Sound card

The puny little pc speaker is not exactly known for its great sound quality, so a sound card is a must!

To ensure compatibility, it really should be an ISA card. Sure, there are PCI cards that works under DOS, but old games usually addresses the sound card directly. PCI sockets were introduced in 1992, and most games older than that cannot address PCI sound cards, as they do not know about the address ranges used by PCI.

In an attempt to remedy this situation, the SB-LINK entered the scene briefly. This is a small six pin header found on some motherboards (the iWill BD-100 Plus, among others) and sound cards (which could be the ESS ES1938S Solo-1). The header on the motherboard provides ISA-slot hardware addresses to the PCI sound card, meaning the PCI card can be addressed as an ISA card. While it does help some, there are still many games that does not work with it.

So, ISA. But which one? Well, you can never go wrong with a Sound Blaster, right? A decent Sound Blaster 16 should set you back about 50 USD on eBay, but you can of course go for a higher spec card like an AWE 64.

It you ever owned a AWE 32, you probably have fond memories of it. Rightly so - it is a great card, but it does have a tendency to be quite noisy, picking up a lot of static from the other cards in the case. The AWE 64 reduced this a lot.

Again, look out for gold diggers! There are listings on eBay where people are asking several hundreds of dollars (US) for an AWE 32. You can get them for about 60 USD.

A few years ago, at the height of the Greek financial crisis, there was a greek trying to sell his AWE32 on eBay for 775 USD. Crisis or not, that is just ridiculous...