This Sound Card Is a Disaster for DOS Games (Trident 4DWave DX)

The Trident 4DWave DX/NX tries to do lots of neat things but ultimately fails at pretty much all of them. The FM to WaveTable conversion sounds neat on paper but is more abominable than a snowman. The chipset is also extremely picky about motherboards! Don't buy this unless its just for morbid curiosity. Buy a Sound Blaster Live If you need a cheap PCI Sound Card.

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:48 - Overview
2:15 - Installation Woes
5:24 - What is Virtual FM?
5:55 - VirtualFM Samples
6:40 - Sound Blaster 16 and WaveTable modes
7:17 - GM Wavetable: Tyrian 2000
7:59 - GM WaveTable: Descent
9:06 - GM WaveTable: DOOM
9:46 - Wavetable Sample Set Comparison
10:20 - Final Thought
10:54 - End

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#vintagecomputing #retrogaming #MSDOSGAMES

[IntegerOfDoom]

I appreciate all of my ISA SoundBlasters so much now.

[westcoastcaper]

As much as I love old school hardware, seeing One Must Fall 2097 in the video made me cheer!

[CDiFan]

I have an old Daewoo PC with this chip integrated onto the motherboard. One weird issue it sometimes has is it will play the first quarter-second of a WAV file, and continuously loop it until the system is rebooted (I.e. If the Windows Ding sound plays, it will just go "Di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di..." non-stop until a reboot). The wavetable synth is interesting though, as certain MIDI files will even play at that lower pitch.

Also sometimes on boot, it will list itself in the PCI device table as about 20 separate multimedia devices and freeze the system.

[JayTheComputerGuy]

I kind of like the renditon of E1M1 this card puts out! It sounds slightly lower pitch

[subynut]

Growing up, I had an Orchid SoundWave32 in my computer. It had a DSP in it that would emulate SBPro and Windows Sound System plus it had a General MIDI Wave-table Synthesis that did a pretty ok job of handling most MIDI files I had at the time. It also had a 3d FM Systh mode that made some games sound great and others sounded awful! Kinda like that Trident sounded. LOL Overall, I really liked that sound card even though the SB emulation was only the Pro instead of the 16. That was one of the reasons I added a ProAudio Spectrum 16 to the system and played the dance of I/O, IRQ, and DMA configurations! That was fun getting those two to work! LOL In the end, those two cards gave me the best of both worlds with a few extra options as well.
Anyway, I enjoyed this review of a sound card I had never heard of before and it brought back memories of my old DOS / Windows computers.

[PXAbstraction]

As a former suffering user of Trident video cards, I can confidently say that this company never made a good product.

[detalite]

Trident 4DWave was integrated in SiS630/730 chipset.

[Mwyann]

I guess the main reason the sound is not that great in DOS mode is because games used to use OPL3 instruments for sound effects (jump, fire...). Once translated to more complex instruments, it surely doesn't sound like the devs intended.

[sluxi]

That was interesting, would have loved to hear it butcher even more beloved game music with the fm synth mode.

[TimNeumann-qb]

The only PCI cards I'm in the hunt for are the Yamaha variations but like all else retro they're super expensive. Enjoyed the video!

[jbinary]

Please! Try this in SBEmu, the new sound blaster emulator. As it's ac97 it might work

[revcrussell]

Trident also made the Trident 4DWave NX, I have them both in my collection but haven't tried either other than to POST.

[FOIL_FRESH]

i bought one of these cards about a year back because i was so interested in how it would sound - it's worse than i imagined, and that's a good thing! the actual problem with my card is that it doesn't output any sound at all. it's very broken. at least i got it in its box, with its oh so cheesy 90s design.

how did you find it's soundblaster 16 compatibility/quality? I had the idea of using it alongside one of my YMF744 cards to only do SB16 while the yamaha did everything else.

great vid as always!

[SianaGearz]

This is hilarious.

You know how there's people who are in love with Sonic music as tortured by wrongly clocked Atmega consoles.

This is going to be a sought-after collector's item now.

Now i'm just curious how the DOS version of the driver may creatively butcher ALL the games. Because there's actual logic behind the OPL patch matching, it almost makes sense. Almost but not quite. It's sort of impressive really if you think about it, if not really in a good way.

Also the various soundbanks are sort of... the larger ones are not strictly a higher quality versions of the smaller ones, they're all slightly different in character! But they do sound fairly pleasant, they aren't too unbalanced and aren't trying to do too much heavy lifting.

[Pickle]

yeah sounds like one those cards that have a grand idea of using its midi bank for FM synth.

[joaoc_PT]

Ralphie version of soundcards.
Test Rise of the Triad!

[jakobole]

That piano-sample sounds like something they snatched from EMU-systems...(EMU II, Proteus and others)

[Kawa-oneechan]

The worst thing about the Commander Keen midification is that we actually have the originals, before they were converted to OPL.

[dabombinablemi]

So many cheap late 90's soundcards/chips beg the question of manufacturers "why not an ESS Solo-1E instead?". Highly compatible, flexible, excellent fm-synth if you were going for that, 3D effects and handles playback/record at 6KHz through to 48KHz (unlike the Live! series with their need to resample). And very cheap to implement cleanly if my generic (and of fairly modern manufacture) Solo-1E card is to go by.

So much worse than the AudioPCI.

[pc-sound-legacy]

In the late 90s, "multimedia" was what is "AI" today. Everyone talked about it and every related company wanted to be part of the hype. Sound was a key element so Trident was consequent enough to make a soundcard. S3, Opti and many others did so as well. But also many of them failed to gain marked share. (No wonder in this case I guess).
The wavetable sounds better than I remember to be fair. But the FM emulation -horrible!