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Old November 3rd, 2009, 06:36 PM
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Default Game Blaster

I have a SOUNDBLASTER 16MCD ASP (CT1750) card, and it does not seem to work very well with older games that seem to only support game blasters.

Is this normal? Is there a work around or am I stuck with PC Speaker sound?
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Old November 3rd, 2009, 10:26 PM
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Absolutely normal.
Only SB 1.0 is by default (mostly) compatible with CMS/Game Blaster.
So are SB 1.5 and SB 2.0, but only with optional CMS chips installed.
All you can do with later cards is software emulation, I think Dosbox provides CMS/Game Blaster emulation.
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Old November 4th, 2009, 05:23 AM
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The games in question work well in DOSbox, but I am trying to run these on a real dos machine (a 486) running DOS 6.22.

Is there a DOS emulation (translation) software that can be used to convert the Game Blaster stream into a SB16 stream?
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Old November 4th, 2009, 05:44 AM
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I've never heard about such software, and I would be extremely surprised to see something like that.
SB16 lacks Game Blaster-like square wave generators, so they would have to be emulated using SB16's DAC, ie. with heavy CPU effort, probably too heavy for a 486.
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Old November 4th, 2009, 08:37 AM
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What games support only CMS / Game Blaster? All CMS compatible games that i know also supports at least Adlib.
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Old November 4th, 2009, 08:40 AM
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The games I am trying to run do support Adlib. Are you saying my SB16 should play the adlib sounds just fine?

I think I tried this and found that they did not, but I will have to try again tonight.
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Old November 4th, 2009, 04:26 PM
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I think Soundblasters were compatible with adlib.

Also, I did use a SB live in a 486 machine before which requires emulation for SB16 and soundblaster sound.

When playing a game with sound on, it was very very slow, from the emulation.
This was on a socket 3 Pentium Overdrive.
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Old November 4th, 2009, 05:11 PM
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SB16 is Adlib-compatible, but you may encounter one problem with running early Adlib games on 486 and faster machines: the synth chip needs certain delay between I/O port writes, and old software running on a fast CPU doesn't provide such delays.
So, in case of problems with Adlib sound, try to slow down the CPU by disabling Internal Cache in CMOS Setup.
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