Posted by Wombat Was Here on 4, 2001 at 3:56 PM:
In Reply to: Anyone here uses a motherboard without ISA slot? posted by Bugfinder on 4, 2001 at 3:16 PM:
: I have a few questions for people using motherboards with no ISA slot, namely Asus A7V / A7V Pro / A7V133.
: 1) Someone said at MAME official board that ISA 16-bit sound cards slow down the processor performance so I´d better choose a PCI sound card. Is this true?
I have an A7V Motherboard with no ISA slots. I am running a Sound Blaster Live, and have noticed that in a few games it is a little hard to hear. Whether it's a slow down thing, or just something I haven't run into yet I haven't found out yet.
: 2) I want to have a DOS-only computer for use in my cabinet however I don´t see sound card manufacturers including DOS drivers... Do you have any of these motherboards and have sound in pure MS-DOS? How did you install the soundcard if there are no DOS drivers? Have you had to install Windows just to use the sound card installer program, to have sound support in pure MS-DOS?
Good question. I haven't found any DOS drivers, but the Sound Blaster Live emulates a Sound Blaster 16 for DOS applications.
: 3) People who have already used both Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA and PCI sound cards say that an AWE64 ISA card sounds much better than a PCI sound card. How true is that? I´m looking to a Sound Blaster PCI 128, running away from Sound Blaster PCI 16 (Ensoniq) and Live! because they´re expensive and add nothing good to DOS users, only showing their full feature under Windows.
Don't know what to tell you guy. It's a trade up on performance vs. sound. My setup runs Mortal Kombat 3 at full FPS with no scanlines, or any of the typical "save processor" techniques.