Thanks for such awesome comparisons

Yeah, a lot of games with the MT-32 option will sound awful on any card that "emulates" it with just a sample bank, as it only has samples of the default patches. Games such as Dune II programmed the synth with custom patches.

@markcritic2409

3 ай бұрын

oop... you beat me to it (by a year!) Good work!

Lol, That was like the 'shitty flute' version of TFX. I had a CT4500 back in the day, and it was my first decent soundcard, loved it. These days I have a CT4520 with a SimmCon, and have that paired with an Orpheus in my retro pc, it's a flexible combination. Great work on the video as always.

Growing up I was surrounded by friends/family with Soundblaster sound cards but I never had one. My first card was the ProAudio Spectrum 16 and I always thought the FM synth sounded better on there than newer Soundblasters. (I didn't understand the difference between genuine OPL3 and CQM at the time) When I first heard a friend's AWE32 play GM I was blown away but still never had a Soundblaster card. I ended up getting a Yamaha SW60XG instead (thanks Mom!) and to me that sounded far better than any AWE32/64 for music playback. I greatly appreciate this comprehensive review and example of the challenges with the AWE64 and how it sounds. I think it effectively "solved" my longing to own one of these cards.

@KITR-UK

Жыл бұрын

Your mom certainly knew what's best for her son.

I prefer a ES1868f for pretty much most games. It just sounds fantastic. In some cases sounds arguably better than a real OPL3.

@KITR-UK

2 жыл бұрын

I must agree...

@chiphopper

2 жыл бұрын

@@KITR-UK Great new vid by the way! :) Keep em coming!

I have a gold and I like for the low sound (i also was able to get it for a reasonable price). I dont mind the 1 mb in some cases, same for the CQM. I dont really bother with aweutil. For midi im using the uart with either my dreamblaster x2 or mt32pi emu (which gives me perfect mt32). It also provides sb16. I think you might look into community tools as well. I use unisound exclusively with this card for pnp init and volumes, it works perfectly. There also some other tools (i havnt tried) but use dos32a to get around the protected mode issue aweutil has. There was also a tool that allows the bank to be loaded within dos. Still has to be in the odd format the default banks used, but someone had a tool and users have been converting various SF2 banks.

8:49 is Mouth for war by Pantera

Really interesting findings. I don't play a huge number of games so my experience of my AWE64 isn't well-rounded, but I agree the default bank is not pretty. I mainly use it as a MIDI interface for my SC-55, which sounds awesome.

@KITR-UK

Жыл бұрын

SC-55 will always sound awesome...

cool

I love your quest series👍 The AWE64 is very hyped and overpriced, but not a bad card at all. It is a great card for a Pentium/Pentium II class windows 9x system. For pure DOS, it is fine as long as you stay with FM music. Even if AWE is natively supported like in Descent, I don't like the small soundfond. The noise-level seem to vary as I can tell you my AWE64 is perfectly low-noise. I made some records and comparisons with this card as well, and my conclusion is that CQM is pretty good but I also can understand if someone prefer "real" Yamaha OPL2/3 FM for old DOS games.

@lordwiadro83

Жыл бұрын

Finally someone said what I was always thinking, the AWE64 is definitely overhyped. For my retro PC I go with an ESS Audiodrive card coupled with the Dreamblaster S2. I get ESFM synthesis that I was growing up with, and GM from the Dreamblaster if I so want. Plus, the card is more easily configurable and bug free.

Oh.I like this Sound Card! Awe64 GOLD is Great But Need ISA

Decent card, I went from the AWE32 to the SB Live! so never had an experience with this one. I really appreciate the noise test you do to show the background / idle noise of these cards. Do you think you could do one video just comparing the idle noise of all the cards you have tested? Thank you for making great videos, lots of enjoyment looking back at these cards. Cheers!

@KITR-UK

Жыл бұрын

I've still got lots of cards to cover, but I may include the noise comparison in pretty much every new video. Cheers.

Oh bloody hell, i remember heroes 2 on my (our😪) awe32 exactly how it sounds then, still remember that all games i played using win95, late 96, using wavetables sounds amazing, and i had 8 megs on sound card then 🙂 From Cz with love ;-)

It's crazy to see the prices asked now, I don't know if anyone actually pay those prices. I remember I bought quite a few between 2005 and 2010 with about 5-10 dollars each.

also question, have you tried SBK soundfonts in dos from vogons? does it work please? i cant paste links here, so i hope you will get it this way... vogonsdrivers, Home, Utilities, Soundfonts... thx

@KITR-UK

6 ай бұрын

Do you have some specific banks in mind?

@dim0n1

6 ай бұрын

@@KITR-UK hmm, you know, until now, i even didn't know, that there is posibility to upload sound fonts in to awe32/64 for dos, so i found one, emulating sound from gravis sound, so maybe try this: "2MB SBK for AWE32 to get Gravis qualty wavetable in DOS." just copy that is inside"" in google, first (vogons) link, there is 2, one 2mb, one 6mb which will not fit in 4mb ram of awe64...

Sampler EMU8000 is not recommended to use it becose has 16 bit samples, although the quality can be improved using EMU8000 DSP with controllers Non Registered Parameter Number ( NRPM ) or System Exclusive ( SysEx ) at MIDI file with sequencer I make music with the AWE64 Gold, but mostly I use an FM synth with SPDIF output With sequencer for Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold using the FM hardware synthesizer at 4-operators mode or using the Add hardware synthesizer ( it requires software that can use 4 operators instead of 2 operators ) to create quality sounds with the SPDIF output record to new high-quality sound cards or from them to the magnetic tape , can be achieved the studios quality sound It's difficult to find software that uses 4 operators instead of 2 operators that give a sparse sound , or find System Exclusive (SysEx) in a MIDI file with a sequencer to use 4 operators for bether sounds

Can you upload more Heroes 2 songs in FM OPL3? With the optimal card

@KITR-UK

2 жыл бұрын

I'll try to upload some tracks tomorrow.

@Alianger

2 жыл бұрын

@@KITR-UK Awesome, thanks

@KITR-UK

2 жыл бұрын

@@Alianger Check this out: kzread.info/dash/bejne/lIR2spiqaLKomqw.html

EMU8000, shame, that something what had it legacy in legendary sampler Emulator II and modules Protheus, was equipped with such as horrible 1MB ROM. No wonder, that most of games didn't bother to support it more than just only General Midi card, and almost everything was composed on Roland SoundCanvas. And final nail into it was, that it was not compatible with SoundCanvas sysex, what you can hear in TFX, or Inferno, where AWE plays drums only on channel 10, instead of multiple (yes that annoying sound should be also drum track).

@KITR-UK

2 жыл бұрын

TFX was really the worst example of how horrible the emulated MT-32 can sound.

@soylentgreenb

2 жыл бұрын

Features don’t matter if they aren’t used. In principle the gravis ultra sound was a magnificent card. It’s like an amiga, but way more channels and way more memory. In practice however nearly nothing supported it natively and they just half-assed any music for it as an after thought. It was a great card; it just wasn’t a good card to own and use.

@petertorda5487

2 жыл бұрын

@@soylentgreenb Yeah, Gravis was not ideal for MIDI as it didn't supported Reverb and Chorus, plus if it was used as General Midi card, then MEGAEM had to compress all 5MB of samples into 1MB RAM. Anyway for MODs and trackers it sounded absolutely amazing, even AWE 32/64 tracker player didn't sounded as such good.

amusingly enough, i get less noise out of my awe64 gold than every other soundblaster in my collection. though my PAS16 seems to have it beat, if slightly. though my sb32 has better overall dos support, for the most part. including soundfonts and the like. and i can upgrade the memory without an adapter board. so bonus points for that. might look into modding the 32 for SQ at some point, but its pretty far down the list of project ideas. and, naturally, nothing beats my studio gear, but as dos firewire audio support is basically non-existent, i can't really use it directly, much as i'd like to play around with it. i have to pipe the output from one of the dedicated cards into the i/o device as a mixed source. sadface.

@KITR-UK

Жыл бұрын

What's your studio gear, if I may ask?

The card is not rubbish at all! The background noise is lower than with many other sound cards, whether under Dos or Windows. That is not to be underestimated. The card is easy to install and offers many setting options. It is possible to elicit sounds from it in practically every game. The fact that General Midi practically never works under Dos has been known for a long time, but most games offer the possibility of directly addressing the EMU chip as AWE32. The fact that the card doesn't have a real OPL3 chip is negligible in my opinion, but the existing FM chip can be provided with effects such as reverb and chorus, and it doesn't do such a bad job. I would also have been interested to know which other card you would have recommended. What about alternatives?

@ozzyp97

2 жыл бұрын

One obvious alternative is the AWE32. It has about the same features, but with standard 30-pin SIMM modules, a wavetable header and a real OPL3 which supports effects as well. Granted, only on a few models, most have CQM. Edit: Just saw the ending, seems he had the same idea.

@lasskinn474

2 жыл бұрын

Obvious alternatives are the older sb cards. Like the 32. Or just 16. Lots of dos games have only fm anyway so decent fm can be kinda important.

@KITR-UK

2 жыл бұрын

You are right, there are many other sound cards with more background noise than the Gold, however, my point about the noise floor was that the cheaper and "worse" AWE64 standard or classic or whatever you want to call it, has lower noise floor than the pricier and better card. I wouldn't say that most games offer AWE32 option, maybe about half of all DOS games. And that's good, but the problem is, the card can't use its memory to load sound banks with AWE32 driver, so it uses, and let's be honest here, absolutely terrible default 1MB ROM. And in the end I said that I would recommend the AWE32 or SB32.

@lasskinn474

2 жыл бұрын

@@KITR-UK if you were to do a statistics of dos games I think you'd find most of them to not support the higher end sb sound cards that came out in the tail end of dos gaming anyway, even if you just counted boxed games. if you count all the shareware, homebrew etc very few of them have support for 'better' soundcards. even awe32 was released at the tail end of dos gaming so there's just like 2-3 years of strictly dos games window to have native support, with many glorious dos games released in that time window, sure, but many of them also had just full cd soundtracks instead of digital sfx. these weren't really common cards back in the day because you didn't get much more out of popular games for having them. quake isn't any better with them than with a normal sb, neither is half life 1 or many other popular games of the era from 1994 onwards.

@ozzyp97

2 жыл бұрын

@@KITR-UK The default ROM has awful guitars, but in fairness I think it can sound pretty decent in other ways. It's not too bad at all in Daggerfall or Dark Forces, for example. Still, I agree about the AWE32.

Good work, but here's something that kept throwing you off; you CANNOT emulate a Roland MT-32 since most games loaded custom sounds impossible to duplicate. Best synths like this could do was run a default patch set and hope the game/song didn't load any custom sounds. Most of your MT-32 "sounds bad" problems are due to that. Run General MIDI or FM, never MT-32.

could you please make an effort to speak standard international english ? I dont understand anything... and neither the google translator

@KITR-UK

9 ай бұрын

Well, I already tried something like that, but then instead of focusing on what to say I was focusing on how to say it and it came out as utter rubbish.

7:55 8:14 Oh, come on.what is this BAD COPYed cheap music? That music is such a rip off of Fantasy Zone - Boss Music (1986/SEGA).

@Dan-TechAndMusic

Жыл бұрын

Rip off? The songs aren't all that similar, calling it a rip off betrays a lack of proper music comprehension.