Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Well, it is certainly an interesting discovery. I certainly haven't heard about it before, and I doubt a lot of people know about it either. I am currently running an SB 2.0 in my XT. I think that the SB Pro is a better card though, because I do believe it has some extra voices and cleaner sounding output. I think I'll leave my SB Pro II in my AT for now. What I would really like is an SB 1.0 or 1.5 for my XT.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

creepingnet wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Creepingnet, I noticed that your XT II has a Soundblaster Pro II installed. Do those really work in 8-bit slots?

Amazingly yes it does. The 16 bit end hangs off though, and I think when in 8-bit mode, the CD-ROM controller is disabled.

I think you guys are confused. All Sound Blaster cards up to and including the Pro II were 8-bit ISA cards, and have no extra interface piece "hanging off the end". They work just fine in an XT as long as you choose a free IRQ (5 is taken by the hard drive, so you have to choose either 7 or 2).

So here's a bit of trivia: Were there ever any 16-bit *audio* sound cards that worked in an *8-bit* slot? Yes! Early versions of the Pro Audio Spectrum did, as well as some clones. So it is possible to have 44.1KHz 16-bit audio come out of your XT. Scary, eh?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Trixter, I think you are mistaken. You are correct that the Sound Blaster Pro is an 8-bit card. However, you are incorrect about them having only an 8-bit interface. They do infact use a 16-bit ISA slot for the MKE CD-ROM interface. However, I always figured creative labs did something sneaky to prevent people from using them in 8-bit slots and never bothered to try it out.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

I am indeed mistaken, sorry. I opened up my XT and confirmed both our assertions: The Sound Blaster Pro II does indeed have a 16-bit ISA interface, and the sound card portion does indeed work in an 8-bit slot.

If the 16-bit portion of the interface is only used for the CDROM interface, then I wonder if the Sound Blaster 16 can be used in an 8-bit slot as well...

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

You can give it a shot, but I doubt it will work. I am pretty sure that the SB16 actually uses the 16-bit portion of the slot to process sound properly.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I did some searching on the internet months ago for my Pro II, and found out that it came in an 8-bit version as well with a CD-ROM interface (I think), but it was apparently later released as a 16 bit version. Otherwise, both are functionally the same sound wise I figure.

It gives off pretty good sound running on an 8-bit bus. Even the audio it throws out is really good and rather clean.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

That's pretty interesting. I've never seen the 8-bit ISA version before.