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.
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?