AWE64 Legacy: A Premium New ISA Sound Card in 2022
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- čas přidán 1. 11. 2022
- I was able to borrow this AWE 64 Legacy sound card, and wow is this thing impressive. A modern 16-bit ISA sound card with just about all the bells and whistles you could ask for in a Sound Blaster of this type. So let's check it out on a Pentium III Windows 98 PC and the LGR Woodgrain 486!
More info about the project on Vogons: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?... - Věda a technologie
Here's a link to where you can get that first tracker tune I played: artscene.textfiles.com/music/mods/XM/MODLAND/Nagz/
The filename is _ride'em cowboy.xm_
Also found it here on yt, on "soundwave trax". Theres also a couple uploads of the other song, phased chords by estrayk and evelred.
Hello I know that this video was made a year ago but I saw that sf2 files also work on the midi thing you just have to do all files then click on the sf2 file
BTW: FastTracker 2 only used card memory for the classic 1MB Ultrasound. No other. SB16 will use all you want for system memory.
Impulse Tracker, however, would use AWE32/64 card RAM if you chose, as well as the reverb/chorus effects!
As a former Creative Labs employee, I really enjoyed seeing this. I didn't know it existed. I wrote Audio Stream Recorder that shipped with some of the later sound cards, and I consider myself fortunate to have been able to work with these sound cards.
You and your peers back then were instrumental (kind of literally) in getting the PC world into sound and music on a larger scale, and I certainly grew up with Creative, having owned the original SoundBlaster 8 Bit, SB16, SB16 Pro, AWE32, AWE64 Gold and finally the SB Live! Player before my music making ambitions were swallowed by real life and onboard solutions became "good enough" to me as a mere consumer. I've formed some of my core auditory childhood/teen memories through those cards, and had quite the blast their name promised with them. I guess this was a lenghty "thanks"!
@@fonkbadonk5370 I started out as a lowly technical support agent when the SB Pro was popular and worked my way up to developing applications packaged with the Nomad MP3 players and Live cards over a period of eight years. Fun times!
An honor. Some guy at creative should realize how big is the retro community and do something official :)
I salute you, sir!
I still use this card today. ❤
Had an AWE64 with the black jacks before they were rebranded as 'Value' and had color coded jacks. Came with onboard 512KB RAM. I got a mic and started messing around and recorded myself making stupid sounds and uploaded it to the onboard RAM and then forgot about it.
A little while later I was playing Hexen late at night and started hearing my voice come through in the sounds and freaked the hell out. Eventually realised that Hexen was using the stupid sounds stored in the memory of the AWE64 that I had forgotten about.
That's incredibly funny, I'd be thinking my game was haunted or something haha
Lol
That made me trully lol
Haha, the guy thinks hes schizo, hearing his own voice through the speakers
But I'm thinking we have a nice compreson for awe64 gold vs awe64 value specific ct4520 2mb onboard
The sheer quality of this community produced card is a testament to the kind of dedication folks have in retro computing.
For $540 it better be quality lol
The problem is that while it's a stunning looking product and looks like a true labour of love from some enthousiats, it's doomed to fail commercially and it will never get off at that price (or drop to reasonable price) because let's be honest - how many people are actually interested in such product worldwide? I'd say probably less than 1000 and if you add the price to the equation, maybe 100 folks would actually buy it.
@@puciohenzap891 Yeah, for something like that I would probably play with it for a weekend and then it will end up in a box, forgotten about in a closet somewhere for a decade
@@puciohenzap891 Id say maybe like 10k interested but the 100 actually buying it, sounds about right
@@puciohenzap891 And is difficult(but not impossible) to obtain in western country due to conflict.
For $500 I'd say it was expensive, but looking at the quality there and the fact you can see the love and passion that went in to it, I think it's the perfect price point.
This is proof of what happens if you have a good community.
for a
- low count,
- hobbyist-designed but professionally built,
- packaged,
- extremely niche product
$500 is CHEAP
sourcing the chips alone is a challenge. Designing a 6 layer PCB demands expertise. Prototyping this would have cost quite a bit (each test run of 5 _EMPTY_ boards? $200 then populate them...)
I was born in 2010 but I still think it's cool that you old people like this kind of stuff. Sometimes I play with my iPhone 8 for nostalgia
It's our childhood toys, of course we do!
We're not old, we're retro!
There's a difference there!
Ever since I saw the original Vogons thread three years ago, I wanted one of these cards but could never justify the $500+ expense (especially when converted to Canadian Dollars). It would let me avoid juggling sound cards in my Windows 98 retro PC (PII-450, 440BX motherboard, Voodoo2, GeForce2 GTS); at the moment I need to use a Sound Blaster 16 for my OPL3 needs, a Vortex2 card for A3D games, and a SB Live Value for EAX games. Even if they were still available, it would be hard to tell my wife "Sorry, I can't buy a new crib for the baby, I just spent all of our money importing a retro sound card from Russia." 😅
Divorce or a new sound card hmmm
Also, I will never get tired of watching that Gateway monitor resync. Seemingly every other CRT flickers quickly or does it totally unnoticeably - I love the gentle yet dignified resizing of screen geometry on this unit.
I had a Seanix branded CRT from about 1998 that behaved in a similar fashion. When it changed sync modes, it would make an audible click, but the image would morph like this one. I think the ODM was Hansol.
You talk like a poet.
I used to have one of these monitors myself. It's an aperture grille CRT, Trinitron-like. So there's two tiny damper wires inside the CRT that you can faintly see on white backgrounds but it never bothered me. Goes up to 100 Hz refresh at 1024x768. Unfortunately, mine died with a loud bang one night and I didn't have the confidence to try to repair a CRT monitor at the time.
@@reidster87 whaddya know, the Hansol Mazellan looks nigh-identical to the Gateway VX700! But it’s got a D-pad instead of a little door with controls behind it.
@@TheVanillatech thank you!
The song at 17:45 damn. I was such a audio card nerd in highschool and my college years. I was preaching the word of Audigy to anyone who would listen. Loved this vid.
12:37 - When changing Soundfonts / banks, you often need to play the MIDI from the start again, else the patch changes don't occur, and most of the sounds will default to Piano.
Very nice-looking card.
Yep, I was just about to comment that. Strange how using custom SF2s worked correctly though.
A wild ElectronAsh appears!
@@Vanessaira-Retro I just saw how much the card costs.
It's nice, but it's not in my budget. lol
@@Vanessaira-Retro Hi, btw.
Stupid GoogleTube auto-deleted my comment. sigh
Basically, I just sent off for boards today, for an FPGA-based ISA Sound Card.
It will be fully open-source. The PCB files are on my github.
I'll be using the SB16 and OPL3 code from ao486 (with credit).
I've been discussing it mainly on the fpga-systems channel on the RMC Discord.
Let's see if this comment gets deleted again. lol
@@electronash That would be neat, as I would like an option to use FPGAs to mimic other types like Yamaha's OPL4 or the GUS, Ensoniq Soundscape etc.
I was a tester for this card, got my prototype safely in my Dual MMX box. It really is something very special. The guys did a phenomenal job on the whole project.
I used to use FT2 for a while to make tracker music. FT2 utilizes software mixing. It loads samples to system RAM, not in the AWE64 RAM. That is the reason it uses system RAM when loading samples. GUS may be different, but in Sound Blaster mode, mixing is done in software. Also, despite what the software says, it seems to play samples in 8-bit while in live preview, but can render 16-bit WAV files as output for best quality.
FT2 outputs in 16-bit live, from a 32-bit integer mixer.
Thanks for confirming what I was also pretty sure about. The first tracker I used (Tetra Compositor, lol) didn't even support XMS, so the free conventional memory was all you got (about 580K in my case back then). FT2 was my favorite. Triton was an amazing group anyway. Too bad Crystal Dream II was overshadowed by 2nd Reality. But I'm drifting off ;) Regarding hardware mixing (using the RAM on the soundcard - not DMA to get the samples from the system memory) you have to use Cubic Player to hear AWE's full potential (you could add reverb for example). GUS on the other side didn't even support software mixing afaik, so FT2 absolutely used GUS' memory to load the samples into.
wow, those people did a good job putting that together. It's definitely boutique and priced accordingly but you can tell they built it to be as good as possible instead of just another marginal clone card.
I love tracker and mod files. I used to listen to them for hours. This takes them to a whole new level. If this card was cheaper and available, I'd want one just for that purpose.
Any modern phone has better audio hardware than this card. And mod files can be played on Android without problems. Buying this card for playing tracker files would be quite a waste of money.
@@sypialnia_studio i think ur missing the point of the card- its for retro pc stuff, u quoting android is a non-argument
@@sypialnia_studio Its not a case of they needed to do it,its the fact they wanted to.Many things in life are 100% unnecessary,but still give some folks much happiness.Who are we to say "No"?
Mod files (and variants like screamtracker3, impulse tracker, etc.) load PCM samples into memory and play from there - they're sound card independent. Any modern computer can play them perfectly, with the right tracker. :) (where a lot of modern computers do struggle is noise on the audio outputs, but you can get around that with an external usb sound card or bluetooth)
@@dariyanvalentine3564 that's exactly the point- this card is meant for retro compatibility. Mod files are not suffering with compatibility in any way with modern hardware. And op stated he likes to listen to mod files and would get this card for the "whole new level". In reality this card does nothing for mod files compared to a modern PC or smartphone you already have. But it's hella expensive. If the op wants this card just for listening to mod files it's a waste of money.
Awesome seeing it on Blerbs! Been following the Vogons thread for a long time but the 540 USD was a bit too steep for me. Especially since I already own a Awe64 Gold.
Got mine a few years ago from a seller who offered a box of random cards. Mostly generic AGP cards and NICs but then my keen eye spotted that gold PCB in the bottom of the box. Got the entire box for 40 EUR.. it was a good day :)
I know Soundcards aren't exactly a thing anymore, but that thing is awesome. It looks amazing too.
Oh they are still a thing in pci-e form, but hardly anybody buys them anymore.
@@rommix0 Mostly "audiophiles" that is, the kind of folks who will spend thousands of dollars on cables for their hi-fi systems. Just the cables.
@@rommix0 I buy them, they rock
I still purchase soundcards, just in USB form factor.
@@ashkitt7719 If you need more than USB and 3.5 minijack you'll need an internal card or external interface regardless. Definitely not an audiophile thing.
Man, that fast tracker clip ....that music is like food for the soul. Takes me straight back to 90s gaming. Same with the descent music. Amazing. Fantastic.
Thats Awesome, I Always LOVED my ISA Sound Blaster Card that had the Volume Control on it and Every Port you could think of at the time, I kept that in every PC from my Packard Bell 80286/386/AMD DX4-100/Pentium MMX 233 Gaming Rig.
I wish that had that control on it.
I like how the asymmetry brings it all together. So clean and concise. Very Nice!!!!
Really amazing what the retro computing community comes out with, looks beautiful i remember getting a AWE32 back in the day and it was a real big deal for me and my dad. I can vividly remember trying out all the things it could do and my dad was interested in using it for making music and such.
man i miss those days where everything was new and seemed like endless progress and now seems a little stagnant except for VR stuff.
That might be the best looking card I've ever seen. Shows how passion and dedication can make a difference.
The moment you said Argentina I realized why. This is a really cool project.
The ISA sound cards are so rare to found specially working. Most people went to on-board or pci sound cards because they were expensive and hard to find. Making retro computers hard to do because of it maybe hdd and graphics cards too.
The whole deal with "MT-32 Emulation" was it only did the default sound patches. A HUGE number of games supporting it did their own custom patches. Since the MT32.SBK file only has recordings of the default patches, it's only suitable for games that use just the default patches (Monkey Island 1).
Also, ya gotta outright stop MIDI playback when switching synths or soundbanks, otherwise it's Oops All Pianos. XD
Yes the SCC-1 was in many ways actually a step backwards from the MT-32. General Midi was IMO the worst thing to ever happen to PC sound. The Soundblaster 16 should have been something like the GUS on a smaller scale. i.e. 6 or 8 ADPCM channels and some RAM and the FM synth. If PC soundcards had been based on the OPN instead of the OPL this would have been a lot simper as the YM2610B (OPNB) would have fit the bill perfectly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM2610.
Example of OPNB music: czcams.com/video/deb4BGycmF8/video.html
Now imagine that chip on a PC card with 256k of RAM back in the day.
do i understand correctly that this soundcard is basically a collection of different kinds of synthesizers bundled together?
@@GeorgeTsiros It's a Yamaha OPL3 FM synth and two separate ways (native or MPU-401 emulation) to route midi to internal or external wavetables, in addition to PCM playback of course. All the things typically employed by early to mid 90s DOS games, basically.
@@ozzyp97 i'm gonna search for a graphic/image/chart that describes how the diff components interact, the architecture of it, in a sense. Apart from that, is the arrangement you describe something common or something rare for cards of this "kind" ? I had an ISA awe32 gold, but i am sad to admit i irrepairably damaged in a shitfit about 20 years ago.
@@GeorgeTsiros It's the same as the AWE32 essentially, just with some modern refinements. OPL + digital goes all the way back to the original Sound Blaster, and AWE is where Creative first added an internal wavetable.
What timing on this video! Thanks, never knew this existed and now I need one! Working on a P3-800 Win98se / DOS build right now. Fun times!
A little too expensive for me, lol.
I'm very happy that the postal services are still working so that you could delight us with such a review as well as show off that well-drawn Nu Pogodi art.
"Not a big fan of covering things people can't buy."
Hey, thanks for that. I think there's some disconnect sometimes between creators and viewers, and saying that shows you're still grounded. There's nothing wrong with showing off awesome, horribly expensive stuff as long as your honest about the reality of actually owning it. Keep on rocking it.
Amazing videos as always. So cool to see what the retro community is cooking up these days. I still have tonnes of retro parts stashed away which I cycle out of various PCs to try them out over the years.
Man. Tracker music just has that certain sound to it. Nearly all of it could be used in UT99 I swear. So good.
You actually could. UT99 uses tracker files packaged away in .UMX files. If you extract them out, you'll find they're mostly .IT files with a few .S3M as well. The original Unreal is the reverse, favouring S3M, and Deus Ex is entirely .IT files. I think all three games have the same composer, so that's probably an indication of how they changed tracker programs over the course of development.
@@Roxor128 I'm well aware! That's why I love this music
Epic (and DICE and Remedy) got their roots in the demo scene. Hence their early games all used tracker music, Jazz Jackrabbit, Pinball Fantasies, Death Rally, OMF2097 etc.). But the Amiga ofc played also an important part. PC beeper, GM and OPL3 just didn't do it. Think about Bitmap Brothers and Xenon II - Bass the bomb :)
6:45 That's EXACTLY what they did - stripped down working AWE64 Value cards (and most probably some SIMM72 sticks for the RAM). Some didn't like the move, but considering all Legacies were sold out I wouldn't blame them. All working chips found their happy owners =)
Plus it’s a strict upgrade on the output stages, and the exact same chips! Like the video said the value model isn’t rare.
That is a beautiful card. I would have loved to have one of these back then. I had a AWE32 addon card in my Win95/98 p200 with 8MB ram on it and it was great for midi music.
Impulse Tracker does support the EMU chip on the AWE32/64. It can load the samples into the cards memory and do all the mixing on the card itself AFAK.
I think Cubic Player support it, too. As does MOD4WIN.
Man, this video is too good to call a blerb lol. Sweet video! That MIDI tracker stuff was amazing!
WOOOOOWWWW i also love the box content, design, the AWESOME stickersss.... im in love again with a soundcard, the nerd i am
Great looking card, impressive work.
I really love seeing the community making modern versions of older hardware so they can be reused.
Lu!
And upgraded in this case. The chips are salvaged off AWE64 Value cards, giving them a new lease on life and letting them really shine.
Awesome 🤩 i love the awe64 gold, this is a must buy
I love the design of the card and the talent and effort is really impressive.
Great video and great work!
Congratulations! :>
I had an AWE (I think AWE 32, but with the SIMM slots maxed out), a Live, and an Audigy. I loved the “live drive” thing that the latter two supported.
[edits because I had the wrong models at first. My memory is mush]
Had the AWE 32 and 64 Gold back as an early teen in my first self-bought PC, a Pentium 90. Aside from having my own machine, these were definitely something I was proud of and loved as a (very!) amatuerish music making tryout guy. If I had known how well they'd be regarded and valued about 25 years later, I would definitely have kept them. Dang. And this is an amazing retro prod! Incredible, what a dedicated "amateur" community can put out these days. Thanks for showing it off and the trip down memory lane (kind of literally heh)!
Hope your renovations are going great!! Great continent. Just want you to know that we appreciate you.
I don't know what half of these acronyms are but I loved every minute of this video.
I have 2 AWE64 value, one of them with a SIMMconn adapter and a 32MB stick in it. I purchased that from its original creator about 10 years ago, one of the last ones he had available. Crazy that the demand back then wasn't too great, he had been sitting on his last pieces for a few years unsold. There days though...
It's a shame Creative had to be greedy yet again, you can still get a 32MB kit brand new for the AWE32s for about $20 because they're the same as tons of old Macs, synths etc. The cards themselves on the other hand...
Beautiful card. The sound quality seems to be improved as well.
That is a gorgeous PCB and assembly job, it shows how far we've come with premium PCB manufacturing.
Interestingly I notice there's an ATmega1284p microcontroller on there, absent on the bare prototype PCB. I guess it's there for memory management.
oh my gosh this thing sounds beautiful
4:19 -- the sounds coming out of that Roland sound-bank you loaded in there reminds me a lot of a Roland D10 keyboard I had back in the day. Hook it up via a couple of MIDI cables to any PC with a MIDI out (there was an adapter cable that let you hook up the joystick port as if it were a MIDI in/out) and set your game or other software to use MT-32 emulation, and it sounded really great. I remember playing many games using that setup for the music portion of the sound effects. Good stuff.
That thing is an art piece of its own
YOU ROCK, Clint!!!
Awesome, awesome, AWE64-some. A beautiful sound card, for sure. Love the Ну, погоди! artwork on the outer box :)
That thing is gorgeous! The black and gold color scheme is beautiful. I don't need one, but I NEED one.
That brings up some memories.
So called "intelligent" MPU-401 mode was basically a simple 8-track MIDI sequencer engine, built into the original MPU-401. The data storage was handled by the PC, while sequence playback was handled by the interface. It's functionality was similar to Roland's early hardware MIDI sequencers. The limitations of this mode, along with quickly increasing computing power at the time, made it soon obsolete.
UART or "dumb" MPU mode just meant a serial port at 330h using IRQ 9, with all the processing done by the host. MIDI playback was all handled in software. That's how the vast majority of programs operated.
Much brighter sound from that last sound font. Nice.
Amazing that such things are made in 2022.... !
this was a great project to follow over on Vogons
FT2 isn't using the Emu8000, that's plain software mixing. Only the GUS is supported by FT2 for utilizing the sample ram and sampler. But there are some tools out there, which are using the Emu8000 for playing mods (like AWE32 Module Player or AMP 2.5). Even a tracker specially for the Awe was made (All Sound Tracker), but this beast is weird and can't handle xm or mod files at all (at least the version I have).
I was looking to see if anyone would point that out and mention the players that used the E-Mu to play the MODs. I couldn't remember exactly what the player I used was called - I thought something like AWEMP but I think now it may well have been AMP. I just remember that it blew my mind when I heard my MOD collection played on my Gold for the first time. I'm sure that even modern software mixing with vast CPU resources doesn't sound quite as AWEsome (ba-dumm-tshhhh). I shall have to dig out the PC that's got the card in it (my old, well-loved Dual-Deschutes box), revive it and have a listen.
I think Cubic Player and MOD4WIN also support the AWE32 for hardware mixing.
I had one of these in an AMD-K6 early 2000s. It and the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz were the best. It was a time. Great to see the design survives.
Holy crap, I got goosebumps when I heard the bootup sound. My AWE64 Gold is sitting in my Win3.11 machine, and I love that thing.
17:27 Seeing the DOS filenames hiding the tilde character seems a tad unusual. One thing I always liked to do on Win95/98 PCs is enable the NameNumericTail setting in the registry, then rename some of the music filenames and back so that they have "better" DOS filenames without the tilde at all.
That’s the best you’ll get for that era… really cool!
Cheers from Argentina!! :D
Nice. I have one of those (#12) and paired it with Roland SCB-55 (alternatively with WP32-McCake). Regarding bare PCB extra I believe there was a lucky box which had it as a surprise gift, so I guess this must be the one.
Btw, Orpheus (being another modern-retro card) is also great and has better availability, I totally recommend it. AWE64 Legacy is a dream version of what people wanted AWE64/Gold to be (Wavetable header, built-in RAM and genuine OPL3), the last proper SoundBlaster ISA card for DOS/Win9x. Unfortunately all AWE32 and SB16 models are minefield of bugs, and despite so many variants released there isn't one that won't have some annoying issue, be it infamous hanging note bug, slowdowns and much more. I had SB16 (CT1770) with WaveBlaster (CT1900) back then and sure enough it had hanging note bug, it was so infuriating.
Yes. Number 002 was the version with a gift)
Every awe64 have opl3 Logic in cms chip not the chip itself
Great vid. Still have my Creative Voodoo 2 and my SB Live Audigy 2 with the 5.25" bay. Was just about to build a Win 98 retro machine with them. Creative labs in the 90s was unbeatable.
Nice Nu, Pogodi! reference on the post box. Pretty sweet looking sound card overall, too. Nice to see rehashings of older tech. That $500 price tag though, oof Xp
Now I'm in nostalgia mode! I had the Awe32, and loved Fastracker, but when I moved to Midi stuff I ended up with a Gravis Ultrasound Pro. I'd love you to get a Gravis and do a comparison, because I loved its particular wavetable sounds. It was not very compatible with games, but great for music.
That is the single most beautiful card I've ever seen and heard.
Man everything about this has a very high aesthetic.
Love your vids. More Amiga please 🙏
I had two awe64gold back in the day. I used them to compose with soundfonts. On both of them the audio output failed eventually, the cards worked but there was no sound. Then I got the Audigy EX which allowed soundfonts in system RAM....you have no idea how happy I was being able to use more than 32MB for banks. Those cards were revolutionary for home musicians, anything else meant spending 10.000 on protools.
Hell yeah! One of the best games to test proper MIDI with is Descent! I totally love you for putting that in first! :D You're right, there isn't much difference, the Gold is a bit punchier when it comes to drums and stuff, the melody is more pronounced with the Legacy as I hear it. Can't hear much in Doom though, then again, I'm not a pro-Doomer, I'm a pro-Descenter. :P
Soundtrack at 18:00 is something we'd hear today
Considering what thar pkg had to go thru getting to you, just the small dent on the box & the tap tabs is extremely impressive!!!
A couple things, most of which you probably already know, but others may not:
MPU401 is speed sensitive, just like OPL is. Even a 386 with cache is kind of fast. This is what the 8 and/or 16 bit I/O wait states setting is for. Not all BIOSes have these setting, and it sometimes may be called something else. Changing this ISA clock divider may help as well, if that is an option in the BIOS or on the motherboard.
MPU uses IRQ 2/9, but some video cards also use that by default for a Vertical Blank.
MIDI devices use 300/330 or such. Some network cards uses this as well.
There's also a utility that initialises the HardMPU in some particular way that some games seem to require but not others.
IRQ 2/9 is also sometimes reserved for ACPI, at least on 440BX. Switching to APM in the bios and uninstalling ACPI drivers did fix it in one of my systems, but imagine how long it took to figure that out.
Just one more reason to stick to older hardware for your intelligent mode needs.
@@ozzyp97 I didn't even think about that. It is sometimes assigned to the USB controllers as well in a PCI system.
Great to have Blerbs back!
I owned this card back in the day. One of the best sounds cards I’ve ever used.
I need to find that tracker track you played it's SO good, I want it since it has such a freaking amazing 90's sound.
Never mind I found it! SO FREAKING GOOD
seeing this reminds me of the Audigy 2 ZS Gamer limited edition i've still got. lightly used but still original box and everything, card looks mint.
I had an awe64 gold and it was the loudest sound card I ever had. I could drive anything and sounded great.
I love that every fan in your build is a modern Noctua.
I'm glad that even during that hard period of time our comminuty is still stand together.
In impulse tracker it can use the card for hardware mixing and loads the samples in the card memory. Had one more than 20 years ago and sounded so clear. It was the value with 512k, the memory was more expensive than the card. Very nice project!
OMG, I had some of those speakers back in the day. I forgot all about them until now.. :)
Wow. That may be the most beautiful card I have ever seen. Sounds good too! Perhaps slightly "cooler" sound than the Gold.
My AWE64 Gold is in my Win 95 gaming machine. It's got one of Serdaco's simmcon daughterboards with the full 32MB! Absolutely amazing sounds for the era. I could use two of these Legacy boards.
I love this sound card. I was lucky enough to get an AWE 64 Gold for £100 a couple of years back but this looks amazing.
As someone with a Simmconn (and 32mb simm to get the 28mb max ram) on my AWE64 gold, one thing that is kinda interesting is just how slow it is to load a big soundfont. It gets loaded during driver initialization at windows boot, so you get a pretty long hang at boot - just showing the mouse cursor - if you leave a big soundfont configured. An SSD doesn't help, the limitation seems to be the transfer to the sound card.
Yeah it's the cards internal bus. It's slow.
I had the AWE64 Gold back in the day with the memory upgrade - loved it! The recreation is good but the samples here Id say the OG was a little better.
soundtastic !
I used to have quite the fetish for sound cards back in the day! I had most of the sound blasters from the early to mid 2000s. I ended up getting a sound card eventually that made me not ever want another one, an Asus Xonar D2X. I still use it to this day in my AM4 system. It pairs well with my optical SPDIF audio receiver from the early 2010s (Kenwood). I was so done with soundblaster before I got the Xonar though, I got up to the X-Fi Titanium Fatality or something and the drivers just broke when windows 10 came. Xonar has some great drivers made by 'Maxed Tech'... I used to record music in DAWs using internal sound cards! lol Now I have a Focusrite 6i6 external audio interface and it's brilliant.
I remember when on-board audio was first coming to be a thing. I played some midi files from the various Ultima games and was so disappointed compared to how full the Creative Labs ISA cards were.
Oh the wallpaper and startup sounds takes me back to 1999, and the Creative Blaster! PC. That machine was peak Windows '98 awesomeness for me.
Amazing it was crowd funded. Amazing
Nice demonstration of this card.
Fast Tracker 2 is doing software mixing and does not use the AWE64 ram, it was released before the AWE32 exist.
aww this brought me back tot he old youth. Bards Tale III, Syndicate, Dune II... Lemmings
That is super cool and the did a great job putting it together. But wow the price point.
You had me at ISA.
YES I just watched the Orpheus episode again yesterday 😆
If the Media Vision Pro Zonic ever made it to production, it would be a very interesting card to see you look at. I saw one mention of it as an upcoming product in a computer magazine sometime in the 90's. The Pro Zonic was supposedly going to be an everything but GUS in one card. Adlib, Soundblaster 8 and 16 bit, Covox Sound Master 2 + Speech Thing, Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and more. One card, compatible with DOS, Windows, and every game.
The card is as beautiful as a painting^^
This card is awesome. I loved my sb