This is a quick preview of the new card from Creative Technology. A more detailed review, thanks to the generosity of Creative in lending us the card for thorough testing, will be published in GameBytes 19, where we will give a list of the technical specifications, and the results of running this card through Sir L's library of games.
We would like to thank Christopher Ng, Manager of Creative's showroom at Funan Centre, Singapore, for giving GameBytes a demonstration of the SB AWE32 card.
I'm a totally unorthodox guy, and the only concession I make towards Microsoft is that I use their mouse. I loaded MS Windows just to test the Sound Blaster AWE 32 (SB AWE32); it should be gone from my hard disk when you read this. I would also like to make another point that I do not play games very often at all. So why am I here? Well, firstly, Creative Technology in Singapore made an offer hard to resist by lending us their new sound board at no charge to let us write this review. Secondly, I appreciate good sound and coming from a musical background, I have trained ears. Thirdly, Sir L needed someone to write on the technical aspects of the card.
On first impressions, the SB AWE32 is a large board; almost a full length board, just half an inch from being one. Two SIMM banks dominate the end of the board, and under it are the three CD-ROM ports (Mitsumi, Panasonic and Sony), and their associated chipsets. The EMU-8000 sunthesizer sits in the middle of the board (a very small IC chip), and the rest of the board is your normal Sound Blaster 16 Advanced Signal Processor board. The biggest thing missing from this board is the volume spindle, and good riddance too!
The ports at the back are LINE IN, MICROPHONE IN, SPEAKER OUR, and LINE OUT. The joystick/MIDI OUT port is still there. With so many things, the board does not have the cluttered layout like the Sound Blaster Pro, and looks very neat. Installation of the board was a breeze despite its length. The SB AWE32 comes with 4 MegaBITS of RAM, which comes to 512KB. This is expandable to 28 MegaBYTES of RAM by installing 2 16MB SIMMs into the SIMM banks. We could not get a straight answer from Creative where the other 4MB of RAM disappeared to, but we suspect that it has something to do with the addressing used in the board.
The SB AWE32 comes with a very nice table-standing microphone, which looks like the one Microsoft supplies with their Sound System. The microphone comes with a wide base, attached to a swivel. The microphone itself is cased in a long rigid neck, which fits to the swivel. This microphone is rather sensitive so please place it somewhere away from speakers, unless you like to get a squealing feedback from speakers.
The SB AWE32 comes out of the box with a set of DOS and Windows drivers and utilities. Unfortunately, there are no drivers nor utilities for OS/2 or Windows NT. This is certainly one aspect which Creative should work at. There seems to be hope as Creative Technology recently posted an advertisment for programmers experienced in DOS, Windows or OS/2. I will leave the list of new utilities for the main review, but what I can say is that in my preliminary testing, the SB AWE32 works superbly in DOS and in Windows. The new Creative Ensemble set of Windows utilities performs well, and sports a very catching user interface design. Basically, it puts Animotion's WinStereo to shame, as Creative Ensemble is smaller, leaner and has more capabilities than anything else in the Windows market.
In OS/2, however, the SB AWE32 is a real chore to install and use. There are no OS/2 specific drivers for the SB AWE32, so I am resigned to install the SB16 drivers. All I can say is that, the SB AWE32 is very flaky in OS/2, pro-ducing random system hangs, crashes, and boot-up failures. The problems do not have an apparent pattern, and cannot be reliably reproduced. The Windows drivers for the SB AWE32 includes a 32-bit VxD, which is not compatible with OS/2. Thus, the SB AWE32 is severely stunted and hampered in OS/2. This is a real pity, as OS/2 is an excellent multimedia platoform.
The SB AWE32 is basically an enhanced and souped up version of the SB16. Indeed, the SB AWE32 is backward compatible all the way to the Sound Blaster 2.0! The SB AWE32 retains much of the same functionality as the SB16asp Multi-CD version. A port for optional daughter boards like the Wave Blaster is still available in the SB AWE32. The '32' really stands for 32-voice polyphony, and the SB AWE32 is still essentially a 16-bit audio board.
Reverb and Chorus effects are the new sound effects for the SB AWE32. With them activated in the AWEUTIL.EXE TSR, your FM generated sounds (like WAVs) will have more depth and timbre, producing more life-like sounds. The SB AWE32 still maintains FM, and a Yamaha OPL3 synthesizer is still on the board.
SB AWE32 supports downloaded 'sound fonts', developed by E-mu, and the sound from a SB AWE32 is indeed a lot more life-like than anything thus far produced by Creative Labs. The SB AWE32 supports the General MIDI standards, the Roland General Standard MIDI files, and MT-32.
SB AWE32 requires about 6 TSRs to properly setup in DOS. With them and several more of my own TSRs, my Novell DOS reports 611KB of RAM free. I do not know the answer for QEMM; I'll let Sir Launcelot du Lake to enligthen on this point (Sir L: I'll do this in the main reveiw next issue).
The SB AWE32 is an exciting new board for DOS + Windows users. For OS/2 users, I would recommend them to either wait for something nice and supported to come along. OR they can start calling up Creative Labs.
Foremost on everyone's minds is whether the SB AWE32 will have the same noisy feedback that the SB16 was notorious for in some games. We tested the card with Id's Wolfenstein 3D, which was horribly noisy on my SB16asp with the sound set the SB. Using the same SB setting for the game, the SN AWE32 passed the test with flying colours.... no noise at all! I will make more tests on other games and report the results in the next issue.
This preview is Copyright (C) 1994 by The Blue Beetle & Sir Launcelot du Lake for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.