumes are formatted just for dos 6.22 originally.

Would it make the game work if I removed windows and and installed just dos 6.22?

I have the same sound card. My system lacks a HDD at the moment so I can't verify but if the game is looking for a regular SB it's probably looking at IRQ 7 and not seeing the card there (it loads as IRQ 5 default) so you may want to edit your SET BLASTER line in CONFIG.SYS to set the card as IRQ7 at startup. If that doesn't work try changing the card's Type setting to a regular SB or SB Pro..

If you're running from MS-DOS mode, then you need to make sure that CTCM is loaded in your Config.sys file as a device driver.

The DOS settings for the sound card is stored under your Windows folder in a file called "ctpnp.cfg".

This file will be updated every time you boot into Windows (unless you make the file read only).

As I recall, later Sierra titles (like the one you have) were OK with the sound card having an IRQ of 5 (however, older titles, like Space Quest 3, is expecting the IRQ to be at 7).

Make sure that the SET BLASTER environment variable is present in your Autoexec.bat file.

For an AWE64 the default parameters are: SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6

The system requirements for the games should give an idea on how slow the PC can be. Remember its not the speed that's at fault, if anything its the soundcard, and that's only cause the default resources are wrong and can be changed easy enough.

You don't have to do this in config.sys. All you need is to run ctcm in your autoexec.bat.

This way it'll only initialize the PnP card, without installing any resident TSR that eats your precious DOS memory.

Well, Wing Commander is an Origin title, for starters. WC1 is certainly speed sensitive, so throttling is advantageous for playing it. For Sierra games, the problem extends beyond sound card compatibility to the script interpreter itself. QFG3, for instance, is known to have a plethora of glitches when operating beyond 486 equivalent performance.

Hi there, I would like to ask for help regarding my old Blaster. I know it's not the best one but it's all I've got. I can hear quite a lot of noise. It subsides while lowering volume but it never entirely stops. I read here on many occasions that people were replacing caps to get better sound and also - that getting rid of all the noise might not be possible (depends on the model). I would like to try to recap my card. I also read that Creative engineers originally designed the card with different caps on some spots. Can someone please advice me where to get the schematics or datasheets for this kind of card so I know what caps were meant to be there? Thank you in advance.

Hi there, I would like to ask for little help regarding my old Blaster. I know it's not the best one but it's all I'v got. I can hear quite a lot of noise. It subsides while lowering volume but it never entirely stops. I read here on many occassions that people were replacing caps to get better sound and also - that getting rid of all the noise might not be possible (depends on the model). I would like to try to recap my card. I also read that Creative engineers originally designed the card with different caps on some spots. Can someone please advice me where to get the schematics or datasheets for this kind of card so I know what caps were ment to be there? Thank you in advance.

Can you point to some info which talk about these supposedly different caps?

You won't get schematics of the card, but of course the card has also standard non-Creative ICs that have examples in their datasheets.

Usually recapping means to change only the electrolytic capacitors. There are also other kind of capacitors (ceramic, tantalum, polymer..) that usually don't go bad and these hardly ever need replacing except when tantalums explode. Electrolytic caps are easy, because you can read their capacitance, voltage and temperature rating, and if you are interested how good/bad those capacitors are compared to what you are going to buy as replacement, they also read the manufacturer and capacitor model series information. Ceramic surface mount caps rarely have any markings on them, so their capacitance and other ratings are only a guess.

I also recall some SB16 cards were pretty noisy (I think my noisiest was a Vibra 16C) so if the noise comes from the ICs, just changing the electrolytic caps on sound card won't help much with the noise. Also standard electrolytic caps are not so good at stabilizing high frequency noise, so they are mainly used as bulk energy storage and the higher frequency noise is smoothed with local ceramic caps near every IC.

The noise also depends on power supply, motherboard, other cards, hard drives etc that generate noise on supply voltages.

Just by changing the sound card to a different ISA slot further away from other cards could help with noise emitted by nearby cards.

Also, just a thought that I have been thinking; how does it really affect the system, if you put the best capacitors you can get to a sound card, and the sound card into a system with just regular capacitors, do the caps on the sound card have the largest ripple current over them, as they have the lowest impedance and they want to stabilize the voltage better than the other caps? I don't know, but if this happens, it surely does not sound good either.

There's about fifty electrolytic caps there, and if I had to estimate, about half of them stabilize the supply voltages, and the other half are there for passing audio between ICs where DC bias must be blocked.

3) C87 replaced. Digi-Key P# P12924. This is the Supply Voltage Rejection capacitor and reduces ripple. Some of the hiss in the background seems to have subsided and the music sounds overall smoother.

4) C89 and C99 replaced. Digi-Key P# P12923. These are the Feedback capacitors. (also referred to as Inverting Input DC Decoupling capacitors) I'm uncertain whether there was a change. The music sounds as if it may have a bit more power behind it. According to the datasheet, this capacitors can affect the low frequency cut-off. It calls for a 100uF capacitor, but Creative Labs used a 47uF capacitor. I may rectify this, later.

5) C83 and C? replaced. Digi-Key P# P12924. These are the Bootstrap capacitors. excerpt from datasheet: "The bootstrap connection allows to increase the output swing. The suggested value for the bootstrap capacitors (100uF) avoids a reduction of the output signal at low frequencies and low supply voltages." I cannot say whether I hear a difference or not, but this is still an important place to apply good quality capacitors. Logically, it would seem that this becomes more of a factor as you increase volume and more power is required. This would likely be a real issue if you were stressing the circuit.

6) C93 and C103 replaced. Digi-Key P# P12376. These are the Output DC Decoupling Capacitors. Their capacitance affects the low frequency cut-off. At 470uF and 24-Ohms the cut-off would be 14Hz. (It's hard to say, exactly since Creative used smaller Feedback capacitors than the Datasheet calls for, but much larger Input capacitors than the Datasheet calls for.) I did not change values, but very low-frequency performance HAS improved. Also, I noticed some details in the various areas of the frequency range in the tracks I have been listening to that I did not notice before. Again, they are much better caps than the originals and they are fresh. These capacitors are also important if you are using headphones as they block DC which would otherwise damage your headphones. Ideally, for best quality they should be non-polarized, but for the moment, I wanted to keep the capacitors the same diameter. Maybe I should have done this first; maybe it would have allowed me to more easily noticed improvements from replacing other caps. doh!

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