Legendary Sound Blaster ISA sound card gets a driver update 30 years later

tomshardware.com

31 points·miles··4 comments

A few separate comments on this article:

1) The original title should say it's about AWE cards, not the "simple" SoundBlaster cards.

2) I consider this a futile effort. Linux is abandoning old hardware. I'm actually surprised they didn't remove ISA support yet.

3) Why would anyone put such a card in a Linux machine (or vice versa)? I'm really interested to know.

The way I see it, the main use of these cards now is to enjoy old DOS games, although they're not a good fit even for that purpose. The AWE cards didn't have the old Yamaha OPL3 FM synth and the game music is worse than older SB cards. A Yamaha OPL3SA2 sounds way better. Very few games supported the AWE synth.

And AFAIK, DOS emulators for Linux and virtual machines don't allow programs to access real hardware, so it's not possible to use these cards for DOS games in Linux.

So why the effort? What am I missing?

Motherboards with ISA slots were made as recently as 2020 (Intel Coffee Lake):

https://www.dfi.com/product/index/1502

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/spectras-new-lga1151-mothe...

I realize that doesn't answer your question as to why someone would put an AWE card into a machine that modern, but hey, at least it is possible.

Those boards are made of unobtainium.

Fair warning, I know nothing about these boards outside of their existence. But, 'from the hip', I'm guessing that they are just daisy chaining bridge chips (PCIe -> PCI -> ISA). ITE makes some PCI -> ISA bridges and I see big ITE logos on both.

If one really wanted to use an ISA card, they could just buy a couple (rare, but noticeably more obtanium) risers with the relevant bridges on the riser to recreate the chain. I don't know if that mean missing out some fancy integration (for better compatibility) from the bios.

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