I had one of these because back in the day I wanted a Wavetable sound card and this was the cheapest one sold as one. Turned out that the „Wavetable“ part was just a full version of Yamaha S-YXG50 bundled with it. However I got that going because S-YXG50 was awesome, although quite hefty on CPU usage especially when at that time I only had a PPro 233 as we were rather poor back then. But the card itself sounded good and it was also Linux compatible. So despite first having felt a bit ripped off about the Wavetable part I liked the card because it did everything I wanted it to do well enough.

Legacy mode 1 and 2 is their counterpart to ESS T-DMA. Both are a type of DMA controller snooping mechanism, which seems to be a proprietary DDMA scheme without needing the PCI chipset to do it but still requires the chipsets' onboard ISA DMA controller for it to copy the necessary register bits from an DOS application to their own sound chipset. this all involves PCI bus mastering instead ISA bus style transactions. Later chipsets (PCIE intel chipsets in particular) lack accesibility to the ISA style DMAC via PCI bus and only devices on LPC bus can only use the DMAC. Hence why Sound Blaster emulation on these type sound cards no longer function anymore on newer platforms. Even worst is that newer chipsets no longer have LPC bus which instead is replaced by eSPI bus making ISA truly dead.

To counter the mixer clipping issue with games that reset the mixer you can try with a third party utility. There's a little TSR mixer program on the VOGONS Vintage Driver Library under the Sound Devices -> Creative Labs category with the Sound Blaster Pro Volume Control TSR file title; it's a very useful piece of software for every SB Pro owner actually called SBPVOL Ver. 4.01 written by a spanish programmer back in the late 90's. It's description reads "SBPVOL, the SB Pro remote control is a resident program to adjust the volume of all the channels of the SB Pro. It only takes 1056 bytes of memory and works under nearly every single program (even under Windows in protected mode)". It can also turn the lowpass output filter on/off and Stereo/Mono switches of the SB Pro by a simple keyboard shortcut and uses the keyboard 3 leds as indicators when you switch settings.

The first time I learnt about FM801 was in an article about "counterfeit" Yamaha YMF724 cards. 😅

I had this very sound card on my first ever proper computer - this was a Pentium 3 computer circa year 2000. I was never able to use it for DOS, but 8-year old me would never think of a DOS driver. And in Windows 98 i remember noting the sound was very crackly with bassy music - and speakers weren't the issue as my dad had connected the pc to a Mini-HiFi amp. I (much) later got a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Value and that solved the issue for that computer in particular, but i remember that my parents had bought for themselves a Pentium 4 with an integrated sound card that i remember sounded much better. Maybe it was a bad batch or lack of OEM configuration for DOS that spoiled it for me, but i don't have good memories about that one. That installer and audio setup utility was a throw back. That "Left......Right......" unlocked memories in me lmao. My retro build now has a mid-life Sound Blaster 16 PnP ISA sound card. It does all but the 3D sound which i remember was very gimmicky on the FM801 (QSound...) and suprisingly much better than the newer FM801.

Whoopsy! A few wrong captions with the game footage. Death Rally, One Must Fall 2097, and Epic Pinball do not have any FM sound. They're all-digital with tracker music.

I scrapped about 12 of these last week.

Great video! Its not perfect but it seems like a "good enough" solution if your only choice is a PCI slot. It does seem like it is messing up the sample rate for the digital sounds in Wolf3D and OMF. I will keep this on my eBay radar...

Does it work with FreeDOS? (I guess it does, but would be nice to confirm)

Does FM synth better than the AudioPCI, but not as well with digital effects - clipping might be a settings issue like with the SB 16XV. How much memory did you have available under DOS after the card was initialised?

Not bad at all for a PCI card.

Ah, I don't know... subjectively I never had any luck nor was I satisfied with its performance. For me it was always the "dire straits" type of card for when I built setups that had no onboard audio and I didn't have any "better" card to fill the void; a stop-gap, if you will. Maybe I'm bad at setting things up, maybe I used the wrong drivers all the time, but it just didn't work for me the way it did for you, and given that it falls into the later era of soundcards - times when they started to become integrated into the motherboards and that wasn't received as a "bad" thing (I'm referring to PCChips, their badge-engineered Amptron/Whatever-brand brands, and their hateful SoundPro onboard ICs), times when the wavetable aspect was being pushed out by CD audio, and times when the sound card market was tight, fierce, and experienced, the FM801 is, as the kids say, "very fucking mid". No wonder ISA stuck around until 2003 or so for all the gamer holdouts, MIDI musicians, and the like (not including people that needed ISA for cards other than sound cards). That said, it's indescribably better than other abominations such as the Avance Logic ALS200 or the Crystal CX4235. On the other hand, I read the FM801 is very much loved by the Amiga community. Subjectivity aside, this is a great video and I am hooked after one vid; keep it up! You enticed me to dig the poor thing out of storage and give it one more shot.