Sound Blaster 32 CT3670 ISA Sound Card Review for DOS Games

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This is 100% why I subscribed to this channel. DOS & sound cards!! Great video Phil, I really like that you spend time on this. Younger gamers will never understand what an upgrade like this did to us back in the day :-)
This card is great in every aspect. I basically grew up with it and all its pros and cons. I own 3 of them myself and are precious to me.
One thing that might also be done with this card is to load soundfonts and play DOS games like Doom, ROTT, Duke3D, ... but the only disadvantage is that you can only load those in windows95/98 :-( but it works!

Keep it up!

vulturius
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AWE32 is the ultimate nostalgic soundcard for me personally, my very first soundcard. Not the best, but decent card, has it's very distinct sound to it, so to speak.

nightgoat
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One of the things i liked best about this card. Depending on the memory you choose to install on this card, you can do some amazing things with Sound Fonts with it. Using that function you can make the AWE32 sound like an MT-32, or a GUS, or just about anything you want. I chose this card exclusively because i wanted an amazing card that was very compatible.

ltlk
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Brings back so many memories. I remember getting this card. And even installing some memory in it at some stage.

mattscomp
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Thank you so much for this video! A great review. I noticed based on my list that the CT3670 is very unique in the 32 line: it is effectively an AWE64 Value with SIMM slots. Compare the chipset to the CT4380 or CT4500 cards and you'll find they are identical.

saxxonpike
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+PhilsComputerLab
Excellent video as usual! When I had this card, I remember that most games could only really effectively use 8MB of ram on the card. Anything more was intended for specialized audio programs. Didn't find this out until I'd spent $100 on 16MB of ram for it. Oh well. It was still bad-ass. Even when I upgraded to the AWE64, this card went into my wife's PC. She loved the sound improvement.

thecaptain
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I used to own this soundcard. When I was younger I had no idea how good it was in respect to emulating midi modules and fm synt etc.

RealGengarTV
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Best sound blaster I have ever owned for DOS compatibility and MIDI sound. So much so that I tracked down another for my 98 gaming machine and searched high and low a few years back for the MIDI ROM. Also owning it in high school probably made me a little biased...

MultiTelan
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I have two of these now with memory maxed out. It's an amazing card really, and I got them cheap but they got at least €100 these days unless you get lucky.

redavatar
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Once I put 8 megs of RAM in my AWE32 (it was a challenge finding 4M modules back then), next loaded 8MB wavetable included on a SB-Live! CD. It was nice, quite surprising that this just worked.

argoneum
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Wow... you review it. In '98 i have 3 awe32, 1 awe64. My first is SB16 with DOS mode. Good review.

TrioMardjoko
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I just bought one for £70. Your review was amazing. Thanks so much for all that you do.

ksp
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im glad you did a review for this, I have the card and never knew it had all these awesome features. Cant wait to use it in a nice system build one day.

DatBlueHusky
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I had a CT3990 myself in my "primary system" for quite a long time, Was my first Audio Card which I put into my 386 in 2003, and I brought it forward up through to my K6-2. I ended up swapping out for a boring AudioPCI as the ISA Card had some issues with Windows XP. Apparently the 3990 also had CQM which sounds different, though since it was my first Audio card I wouldn't have noticed. Shame I tossed it out along with all my old stuff a few years ago- I no longer had systems that could use them so it seemed silly to keep them around and I figured I could get them cheap ($5-$6 was my thinking) online if I wanted them again later anyway. definitely misjudged that one!

BCProgramming
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This exact model was my third soundcard and the only one I ever regretted buying. My first one was Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro 16, which was cheap and perfectly hardware compatible with SB PRO, so no complaints there. I think it even had the real Yamaha OPL3 chip on board, so even FM music sounded as it should (but I hated FM music from the get go, so it didn't matter to me).
Of course, since I grew tired of FM music almost immediately, I wanted to have wavetable MIDI music, so next I bought Media Forte Sound Forte SF32-WAV. It was an interesting hybrid because it had Creative Vibra16 chip (so it worked 100% as SB16 even without any drivers), but also ICS Wavefront wavetable synth (the same one was used in Turtle Beach Tropez series of cards), which was a very decent and balanced General Midi wavetable synth. In fact, I've heard many wavetable implementations over the years and to me this one is one of the best, right behind Roland and Yamaha wavetable synths.
The reason I bought Creative SB32 next was because it had the ability to use installed RAM for bigger soundfont banks and I was sold on the idea. The problem was there were no better sounding banks available for it at the time (there were some awful sounding 4 and 8 MB banks made by EMU in circulation and they sounded much worse than the default 2MB bank, which wasn't all that great to begin with - worse than ICS Wavefront, that's for sure). So I was left with a soundcard that required a TSR program to switch to GM mode and it was a pain in the ass, because it was incompatible with some of the games, and it actually sounded noticably worse in MIDI than my previous sound card. And to add to this it had a very noisy analog output, especially in comparison to Sound Forte, which was very clean. So I don't think I can recommend this card for retro gaming, it has many features, sure, but the implementation is lacking.

kosmosyche
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SB32 used the EMU Systems EMU8000 dsp, which also was the same dsp-chip used in emus ESi32 Turbo samplers. The SB32 was a pretty nice sampler actually for its price. Nice review.

AndrewTSq
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Well done your review is so deep good job

frogtechtips
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Creative had so many sound cards. I kinda felt like I had missed out by not owning an Awe32 card but I can see that I didn't really. Thanks Phil!

mattscomp
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I like how you added 30% reverb+chorus to your audio over :-)

MatthewHolevinski
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Good that I still got my SB 16 CT2230 lyying around.

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