SoundThe interesting thing about the SiS 630/730 chipset is the sound core. Unlike the SiS 7012 used in later chipsets, the SiS 7018 is hardware accelerated and not some dumb software-driven codec. It also has DOS drivers and a decent mixer. In Windows I don't really have anything to say except that I had no issues with the sound drivers. The WDM drivers do not support the acceleration features of the sound core, so I had to pass a parameter to the sound driver's SETUP.EXE to force it to install the VxD drivers. It features a software GM synth that is nothing to write home about, and the analog output quality is decent, but does have a faint background hiss.
Driver Trident 4Dwave Nx Sound Accelerator Pci Xp
For DOS gaming.... OPL emulation sucks. Like... really sucks. And in Windows the VxD drivers seem to fail to expose the software synth to DOS apps within Windows. GM works just fine in pure DOS. Also, the DOS drivers can be set to emulate either a SB16 or a SBPro and take about 30KB of conventional memory. It uses two files, SNDINIT.EXE and SNDTSR.EXE - the first EXE just initializes the hardware (and the mixer), and the second allows the emulation to work fully. Duke Nukem 3D crashes when exiting, and DOOM crashes in OPL mode (not that you'd ever want to use it). Since I have no capture hardware, I just recorded the sound of me playing DOOM for a while with GM, then trying to do so with OPL (and freezing the PC), them Duke Nukem theme song both in GM and in OPL mode. There are a bunch of missing notes when trying to play OPL tunes, which makes it ever crappier for Adlib games.DOOM - GM.mp3DOOM - FM.mp3Duke3D - GM.mp3Duke3D - FM.mp3
One interesting thing, though, is that the MPU-401 interface (for external synths) seems to be separated from the audio core, and it is not even PnP (you have to choose the MPU port in the BIOS setup) and seems to not need the DOS sound drivers to be loaded, and that is very nice!
Ooooh yeah, you are right - the spec sheets say YMF752 (which promises DOS support, but my guess is some WDM TSR in MSDOS box, not clean DOS mode), not 754, and the photos of the motherboard does not show the sound chips in detail (although certain Linux variants report YMF744b onboard). Their Sony equivalent (PCG-SR17/27/33) had a DS-XG (the flowchart on their service manual says YMF754), and their own driver library confirms this. Good luck finding one of those....the ones that were not trashed probably commands a massive (and unjustifiable) price premium. As a former SR27k owner, I was not that impressed by it and sold it for a Thinkpad X24 (good Tualatin machine, but low end Tier 4)
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