Ensoniq AudioPCI, SB PCI 64 and SB PCI 128 are all basically the same card. The audio chip is a little different between them though. The original AudioPCI uses ES1370, the later cards use AC97 versions ES1371 and ES1373. So the drivers may not work across all of them, but the hardware is still awfully similar.
Hopefully it is better than just pc speaker. I do also have sound blaster live that I could try to see how well sound blaster emulation works. Any idea which one is better option? Or would it be better to buy one of those aureal vortex 2 cards for dos?
This was a real messy time for creative, as they also call it a Sound Blaster 64 PCI, You can read more about it here, but basically they just wanted the dos emulation drivers and didn't know what to do with the soundcard itself. Make sure you get the 8MB ecm file.
Ensoniq / Creative AudioPCI
Vortex 2 is completely different (like Intel to AMD or Nvida to ATI)
You will loose EAX, soundfonts, but gain A3D 2.0
Really which is better is down to personal preference, I like the stable (if bloated) drivers of Creative, EAX is more widely supported and Creative cards are much more common and affordable. I wold love a Vortex 2 to play round with though
As I was not sure how to force the via onboard audio chip to work in real dos, I choose a Vortex2 and a Yamaha YMF-724 based pci card for sound.
Anyway my major idea was to use this assembly for
a) Glide games and win98 games that will profit from the Voodoo's 4xFSAA (and the p4, 2,4GHz)
b) really old dos games. I want to use the Yamaha chip with a patched version of dosbox, (h-a-l-9000's Megabuild 5), so I can take advantage from the opl-passthrough.
AFAIK SB64 and SB128 cards of creative are based on the Ensoniq Audio PCI card. When creative bought ensoniq they rebranded some cards, and replaced the original driver with their own (which was - especially the SB emulation - of course based upon the ensoniq ones).
Should the ensoniq drivers work with your card? And what if I have the ES1371 chip?
I'm a little bit confused - is it better to have the original card with the original drivers or the creative ones? (The ensoniq drivers only support SBPro, righty?) And what about the Midi sound?
Does the Live! use the same SB emulation and equals therefore the ensoniq card when it comes to dos compability? If so - to comeback to the original question - is it allways better to use a Live! instead of an ensoniq AudioPCI?
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