Sound Blaster MCV

@5084.ADF - Creative Labs, Inc. - SOUND BLASTER/MCV 
@5103.ADF - Creative Labs SOUND BLASTER PRO MCV CT5330 

sbpmwu.exe Win 3.1 drivers for SB/SB Pro MCV 
sbpmdu.exe  DOS Drivers for SB/SB Pro MCV 
NT support- Creative's site sez "NO" to NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 
OS/2 No drivers at Creative Labs 

Link to Creative Lab's Download site HERE   Use to find SB utilities 



SBPro MCV

 

SB MCV (CT5320)



>Is the MCA Creative Soundblaster (Pro) a useble soundcard,  MIDI W95/98 e.g.?

From Peter
Yes - from the principle. 
   However the card technically bases on the old 8-bit ISA (!!) card, roughly conversed to MCA and originally designed for Stage I and II MCA (80286 and low-end 80386 machines). They tend to cause bus timeout errors on faster machines ... and since you mentioned Win98 (which won't work properly on most PS/2) these will be your prefered machines I guess.
   Best recommendation: do yourself a favour, forget the SB MCV and buy a ChipChat or SoundPiper card. They have been designed and tested to work with the better PS/2.

>My nephew has a Soundblaster Pro running in a 76 Lacuna with DX2/66, Win95 fat16. Clean sound. Can't think of a solution, if timings is the problem.

Peter opines:
   I would guess that it is a problem with the relatively low DMA clock on the "older designs" PS/2s. The Lacuna supports synchro-stream and can run DMA at much higher rates for the individual DMA-request - the 9595-xMx is an old planar with a 10MHz DMA IIRC - which keeps the time-slices for the "lower" DMAs a bit short. The SB is known for holding its IRQ and DMA for extended cycles - which ends in bus timeouts (and error 107 or blue screens) or choppy sound. The "original Soundblaster" use the old 8-bit ISA designs, which are not just racers from the bus interface anyway. And -obviously- a bit off-MCA-standards in their circuit design.
   I had that with the Pro MCV2 as well ... until I decided to remove the card. The Reply Vibra suffers the same symptom - if you run them with the original SB-drivers. With the updated versions it runs much better.  Have one in my 9595-S20 "aol-gate" along with a Pentium-133 just now.
Nontheless the sound is a bit choppy when many tasks run at the same time -
particularly at Windows startup. Sounds odd.  So it is a basic design problem of the SB-compatible cards based on ISA technology. (As is the MCV2, Pro MCV/2 and the Reply Vibra-16 as well).
 
 



Hardware General Info
General Hardware
SB MCV (CT5320)
SB Pro MCV (CT5330)
General 
   FM Synthesis 
Yes 
Yes
   Digitized Sound
Yes
Yes
   Stereo Power Amplifier
No
Yes
   Digital/Analog Mixer
No
Yes
   Plug and Play
No
No
CD-ROM Interface 
None 
None
Hardware Settings 
   Interrupt (IRQ)
3, 5, 7 
3, 5, 7
   8-bit DMA Channel 
1
0, 1, 3
   16-bit DMA Channel 
N/A
N/A
   Joystick I/O Address
200
  200
   Audio I/O Address 
210, 220, 230, 
240, 250, 260
  220, 240
FM Synthesizer I/O Address
388
  388
External Connectors 
   Mic-In
X
   Line In
X
X
   Line-Out
 
X
   Speaker Out
 
X
   Game/Joystick Port 
X
   PC Speaker
 
X
   CD-ROM Audio-In (SB Audio Socket)
 
X

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