SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold

thinkpadman

So received this last night. As it would be fairly rare these days to find one unopened, I decided to share the contents. It came with 2 CDs, one for Cakewalk Express Gold 6.0, and the other for drivers and other apps. I'll upload these to compliment the other SB drivers we have on WinWorld. As some of you would be aware, this is intended on the 486 I'm putting together - just hope I get more success when I get some different RAM sticks.

TCPMeta

I thought those were PCI only. Guess I was wrong.

thinkpadman

No I believe these were the last of the premium ISA sound cards by Creative at least. The box was dated 1998 so was just before SB Live! was out for PCI. ISA cards are best for DOS gaming from what I've read, and wanted something better than a Vibra 16.

Back in those days all I had was an ESS Audiodrive in my Pentium 100. Did the job but no comparison I would think!

TCPMeta

Yeah, I remember the days when it was all about sound and not so much on graphics. I've had all kinds of sound cards. SB16 and Roland are my favs. Last ISA card I had was a second hand Diamond Multimedia ESS card. Windows hated it and was a bitch to get it working. Had to constantly disable it in device manager and re-enable it to work.

BOD

Back when it was actually worth buying a decent sound card. Nowadays it's just pointless unless you're doing some pro audio stuff.

Tronky

I still have this in a tower with the venerable BP6 motherboard and dual celeries. I remember being impressed with the fairly authentic piano tones from the test sounds as opposed to the Stylophone buzz you got from the standard audio cards of the era. I was pleased to also get it working under OS/2 Warp back then. Creative were not really interested in developing for anything but DOS/Windows then or now.

SomeGuy

BTW, nice find. It looks like it just rolled off the assembly line.

KCompRoom2000

Neat find, I've found MINT condition Sound Blaster Live! cards at my computer store, But unfortunately I didn't get one, Instead I got a used Dell OEM CT4780 that I've had a hard time trying to get it to work on my Windows 98 Gaming PC, Turns out it needs the original driver disc, Drivers from creative's site won't work.

I also have a Sound Blaster AWE64 in my Custom Built Pentium II-based Celeron computer, IMO it's better than the Live! for DOS games, Even the ESS Maestro in my old Dell Laptop was better IIRC.