Before starting, there are two things I have to clarify:
1. This article is NOT a technical reference or a commercial advertisement. It just includes my viewpoints.
2. Although absolutely no misleading is intended, the information may be wrong due to my limited knowledge.
Okay, now let's take a closer look on the best audio system for PC games! The PC audio system includes two aspects: music and sound effect (speech).
First of all, it is obvious that playing sound/music directly from a CD-ROM drive has the best quality. As during playing a game the CD-ROM drive must also access other large data such as graphics at the same time, the method of direct play sound/music may result in reducing the game speed dramatically even for a 4X speed CD-ROM drive. To maintain a reasonable speed, many CD games use the old method in other games with floppy disk version - play sound/music from PC audio hardware.
For sound effect (speech), there are a few choices only: Pro Audio Spectrum 16, Sound Blaster advanced model (16/ASP or AWE32) or UltraSound MAX. The best effect depends on which game is played. For example, Ultima VIII supports Sound Blaster models only for speech, while Epic Pinball uses UltraSound to have the best 16-bit stereo effect. One can note that since Sound Blaster is the first sound card providing speech effect and AdLib compatibility, all PC games support it for sound/music.
Unfortunately, the above mentioned sound cards do not fully provide the best music supported by most games - MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). Another hardware is needed in order to have the MIDI music. There are two standards of MIDI, the old one Roland LA (Linear Arithmetic) and the new one GM (General MIDI). Moreover, there are many MIDI sound modules, either internal or external. Here are some typical MIDI modules.
MIDI MODULE INTERNAL EXTERNAL =========================================================================== Roland LA Roland LAPC-I Roland MT-32, CM-32L, (old standard) CM-64, CM-500 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- GM (new standard) Wave Blaster, MIDI Blaster, *Kawai GMega, * has the label: Turtle Beach Rio, Yamaha *CRX-T3, *TG-100, GENERAL Roland *SCC-1 Roland CM-300, CM-500, M I D I *Sound Canvas SC-55 / ======= SC-55 mk-II / SC-155
1. Internal: Roland LAPC-I or SCC-1 needs a free PC slot to be installed. Wave Blaster or Turtle Beach Rio uses the same PC slot with Sound Blaster 16/ASP or AWE32 pre-installed. 2. External: All need a Roland MPU-401 compatible card such that it can connect with the computer. 3. The default setting for MIDI is IRQ = 2, address port = 330h (For Sound Blaster models, IRQ = 5 or 7, address port = 220h) 4. Since the old standard LA was developed by Roland Corporation, a lot of games simply use the word ROLAND to mean having LA music, not the new standard GM (General MIDI). Although the music quality of GM is much better than that of LA, some games still support LA only, such as Mortal Kombat. Of course, some games support GM only, such as Ultima VIII. Also some games support both, such as TIE Fighter. 5. Although many GM modules claim they can emulate the old LA (MT-32), none can have 100% LA compatibility. It is because the old LA, like UltraSound, can accept some kinds of patching such that various music effects can be obtained. The emulation will fail when such patchings are attempted during running a game and the computer may crash or hang. 6. As shown above, there is one and only one external MIDI module has 100% LA + 100% GM, the Roland CM-500. 6. There is another MIDI label called GS (General Sound) which is a better superset of GM (General MIDI), i.e. GM is a subset of GS. Some external MIDI modules having GS are Roland CM-500 and Sound Canvas (SC-55 / SC-55 mk-II / SC-155).
In conclusion, the best PC audio system needs two modules, one for sound/speech effect and another for MIDI music. As mentioned above, the best combination often depends on which game is played. Usually from each game's setup menu, one can get hints of which combination has the best audio configuration for the game. Taking DOOM as an example, according to Id Software, the best audio system includes Sound Blaster 16 for sound & speech and Roland Sound Canvas (SC-55 / SC-55 mk-II / SC-155) for music.
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Richard S. for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.