I recently put together a Win 98 PC, and went with the Sound Blaster Live after watching some content on Phil's Computer Lab. His advice was avoid the OEM cards, and stick with a retail version. He also stated it makes a big difference which driver version you use. I went with his recommendation, and have had no issues so far.
I have a 1998/1999 build with components all from those years with a Live! Non OEM. It is not a bad card at all for DOS. I do try to use a Roland Sound Canvas for anything General MIDI though not that it’s too bad on the Live or anything though. If SB16 perfection is what you need then just get a real SB16. There isn’t anything official from back then that can tick every box perfectly on one card. So with that in mind yeah the SB Live is a fantastic option for someone trying to capture as much of the 90’s as possible.
I like these. Once I got a Spdif receiver to use with my PC I never went back to regular speakers. The one I use most is a dell OEM, but I flashed the ID code on the chip so I could use Retail drivers. That isn't the easiest thing to do. Although it unlocks the full retail functionality you have to remember the options not built into the OEM card. I did it with a parallel port with wires soldered on the removed chip. I still have the software to do that. With the prevalence of retail Live versions a person wouldn't need to do that unless they wanted to. Only the ones that have a Live drive ribbon connector are flashable that I know of. Back in the day people wanted to save money by not buying a retail card. Once I used the OEM card on XP the drivers were built in. I have both a 5.1 and a 4.1 that I only use the digital out on. I would use Ac3 filter to allow spdif psssthrough and other multichannel options that were not available until windows 7 had Dolby digital decoders built in. Yes, I really hated having to use licensed dvd decoders. I have used these in W7 with the KX project that I found to work decent. I even tried the live card to play Ultima 7 with U98 and Origins. I have to say the sound effects were accurate, unlike an original sounblaster 16 ct2230. I would have to say the OEM live is the Awe64 values counterpart.
Came for the Sound Blaster Live talk, stayed for the delicious sub. A nice summary of what the Live! is capable of, and I was quite pleased to see you testing with the more obscure Zone Raiders there amidst all the usual culprits! Keep it up!
Descent, Duke Nukem 3d has to use as GM MPU 330 and instrument bank EAPCI8M.ECM in DOS, in Windows the .sf2 instrument banks are loaded through Creative AudioHQ.
Thanks for the video. Personally, I have a few of these cards. My primary use has been as a card for Win '98 games (an era of gaming I don't have much familiarity with) and the EAX extensions were the reason I picked this one. It's good to know it has built in wave table though. I'd not even thought to try it out in Dos, as it's on a Pentium 3, and I don't really Dos game on that.
SBLive is excellent for Windows 98, 2000, XP gaming. If you play a game like Thief II or Max Payne with a good surround speaker set you get the max out of what this awesome chip has to offer. Great 3D surround sound with excellent environmental audio effects.
It's all about finding the right drivers, if you have the correct software and setup, with a fast enough cpu, it should sound fine on sound blaster emulation. It's one of the most recommended cards for its compatibility and scope of functionality. As I recall, practically every different sound card back then had its own "personality/tone". Better sound is in the ear of the beholder.
Lol, I have a SB Live! 5.1 digital on my main desktop PC today It's so interesting to see someone try it with DOS, while I'm just here using it as normal modern hardware I actually wasn't able to find the Win10 driver, but the card was working perfectly without installing anything on Linux
You can actually use this to get it working on Windows 10 and 11: github.com/kxproject/kX-Audio-driver-binaries My parents PC had the onboard audio fail on an old LGA1155 board and I slotted one of these in and its been working solid for about 3 years now.
SB Live doesn't sound like SB AWE32 at all, this may be the case for many people. It is for me. I'd pay 6x more than I'd pay for SB Live, for a SB 32 (a budget version of AWE32 which is essentially the same, without a few secondary features).
I've got the same model of Live! Value. Found a forum topic on Vogons going through driver compatibility, and learned that (at least 1 example) of a SB Live! 1024 install disc was the correct one for both the CT4780 *and* CT4830. The older CT4670 is far more forgiving and works reliably with newer Liveware 3.0 drivers. I've honestly had no issues with the Live! cards when it comes to sound quality, and only 2 games that I play have issues. BSAOG due to my copy being shareware 1.0 with memory issues (full 2.10 doesn't have any trouble), and Magic Boy because it is an outright finicky game - which is why I bought a Solo-1 for my mum's Win98 PC.
ESS SOLO-1 card has much better DOS compatibility and much better OPL implementation. The advantage of Live! is SB16 compatibility and MIDI which is more useful for latter DOS games. That said I would advice against Live! and recommend Sound Blaster 128 PCI instead. It doesn't have working OPL emulation at all (it produces sounds but they are more funny than useful) but it has superior MIDI support. I mean Enqusonic which made ES1370 chip made sound banks used by all ES137x chips and EMU10K DOS emulation but Creative didn't implement all effects and processing these banks expect so MIDI doesn't sound quite right on EMU10K cards. SB 128PCI uses pretty much the same MIDI engine as their Ensoniq drivers so MIDI sounds great and with Creative's drivers you get SB16 compatibility. Quality-wise only 2MB preset is worthwhile and imho its the most universal MIDI patchset I have ever heard. Maybe not the best fidelity (what can you expect from 2MB samples...) but I have yet to hear any game or even MID file which has sounds sounding out of place on SB 128PCI with 2MB ECW patchset. All in all SOLO-1 + 128PCI is the best DOS sound combo. You get SB Pro + superior OPL2/3 (and native ESFM in like two games...) without need for EMM386 and SB16 with very good MIDI sounds for later games. It is such a shame Creative didn't implement better drivers for EMU10K because I would really want Audigy2ZS to be that latter DOS sound card... anyways, where it comes to SB 128PCI you can also use it with SBEMU to get very accurate OPL3 emulation. It doesn't have amazing compatibility of SOLO-1 and ESS card still sounds better in OPL2/3 mode than "nuked OPL" just like it sounds better than original OPL chips - but that is neither here or there. For best OPL quality you need ESS card. Unless someone cracks how ESS did it, how they fixed FM synthesis.
I upgraded to a Soundblaster Live! From an very incompatible card called an Audio Excel 16. The Soundblaster Live! was a big improvement as it actually ran sound without issues. Later I got an Soundblaster AWE64 and that was even better.... good times.
Yeah PCI is a pretty big advantage sometimes. Some of these old ISA cards were a nightmare to get to work properly. I'd love to get a hold of an AWE64 though.
@@DOSStorm You are right the ISA cards I had to play around with so many IRQ and DMA settings in DOS and Windows 95. It was a pain and unreliable. Yes I wish I still had my AWE64 (I sold it or gave it away log ago).
Wonderful video, straight to the point, properly edited and I finally know what the old card I have in my shelf for 15 years is made of. Thank you, subbed!
This card is great for Windows as it has much better output than ANY onboard chip. Plus it can be used for recording as noise levels are really low. The only downside - the abscence of Creative's own ASIO driver (which was properly implemented only on Audigy 2ZS). You have to use ASIO4ALL instead.
100% agree! It still sounds better than most modern onboard solutions. The output is pretty clean. My parents onboard audio failed on their desktop and I just slotted one of these in and used the KX driver. Its still running on Windows 11 to this day!
"You can get it cheaply of the eBay, but is it safe?" Is anything acquired trough the auctions safe? How many times did I bought a CDs & DVDs (both music and games) where the seller would inform me "yeah, it's in pristine condition!". A week later the disc is delivered. How does it look? It looks like it exchanged more hands than an average banknote... 😤😤😤
eBay certainly has their share of dodgy sellers... however eBay will rarely(if ever) side with the seller when the item fails to match the description if the buyer files a claim. This obviously doesn't apply to "untested" or "as-is" items so always just assume those are non-functional unless stated otherwise. Retro and vintage items are never really 100% guaranteed to work, because even if they did work when the seller tested it this stuff is old and can easily get screwed up in the mail. I've bought many things on ebay over the years including some sound cards that ended up not working and I've had a positive outcome every time I've had to file a claim.
sbemu gives you more or less proper pure dos mode now with the Live!'s, for those that want the 'purity'. its still a bit iffy in places, but its mostly viable.
I owned one of these. I liked it. But I don't think I ever intentionally used it for FM synthesis. Ever since I bought my first WaveBlaster card in 1994, I never went back to the horrid farts of FM. In fact, I considered this a major step up from the SB16+WaveBlasterII setup I had been using because the wavetable loaded into RAM and was swappable with downloadable samples.
Nice video and balanced review of the SB Live! Card. I totally agree with your take. The General MIDI support actually works well in DOS games. I personally prefer the Audigy 2 for my primary late DOS + Win 9x gaming PC. But SB Live! is a solid option, especially when paired with the Live! Drive. (I have a PC with this combo and appreciate that the original Live! Drive has full sized MIDI ports. I can use external MIDI keyboards and devices without having to track down an adapter!) Thank you for your great videos!
I have the build log for this computer in another video. Its a slot 1 system. You're like the third person to comment on it in this video for some reason though. haha
just subbed. I got the platinum version of this card with the front panel when it came out. from what I remember the card supports soundfonts and has 2mb of memory. It was a great card if you were into arranging midi files lol
Today you can use soundfonts with any soundcard, on any OS, even GNU Linux distros. A Creative soundcard is not needed at all. You can even use the original Creative soundfonts. With Timidity, or many other "virtual midi" software. Best wishes.
I know right? It probably wasn't a main priority though in all honestly. I've seen most of these cards in 2000/XP systems. This was right on the edge of the transition away from DOS gaming, as a Windows card its pretty awesome with EAX and all that though.
I think it's acceptable enough for most of the later DOS games I'd be playing on a machine where I'd need to use something like an SB Live. Tried using a YMF-744 and Aureal Vortex 2 on one of my systems without ISA, and while the YMF had perfect FM-Synth due to the Yamaha chip, it was more of a pain to use overall, and the Vortex was giving me issues with CD audio on DOS games.
Hmmm, old PC gaming, you say? This reminds me, I still got one of the very last AGP GPUs - 3D Club nVidia 7800 GS somewhere on the shelf. I gave away that old PC (somewhere around 2017), I guess, at that point it was upgraded with ATi card (6250 or something, that one indeed was THE LAST line of cards for AGP slot), so the nVidia one was abandoned and forgotten for years. From that perspective SoudBlaster isn't even THAT old - it's on PCI slot, while I had a mid 1990s PC with no sound, until I got myself some cheap card, it was for ISA slot. XD
It all sounds fine to me? Like idk, maybe it's just cuz it's been 25+ years but that's how I remember DOS games sounding Unless you have comparable video with how it actually "should" sound with a hardware compatible DOS soundcard (I'm guessing just a full blown ISA card) I don't really see this as an issue personally
If you're interested in the difference of what a real OPL2 or OPL3 sounds like, check out my recent Sound Blaster Clone video or my Sound Blaster 16 VS AD1816 video. Many inexpensive "SB compatible" cards in the 90s used different synth chips that make things sound different(not necessarily worse) but most of these will make certain games aimed at real Sound Blaster compatibility sound "off". The SB live is still usable and the wavetable mode is cool but the accuracy of the notes sound way off in some games.
The Sound Blaster Live sounds so bad in DOS because being a PCI sound card means that it has to emulate SB16 support in software. This makes it fully dependent on the DOS drivers, which are just rebranded Ensoniq ones, as Creative bought out the latter in order to acquire their PCI tech. This also means the General MIDI emulation uses Ensoniq wavetable files, versus the modern soundfonts that the Live supports under Windows.
Always suprises me that a soundblaster card has bad soundblaster emulation, you'd expect the company that made the og to know how to recreate it in later products flawlessly
oh god I have one of those with the green PCB, another with the black PCB, a long boi (Audigy SE2 I think?) and the regular ISA SB, the poor green Live is the worst of them, still good for replacing a faulty onboard sound card for regular use but for DOS it is like a bootleg but made by SB themselves; mine also happens to pop a lot when playing effects and music at the same time
What do you mean by Soundblaster emulation? Are you saying that your emulating through dosbox but using the Soundblaster hardware, or that the hardware itself it trying to emulate a Soundblaster card?
No DOSbox. This is all real hardware. The live uses some sort of software emulation driver for DOS, and in most scenarios DOSbox does a much more convincing job.
I have a few SB0060 models and 2 SB0100 models. Idk how I ended up with a handful of them but they are useful for motherboards without isa slots. My current win98se build doesn't have isa slots so SB0060 is what I use. Win98 games sound good with it but DOS games are ugh. Better than nothing. The general midi thru windows is definitely the better option
There are DOS drivers for the SB Live. However, the motherboard needs to support addressable DMA for it to work, and many more modern boards don't have that feature unfortunately.
@@DOSStorm ooh thank, i have to see if my motherboard supports addressable DMA which i doubt... i know is not the greatest sound card, but better then nothing! if i'm lucky in the future ill buy a build with an ISA soundcrad
Why are SB Live! Cards so cheap on ebay? Because Creative and a bunch of commercial PC vendors built and sold about a billion of them. Having used them years ago, they were pretty good cards over all. The Yamaha XG cards weren't bad either.
Yeah Dell in particular shipped these in a bunch of PCs all the way into the mid 2000s. They were fairly desirable at the time and for an XP rig they still are.
I don't really know anything about that game....However it looks like it uses directdraw right? You may be able to use dgvoodoo2. Just use the DDraw.dll files. More info on it here: wiki.homepointxi.com/DGVoodoo2
So I'm currently cleaning up my old family Dell XPS dimension T500 to play some old games that I never really got to experience as a kid. The system has a sound blaster live, and I have all of the original driver discs. Maybe I should upload them to vogons or something. I have little idea what I'm doing so far, but I want to play System Shock and Daggerfall. If you use a midi sound module for a game like System Shock, do you just use the sound blaster to send midi info out to the module? Are other sounds coming from the sound blaster still?
To be honest I've never used an external module so I'm not really an expert. The SB live has a built-in wavetable synth and to use that it's as easy as selecting GM or Wave blaster in the game. If you have an external synth you should be able to just output from the gameport to your external midi device.
@@sparki_ I think there are a couple of different drivers on there. VDX ones are better, the WDM sometimes cause issues. Drivers can be tricky with these, there is a driver cleanup utility in the philscomputerlab package you could try as well.
From what I understand, the SB Live drivers would immediately corrupt the registry on the original release of Windows 95, since they foolishly and more or less unnecessarily stored more than 64KB of data in a single registry key, which the first versions of Windows 95 didn't support.
@@DOSStorm True that haha! But if it counts for anything, my own version of Windows 95 was the A version, before they integrated Internet Explorer into it, so I think I might have had something of a slightly better experience with Windows 95 than many other folks. Not like I needed IE, we didn't have the internet at my house anyways.
You're right all of the PCI cards have atrocious DOS support. I had the PCI SB16 growing up and it just sounds outright bizarre most of the time. I always find it amusing Creative Labs never got the emulation of their own cards quite right.
Es la mejor tarjeta para juegos que soundblaster live 5.1 y audigy 2 zs aparte de estas y las aureal vortex no hay nada, Tienes tarjetas de audio profesionales pero para juegos suenan muy mal. Lo que suena mal no es la tarjeta si no los parlantes, compra unos roland y notarás la diferencia.
“l don’t wanna play with you anymore” jokes aside, I’m keeping my SB live for the time being as it’s honestly a good mid range card for later 90’s games edit: GRRRR THE PCB ISN’T BROWN!!!! SB LIVE IS BEST CARD BECAUSE IT CHEAP!!! UNSUBBED!!!!
As a late 90s card it's awesome for Windows games since it has EAX and the output is relatively clean. What color is the PCB then? Looks dark brown to me lol.
I recently put together a Win 98 PC, and went with the Sound Blaster Live after watching some content on Phil's Computer Lab. His advice was avoid the OEM cards, and stick with a retail version. He also stated it makes a big difference which driver version you use. I went with his recommendation, and have had no issues so far.
I have a 1998/1999 build with components all from those years with a Live! Non OEM. It is not a bad card at all for DOS. I do try to use a Roland Sound Canvas for anything General MIDI though not that it’s too bad on the Live or anything though. If SB16 perfection is what you need then just get a real SB16. There isn’t anything official from back then that can tick every box perfectly on one card. So with that in mind yeah the SB Live is a fantastic option for someone trying to capture as much of the 90’s as possible.
I like these. Once I got a Spdif receiver to use with my PC I never went back to regular speakers. The one I use most is a dell OEM, but I flashed the ID code on the chip so I could use Retail drivers. That isn't the easiest thing to do. Although it unlocks the full retail functionality you have to remember the options not built into the OEM card. I did it with a parallel port with wires soldered on the removed chip. I still have the software to do that. With the prevalence of retail Live versions a person wouldn't need to do that unless they wanted to. Only the ones that have a Live drive ribbon connector are flashable that I know of. Back in the day people wanted to save money by not buying a retail card. Once I used the OEM card on XP the drivers were built in. I have both a 5.1 and a 4.1 that I only use the digital out on. I would use Ac3 filter to allow spdif psssthrough and other multichannel options that were not available until windows 7 had Dolby digital decoders built in. Yes, I really hated having to use licensed dvd decoders. I have used these in W7 with the KX project that I found to work decent. I even tried the live card to play Ultima 7 with U98 and Origins. I have to say the sound effects were accurate, unlike an original sounblaster 16 ct2230. I would have to say the OEM live is the Awe64 values counterpart.
Came for the Sound Blaster Live talk, stayed for the delicious sub. A nice summary of what the Live! is capable of, and I was quite pleased to see you testing with the more obscure Zone Raiders there amidst all the usual culprits! Keep it up!
Zone Raiders was a personal favorite of mine growing up!
Descent, Duke Nukem 3d has to use as GM MPU 330 and instrument bank EAPCI8M.ECM in DOS, in Windows the .sf2 instrument banks are loaded through Creative AudioHQ.
Thanks for the video. Personally, I have a few of these cards. My primary use has been as a card for Win '98 games (an era of gaming I don't have much familiarity with) and the EAX extensions were the reason I picked this one. It's good to know it has built in wave table though. I'd not even thought to try it out in Dos, as it's on a Pentium 3, and I don't really Dos game on that.
Yeah its a great card for early DirectX games that support EAX. DOS support was probably an afterthought, but at least its there.
SBLive is excellent for Windows 98, 2000, XP gaming.
If you play a game like Thief II or Max Payne with a good surround speaker set you get the max out of what this awesome chip has to offer.
Great 3D surround sound with excellent environmental audio effects.
It's all about finding the right drivers, if you have the correct software and setup, with a fast enough cpu, it should sound fine on sound blaster emulation. It's one of the most recommended cards for its compatibility and scope of functionality. As I recall, practically every different sound card back then had its own "personality/tone". Better sound is in the ear of the beholder.
Lol, I have a SB Live! 5.1 digital on my main desktop PC today
It's so interesting to see someone try it with DOS, while I'm just here using it as normal modern hardware
I actually wasn't able to find the Win10 driver, but the card was working perfectly without installing anything on Linux
You can actually use this to get it working on Windows 10 and 11: github.com/kxproject/kX-Audio-driver-binaries
My parents PC had the onboard audio fail on an old LGA1155 board and I slotted one of these in and its been working solid for about 3 years now.
@@DOSStorm thanks! Good to know, but by now I've given up on modern windows
SB Live doesn't sound like SB AWE32 at all, this may be the case for many people. It is for me. I'd pay 6x more than I'd pay for SB Live, for a SB 32 (a budget version of AWE32 which is essentially the same, without a few secondary features).
The AWE32 is an interesting card more suited to DOS stuff I would agree. The SB Live is a great card for Windows games that support EAX though.
Soundblaster live 5.1 es mejor tarjeta que awe 32y 64 , la que es mejor es la gold.
I've got the same model of Live! Value. Found a forum topic on Vogons going through driver compatibility, and learned that (at least 1 example) of a SB Live! 1024 install disc was the correct one for both the CT4780 *and* CT4830. The older CT4670 is far more forgiving and works reliably with newer Liveware 3.0 drivers.
I've honestly had no issues with the Live! cards when it comes to sound quality, and only 2 games that I play have issues. BSAOG due to my copy being shareware 1.0 with memory issues (full 2.10 doesn't have any trouble), and Magic Boy because it is an outright finicky game - which is why I bought a Solo-1 for my mum's Win98 PC.
ESS SOLO-1 card has much better DOS compatibility and much better OPL implementation. The advantage of Live! is SB16 compatibility and MIDI which is more useful for latter DOS games. That said I would advice against Live! and recommend Sound Blaster 128 PCI instead. It doesn't have working OPL emulation at all (it produces sounds but they are more funny than useful) but it has superior MIDI support. I mean Enqusonic which made ES1370 chip made sound banks used by all ES137x chips and EMU10K DOS emulation but Creative didn't implement all effects and processing these banks expect so MIDI doesn't sound quite right on EMU10K cards. SB 128PCI uses pretty much the same MIDI engine as their Ensoniq drivers so MIDI sounds great and with Creative's drivers you get SB16 compatibility. Quality-wise only 2MB preset is worthwhile and imho its the most universal MIDI patchset I have ever heard. Maybe not the best fidelity (what can you expect from 2MB samples...) but I have yet to hear any game or even MID file which has sounds sounding out of place on SB 128PCI with 2MB ECW patchset. All in all SOLO-1 + 128PCI is the best DOS sound combo. You get SB Pro + superior OPL2/3 (and native ESFM in like two games...) without need for EMM386 and SB16 with very good MIDI sounds for later games. It is such a shame Creative didn't implement better drivers for EMU10K because I would really want Audigy2ZS to be that latter DOS sound card... anyways, where it comes to SB 128PCI you can also use it with SBEMU to get very accurate OPL3 emulation. It doesn't have amazing compatibility of SOLO-1 and ESS card still sounds better in OPL2/3 mode than "nuked OPL" just like it sounds better than original OPL chips - but that is neither here or there. For best OPL quality you need ESS card. Unless someone cracks how ESS did it, how they fixed FM synthesis.
I upgraded to a Soundblaster Live! From an very incompatible card called an Audio Excel 16. The Soundblaster Live! was a big improvement as it actually ran sound without issues.
Later I got an Soundblaster AWE64 and that was even better.... good times.
Yeah PCI is a pretty big advantage sometimes. Some of these old ISA cards were a nightmare to get to work properly. I'd love to get a hold of an AWE64 though.
@@DOSStorm You are right the ISA cards I had to play around with so many IRQ and DMA settings in DOS and Windows 95. It was a pain and unreliable. Yes I wish I still had my AWE64 (I sold it or gave it away log ago).
Wonderful video, straight to the point, properly edited and I finally know what the old card I have in my shelf for 15 years is made of. Thank you, subbed!
Thanks for the kind words!
This card is great for Windows as it has much better output than ANY onboard chip. Plus it can be used for recording as noise levels are really low. The only downside - the abscence of Creative's own ASIO driver (which was properly implemented only on Audigy 2ZS). You have to use ASIO4ALL instead.
100% agree! It still sounds better than most modern onboard solutions. The output is pretty clean. My parents onboard audio failed on their desktop and I just slotted one of these in and used the KX driver. Its still running on Windows 11 to this day!
"You can get it cheaply of the eBay, but is it safe?" Is anything acquired trough the auctions safe? How many times did I bought a CDs & DVDs (both music and games) where the seller would inform me "yeah, it's in pristine condition!". A week later the disc is delivered. How does it look? It looks like it exchanged more hands than an average banknote...
😤😤😤
eBay certainly has their share of dodgy sellers... however eBay will rarely(if ever) side with the seller when the item fails to match the description if the buyer files a claim. This obviously doesn't apply to "untested" or "as-is" items so always just assume those are non-functional unless stated otherwise. Retro and vintage items are never really 100% guaranteed to work, because even if they did work when the seller tested it this stuff is old and can easily get screwed up in the mail. I've bought many things on ebay over the years including some sound cards that ended up not working and I've had a positive outcome every time I've had to file a claim.
sbemu gives you more or less proper pure dos mode now with the Live!'s, for those that want the 'purity'. its still a bit iffy in places, but its mostly viable.
I owned one of these. I liked it. But I don't think I ever intentionally used it for FM synthesis. Ever since I bought my first WaveBlaster card in 1994, I never went back to the horrid farts of FM. In fact, I considered this a major step up from the SB16+WaveBlasterII setup I had been using because the wavetable loaded into RAM and was swappable with downloadable samples.
Nice video and balanced review of the SB Live! Card. I totally agree with your take. The General MIDI support actually works well in DOS games. I personally prefer the Audigy 2 for my primary late DOS + Win 9x gaming PC. But SB Live! is a solid option, especially when paired with the Live! Drive. (I have a PC with this combo and appreciate that the original Live! Drive has full sized MIDI ports. I can use external MIDI keyboards and devices without having to track down an adapter!) Thank you for your great videos!
I didn't know second gen Audigy devices supported DOS. I'll have to look into that. Thanks for watching!
Yes, I'm also curious because I own an Audigy card.
Aw, man. The case on the desk, i had that exact case. So many memories.
I have the build log for this computer in another video. Its a slot 1 system. You're like the third person to comment on it in this video for some reason though. haha
oh my god, this is criminally underrated wtf
here before 10k :3
EDIT: YO I HAVE THAT CASE IN YELLOW
Haha thanks man. I'd like to see the yellow version of this case, hit me up on Twitter if you have a picture of it.
just subbed. I got the platinum version of this card with the front panel when it came out. from what I remember the card supports soundfonts and has 2mb of memory. It was a great card if you were into arranging midi files lol
I got soundfonts working with the card even with some DOS games. Rather interesting to hear the music with an SPC soundfont I have n such.
That's neat. I'm not sure if soundfonts work with this version of the card(I think is OEM but I'm not sure, regular drivers don't seem to work).
Today you can use soundfonts with any soundcard, on any OS, even GNU Linux distros.
A Creative soundcard is not needed at all. You can even use the original Creative soundfonts.
With Timidity, or many other "virtual midi" software.
Best wishes.
Nice review. You would think that Creative Labs could get their own Sound Blaster emulation right, but apparently not with this card.
I know right? It probably wasn't a main priority though in all honestly. I've seen most of these cards in 2000/XP systems. This was right on the edge of the transition away from DOS gaming, as a Windows card its pretty awesome with EAX and all that though.
I think it's acceptable enough for most of the later DOS games I'd be playing on a machine where I'd need to use something like an SB Live. Tried using a YMF-744 and Aureal Vortex 2 on one of my systems without ISA, and while the YMF had perfect FM-Synth due to the Yamaha chip, it was more of a pain to use overall, and the Vortex was giving me issues with CD audio on DOS games.
I agree its pretty good on later games if they support GM. Overall its a great late 90s Windows card if you want EAX.
Hmmm, old PC gaming, you say? This reminds me, I still got one of the very last AGP GPUs - 3D Club nVidia 7800 GS somewhere on the shelf. I gave away that old PC (somewhere around 2017), I guess, at that point it was upgraded with ATi card (6250 or something, that one indeed was THE LAST line of cards for AGP slot), so the nVidia one was abandoned and forgotten for years.
From that perspective SoudBlaster isn't even THAT old - it's on PCI slot, while I had a mid 1990s PC with no sound, until I got myself some cheap card, it was for ISA slot. XD
Sound Blaster Live was produced for 7 years at least and in the millions.
im using a Yamaha DS-XG YMF724F-V, it's quite good for DOS and it has a real OPL3 integrated in the main chip.
I'm on the lookout for one of those actually. Those are neat cards!
It all sounds fine to me?
Like idk, maybe it's just cuz it's been 25+ years but that's how I remember DOS games sounding
Unless you have comparable video with how it actually "should" sound with a hardware compatible DOS soundcard (I'm guessing just a full blown ISA card) I don't really see this as an issue personally
If you're interested in the difference of what a real OPL2 or OPL3 sounds like, check out my recent Sound Blaster Clone video or my Sound Blaster 16 VS AD1816 video. Many inexpensive "SB compatible" cards in the 90s used different synth chips that make things sound different(not necessarily worse) but most of these will make certain games aimed at real Sound Blaster compatibility sound "off". The SB live is still usable and the wavetable mode is cool but the accuracy of the notes sound way off in some games.
The Sound Blaster Live sounds so bad in DOS because being a PCI sound card means that it has to emulate SB16 support in software. This makes it fully dependent on the DOS drivers, which are just rebranded Ensoniq ones, as Creative bought out the latter in order to acquire their PCI tech. This also means the General MIDI emulation uses Ensoniq wavetable files, versus the modern soundfonts that the Live supports under Windows.
Not an excuse, as Solo1 sounds so nice
Subbed!!! How can one not come back for more of this???
Always suprises me that a soundblaster card has bad soundblaster emulation, you'd expect the company that made the og to know how to recreate it in later products flawlessly
Yeah, I hated this card for gaming. I used it a lot to add effects to an electric guitar, it was great
oh god I have one of those with the green PCB, another with the black PCB, a long boi (Audigy SE2 I think?) and the regular ISA SB, the poor green Live is the worst of them, still good for replacing a faulty onboard sound card for regular use but for DOS it is like a bootleg but made by SB themselves; mine also happens to pop a lot when playing effects and music at the same time
vogons has a good thread on using the audigy driver with the live card (i dont recall if it works for all variants)
What do you mean by Soundblaster emulation? Are you saying that your emulating through dosbox but using the Soundblaster hardware, or that the hardware itself it trying to emulate a Soundblaster card?
No DOSbox. This is all real hardware. The live uses some sort of software emulation driver for DOS, and in most scenarios DOSbox does a much more convincing job.
Loved my card, only stopped using it 8 years ago.
Yeah its still not too bad if you have a PCI slot.
@@DOSStorm I've recently received a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, not had a chance to try it yet. :)
That sound emulation was anything but decent.
It was Descent, but not decent. 😂
I have a few SB0060 models and 2 SB0100 models. Idk how I ended up with a handful of them but they are useful for motherboards without isa slots. My current win98se build doesn't have isa slots so SB0060 is what I use. Win98 games sound good with it but DOS games are ugh. Better than nothing. The general midi thru windows is definitely the better option
! Great video
hey i have a Sound Blaster Live CT4670 on an ASRock 775i65G motherboard on DOS 6.22
how did you managed to make it work on DOS via pci solt?!
There are DOS drivers for the SB Live. However, the motherboard needs to support addressable DMA for it to work, and many more modern boards don't have that feature unfortunately.
@@DOSStorm ooh thank, i have to see if my motherboard supports addressable DMA which i doubt... i know is not the greatest sound card, but better then nothing!
if i'm lucky in the future ill buy a build with an ISA soundcrad
Why are SB Live! Cards so cheap on ebay? Because Creative and a bunch of commercial PC vendors built and sold about a billion of them. Having used them years ago, they were pretty good cards over all. The Yamaha XG cards weren't bad either.
Yeah Dell in particular shipped these in a bunch of PCs all the way into the mid 2000s. They were fairly desirable at the time and for an XP rig they still are.
Hang on I’m actually quite interested now, how would I go about enabling wavetable synth for games that support it?
You just have to select a compatible mode for music. You can use General MIDI, Sound Canvas, or Waveblaster.
i know it's offtopic, but do You know any good wrapper or method to play street fighter alpha Windows port at a decent framerate on Windows 8?
I don't really know anything about that game....However it looks like it uses directdraw right? You may be able to use dgvoodoo2. Just use the DDraw.dll files.
More info on it here: wiki.homepointxi.com/DGVoodoo2
@@DOSStorm thanks You buddy
So I'm currently cleaning up my old family Dell XPS dimension T500 to play some old games that I never really got to experience as a kid. The system has a sound blaster live, and I have all of the original driver discs. Maybe I should upload them to vogons or something. I have little idea what I'm doing so far, but I want to play System Shock and Daggerfall. If you use a midi sound module for a game like System Shock, do you just use the sound blaster to send midi info out to the module? Are other sounds coming from the sound blaster still?
To be honest I've never used an external module so I'm not really an expert. The SB live has a built-in wavetable synth and to use that it's as easy as selecting GM or Wave blaster in the game. If you have an external synth you should be able to just output from the gameport to your external midi device.
@@DOSStorm Do games just always play their midi data when you're playing? Or do you have to enable midi data output in a game?
@@middle_pickup DOS games need to support it and it has to be enabled in the setup program for the game.
Funny, I currently run my server out of that case but in silver. Great case
Looking through the comments here I think everyone had this case. 😂
i have a ct4830 but couldn't find drivers for it :/
philscomputerlab ones just doesnt do anything, blank desktop
@@sparki_ What OS?
@@DOSStorm 98 se
@@sparki_ I think there are a couple of different drivers on there. VDX ones are better, the WDM sometimes cause issues. Drivers can be tricky with these, there is a driver cleanup utility in the philscomputerlab package you could try as well.
@@DOSStorm actually i installed the audigy 2 drivers from philscomputerlabs and they work like a charm! thanks a lot for trying to help me
From what I understand, the SB Live drivers would immediately corrupt the registry on the original release of Windows 95, since they foolishly and more or less unnecessarily stored more than 64KB of data in a single registry key, which the first versions of Windows 95 didn't support.
Sounds about right. Although in my experience nearly anything can break early versions of Windows 95. haha
@@DOSStorm True that haha! But if it counts for anything, my own version of Windows 95 was the A version, before they integrated Internet Explorer into it, so I think I might have had something of a slightly better experience with Windows 95 than many other folks. Not like I needed IE, we didn't have the internet at my house anyways.
A SB PCI128 and a bunch of variants are worst for sure.
You're right all of the PCI cards have atrocious DOS support. I had the PCI SB16 growing up and it just sounds outright bizarre most of the time. I always find it amusing Creative Labs never got the emulation of their own cards quite right.
Es la mejor tarjeta para juegos que soundblaster live 5.1 y audigy 2 zs aparte de estas y las aureal vortex no hay nada, Tienes tarjetas de audio profesionales pero para juegos suenan muy mal. Lo que suena mal no es la tarjeta si no los parlantes, compra unos roland y notarás la diferencia.
I could buy one for 10€ in my neighborhood, maybe I will
Its not a bad card to have especially for Windows games!
“l don’t wanna play with you anymore”
jokes aside, I’m keeping my SB live for the time being as it’s honestly a good mid range card for later 90’s games
edit: GRRRR THE PCB ISN’T BROWN!!!! SB LIVE IS BEST CARD BECAUSE IT CHEAP!!! UNSUBBED!!!!
As a late 90s card it's awesome for Windows games since it has EAX and the output is relatively clean. What color is the PCB then? Looks dark brown to me lol.