upgradeing from awe32 to awe64 gold

[oblivion]

right now in my pentium based DOS pc i'm running a awe32 with 8mb ram added as my sound card. in my opinion its a fairly noisy card. im running it with the latest drivers for the awe32 and i still get alot of poping. i've heard good things about the awe64 gold having alot less noise. question is does the awe64 act like a awe32 in DOS but just less noisy? am i going to run into any issues simply pulling the awe32 and replaceing it with a awe64? also does the awe64 have the same issues with its midi port when connected to a mt-32 or sc-55 as the awe32?

 

[deathshadow]

For the most part the AWE-64 is really a downgrade not a upgrade compared to a 8 meg AWE32. The synth unit in it is rubbish by comparison.

BUT -- 'popping' usually means a IRQ issue, possibly from allowing IRQ's to be auto assigned; Creative cards right through to the LIVE tend to have a lot of bus related issues when things like ACPI are enabled.

One way to tell is to hold down a key on the keyboard - does the crackle/popping stop while keys are held down? If so, go through BIOS, disable ACPI and anything else 'fancy' for dealing with IRQ's, assign all the IRQ's manually making sure that you do NOT allow the OS to try and allocated them - and see if that helps.

Any 'noise' on a AWE32 should be negligible; unless you've got bad caps, an IRQ conflict, or something else conflicting, you shouldn't have 'popping' bad enough to be noticeable unless you're running the output through studio monitors.

 

[oblivion]

yhep, seemed to fix it. only game that still pops alot is Elder Scrolls: Arena but i think thats just the game. one example of a game that was "noisy" as i put it was duke 3d. all the explosions just got a real noticible crackling sound and when firing alot of the weapons. sounds good now.

 

[twolazy]

I never had many issues with my awe32 either. Card I own isnt the exact same card, but close, a dell revision... I have a feeling there is something wrong with your awe32. Now SB16's, ya tons of pops (unless vibra based). Downside is the awe32 has a better midi chip then the awe64. The awe32 has a modified OPL3 chip, where as the awe64 I believe is CQM based, and will have midi problems. (stuck note upon exit being one of the flaws)

Prob just a shared IRQ/DMA in all likelyhood. Chances are the awe64 was setup differently previously, and had the settings in its eprom, hence why it works fine... Another cause could be the pci/isa header needs to be cleaned, or bad caps on the headphone/speaker amp.

 

[oblivion]

if your not running some kind of music software or using soundfonts does adding ram to an awe32 improve performace or sound quality in any way for games?

 

[twolazy]

Depends how you decide to use the added ram. If you mean for gaming persay, you can most definitely improve sound quality! I remember a few years ago someone made a MT-32 soundfont pack, as well as I think a orginal adlib midi soundfont pack as well, that can be used on cards with more 8? or more mb of ram... Also, if you look on your installation diskettes/cd for the awe64, i seem to recall an opl3 soundfont pack on it.

You will have to search some with google for the files though, I don't remember what I did with the bookmarks/files...

I think this is the right one, hard to say... Not sure if this is the fixed one or not ... *scratches head. There's 2 copies floating on the web that I know of. Both have the correct sounds, but one has them in the wrong order. Think this is the right one...

http://www.sf2midi.com/soundfonts/file-detail/roland-mt-32-sf2-3029.html

 

[NeXT]

The popping noises are not just limited to the older cards in terms of resources not being happily shared with the sound card.
Even with Creative's much newer Audigy 2 ZS the problem is still known to exist.