The main advantage I found was that it lit my room up more than dos when I couldn't be arsed turning the light on, due to the lighter coloured background.
lol well you can achieve the same result at the DOS prompt with ANSI.SYS
I'll keep my eye out for the CT2800. Is that the ISA model? I know a lot of PCI sound cards are terrible for noise, and very incompatible with dos games.
Yes, the CT2800 is ISA. It uses the Vibra chipset which is basically a more integrated version of the original Creative SB16 chipset, but is much less prone to noise and interference. Vibras have a cleaner sound than the earlier SB16's but many of them lack a real OPL FM synth, instead using an inferior emulation which sounds a bit off. The CT2800 and CT2900 are two such ISA Vibra based cards that include a real Yamaha OPL chip. Of course if you're using MIDI then this is only of concern for games that don't support anything better than Sound Blaster or Adlib audio.
Please do I used to have a wave blaster which was good (read FANTASTIC) in games you could get it to work with. I would really love to play Dune2 with an MT32 or similar...
OK you asked for it
wall of text incoming.....
I own several MIDI devices that I use with my gaming rigs:
MT32
LAPC-I
RAP-10
Sound Canvas SC55
Yamaha DB50XG clone (NEC XR385) waveblaster card
Also not true MIDI devices, but I'll include them here for comparison:
AWE32
Gravis Ultrasound Classic
These two work best for games that support them natively. You can run utils for GM compatibility for other games, but they tend to be a bit clunky, as you've discovered with the GUS. AWEUTIL is even worse.
You can install sample RAM on the AWE32/64 but its useless under DOS. Windows lets you load SF2 soundfonts on the AWE, under DOS you have to replace the default SBK soundfonts; there are very few SBK files out there and none of the ones I tried sounded any better than the default ones. So I'd suggest just to forget about it.
Of the above devices, my pick for best general sound is the DB50XG clone card. This might be personal preference but I find its generally the best sounding option all round. It can be had on ebay pretty cheaply too.
Of course some games will sound better on different devices. Tyrian seems to sound best on the AWE. Rise of the Triad seems best on the GUS, X-Wing sounds best on the SC-55, and so on.
Many earlier games were written for the MT32, these games will always sound best on that device. The big thing to worry about with MT32 is 'intelligent mode MIDI'. Many games will hang on launch if you have an MT32 attached to a non-intelligent MIDI controller, (known as UART MIDI). The Sound Blaster 16 and AWE both have a UART MIDI port. SB PRO and earlier are not MIDI compatible. I'm not aware of any SB clone cards that have intelligent MIDI, although the Ensoniq cards did apparently (these are comparatively rare and expensive though). I should also mention that I never managed to get my GUS's external MIDI port to work at all under DOS.
There is a patch for some games that will let you use an MT32 with a UART MIDI controller. The LAPC-I is an internal version of the MT32 and has a built-in intelligent mode MIDI controller so it doesn't have this problem.
Roland's own Intelligent MIDI controller ISA card is the MPU401-AT or the MPU-IPC. Be warned that you need both the MPU-IPC card and the breakout box, they often pop up on ebay as one or the other seperately. The MPU401-AT doesn't have a breakout box and also includes an internal Waveblaster daughterboard mount. If you can find one grab it!
I personally have a Music Quest ISA MIDI card to run my MT32, which doesn't need a breakout box.
Finally, the MT32/LAPC-I predates the General MIDI standard and doesn't work properly with games that only support GM. Some games actually claim MT32 support and have the option in the setup but they just try to run the MT32 in GM mode which produces poor results.
The Sound Canvas SC55 is a proper General MIDI device, and doesn't care about intelligent mode. The RAP-10 is an internal card, and its General MIDI mode sounds almost identical to the SC55. Some games support the RAP-10 for digital sound too (not many though). Both of these have an MT32 compatible mode but it doesn't sound identical to a real MT32 and if your game requires intelligent mode it won't fix this either.
The Waveblaster and compatible boards like my XR385 are proper General MIDI devices too. Of course they are mounted internally on a Sound Blaster 16 or compatible card.
Unfortunately nearly all SB16 models had the 'hanging note' bug: basically when using a MIDI device connected to the SB16 (internally on the Waveblaster header, or externally using the DB15 port) and using the same SB16 for digital sound, you sometimes get a stuck/hanging note on the synth.
Certain models seem to be affected more than others, The CT2800 has it quite badly. The original SB16 (CT1740 I think) didn't have this issue but has a poor SNR with audible cracks/hiss so its a poor choice anyway. The CT2230 was another model that doesn't seem to be affected but it too suffers from noise issues. Nearly all other models have it to varying degrees.
I think the AWE64 is not affected either but it doesn't have a Waveblaster header, nor does it have a real OPL chip on it so you don't get true adlib audio. My AWE32 IS affected and also has noise problems.
The quick test for this is to setup hexen with general MIDI + digital sound on the same card, then start hexen with
hexen -warp 02
And you should hear a high pitched constant ringing tone within a couple of minutes if not immediately.
This is noticable in other games during normal game play and its quite annoying, there is no fix for it. One alternative is to have two sound blasters in the one PC... one for digital sound, one to run the MIDI device. But this gets messy with IRQ and DMA settings etc.
I got frustrated with all this and ditched Sound Blasters all together. I tried a few different cards using Crystal, ESS or Opti chipsets and was disappointed in them all for various reasons - not working with certain games, lack of true OPL3 synth, driver issues etc.
I ended up buying a Yamaha YMF719 ISA card which includes a real OPL3 synth, does not suffer from hanging note bug and once the volume is set correctly in the mixer software, has nice clean output.
Unfortunately it wasn't big enough to mount my XR385 wavetable daughter board so I had to make an adapter cable:
However I am very happy with the results.
Many clone cards are also not big enough to mount my XR385 card so be wary of this. I believe Yamaha made an external version of the DB50XG, in the MU series of MIDI synths but I haven't tried one.
I've done a recording of Rise of the Triad music using my GUS, SC55 and XR385
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9151127/ROTT/rott.html
There is a bit of noise in these files but its more to do with the crappy onboard sound I was using rather than the sound cards themselves. This is a good way to compare the sample sets of each card.
And finally, here's a tip - a lot of sound cards have jumpers for 'line' or 'speaker' out or a seperate line out jack. Use Line out when possible as the internal amplifiers are usually pretty noisy.
So there you have it. Sorry for the lengthy read but I hope it helps you out in some way
