I can't comment about Windows but in DOS is awesome as we have to consider this is a PCI card. The legacy compatibility is excellent and sound quality is great too.

I never noticed the SB Link header on my SE440BX-2. I know there are different versions of this board. Is it the PC/PCI connector (J6D1) kind of near the AGP slot?

boxpressed wrote:

I never noticed the SB Link header on my SE440BX-2. I know there are different versions of this board. Is it the PC/PCI connector (J6D1) kind of near the AGP slot?

Yes, just another name for it.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Yes, just another name for it.

Thanks. I'll need to find a cable to test it out. They don't seem like a common item.

I see that some versions of the board come with onboard YMF-740 PCI audio.

One question: why would the SB Link even matter (to us hardware fanatics with multiple ISA sound cards) if the board has two ISA slots?

No, not for ISA cards. But for PCI cards it matters, as it improves compatibility with DOS.

boxpressed wrote:

Thanks. I'll need to find a cable to test it out. They don't seem like a common item.

I see that some versions of the board come with onboard YMF-740 PCI audio.

One question: why would the SB Link even matter (to us hardware fanatics with multiple ISA sound cards) if the board has two ISA slots?

You can get away with a single card with both good DOS support and EAX/D3D.

Sorry, I was a little unclear. Because you could put two ISA cards in the SE440BX-2 (I usually have an AWE64 Gold & GUS Ace), why would you want to bother with SB Link?

Does the "hardware assisted" XG synth even work under real DOS? I do know the softsynth for the ISA Yamaha cards only works in Win9x so not much reason to believe they'd have made a TSR for the PCI cards...

boxpressed wrote:

One question: why would the SB Link even matter (to us hardware fanatics with multiple ISA sound cards) if the board has two ISA slots?

If your board does not support Distributed DMA, SB Link provides a way for the PCI card to be able to have access to ISA bus signals. DOS software relied on these, and otherwise there would be no way of the PCI card to provide accurate emulation. Of course the SB Link wouldn't matter if you're using ISA sound cards, but if you want to use a PCI sound card to save one ISA slot for whatever reason then SB Link is important.

On my case i'm using a Yamaha 724 PCI card in DOS. That way i have an extra slot for one more sound card. My socket 7 system has currently 5 sound cards:

Yamaha 724 PCI (provides Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro)
Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold
Pro Audio Studio XL
Gravis Ultrasound
Innovation SSI 2001

The reason is simple, for a late DOS (for me that means Windows 98 DOS Box, not booting into real DOS) and early Windows computer it might just be the elegant single sound card setup I have been looking for. I understand most might not care about this at all.

Can anyone name some cards to search for?

Thank you for the replies!

@carlostex: I see your point. I guess if you can tap a true OPL3 via the SB Link, you can do interesting things with the two ISA slots on the SE440BX-2. You could have OPL3 + Ultrasound + AWE/CQM.

@squareguy: I can appreciate the elegance of that setup.

squareguy wrote:

I have heard there is no real difference in games between A3D 1.0 and 2.0, anyone done a side-by-side comparison? Supposedly most game makers only really used A3D 1.0 calls?

A3D 2.0 only works on Vortex2 cards and includes the following over A3D 1.0:

Larger HRTF filters for more accurate 3D positioning Full A3D 3.0 wavetracing reverb, occlusions, doppler, and volumetric/nearfi […]
Show full quote

Larger HRTF filters for more accurate 3D positioning
Full A3D 3.0 wavetracing reverb, occlusions, doppler, and volumetric/nearfield sounds.
96 3D audio buffers in hardware
Support for A3D 1.0 and 2.0 audio streams @48khz
Hardware 10 band stereo graphic equalizer
Hardware crosstalk cancellation

Volumetric and Nearfield were done before Sensauras macroFX and zoomFX respectively.

Other soundcards only emulate A3D 1.0, and none emulate 2.0. A3D 2.0 does sound much better on the real hardware over 1.0.

Intersting, I will try one out and see for myself.

I think the one I ordered is a Labway.

I have one of these, seems like a great PCI card on paper, but Yamaha apparently never bothered to finish their win2k drivers. As I'm not too fond of 9x, it's more or less useless to me. 🙁

There are three versions of this chip afaik: YMF724, YMF744, and YMF754. The first is normal stereo, and the latter two offer quad output and SPDIF input.

I'm just thinking out loud here... This might be a key part of the perfect low budget late DOS early Windows build, up to DirectX 7.

An OEM (Dell, Gateway, etc.) Pentium II/III motherboard (hopefully Intel SE440BX-3) and processor that has the SB-Link pins populated. I will see if I have one with un-populated pins and see if it is just the pins, or more circuitry, needs to be added. People give me stuff like this all the time.

A GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8X video card (fast DirectX 7), I really like the Dell OEM cards. Good build quality and I get these out of machines given to me as well.

Any soundcard with Yamaha YMF-724 chip. (I got one for $12 shipped off eBay)

It would not be perfect but think of all the late DOS, DirectX 5/6/7 games it would handle really well. I know a lot of you guys are into a lot more complicated (edit: I mean advanced) things than just OPL3 FM but you could literally build this for almost nothing.

Ok, I'm done thinking out loud and here is the card I found.

jwt27 wrote:

I have one of these, seems like a great PCI card on paper, but Yamaha apparently never bothered to finish their win2k drivers. As I'm not too fond of 9x, it's more or less useless to me. 🙁

There are three versions of this chip afaik: YMF724, YMF744, and YMF754. The first is normal stereo, and the latter two offer quad output and SPDIF input.

Too bad they didn't fully support it in W2K 🙁

Sounds like its time to polish up your reverse engineering skills and get to work eh?
In a few decades we'll have software smart enough to do it all for you, after you fill in some chip information of course (oh wait Jungo...).

I just want to state that I see PCI cards for DOS always as Plan B if your board has ISA slots.

For PCI cards, and late DOS games, there is nothing wrong with the Vortex 2. Great SB Pro 2 compatibility and either a wavetable header or external MIDI unit. I see the lack of OPL3 a non-issue, because all the late DOS games support MIDI.

You can use a cheap DreamBlaster S1, get an external SC or MU unit or drive a PC MIDI box running a soft synth.

I tend to agree with Phil's first statement.

When your play games on Windows, whether your have an ISA or PCI based soundcard makes no difference (although PCI is probably the better choice for later systems).

However, when you play in DOS, the best option is an ISA based sound card (considering that it was designed for the ISA bus).

On the other subject of multiple sound cards in the same system.
I'm interested to see how you free up enough resources for all the sound cards (unless you don't utilise them all at the same time).