Looking for XG midi compatible pci card. Seen many cheap soundcards on Ebay with XG midi capability but not sure if the wavetable is accessible under Linux. Also would like a pure wavetable card since I already have a sound card.

If memory serves me, the AWE32/64 series from Creative and possibly some of the Emu10k1 series cards like the Live! and PCI512 have really good midi wavetable support in hardware. The Emu10k1 does have a secondary kernel ALSA module for midi also.

This page has good info on how to set it up:

http://wiki.openttd.org/Linux_SB_Live_Wavetable_Support

Not sure if this is what you meant but that's all I could think of.

There's also the Yamaha YMF7xx series PCI cards like the YMF724E-V series using cards that have built-in XG wavetable support systems. Not sure how much luck you'd have finding one though.

If you could get a sound card with a Wavetable header, you could hunt down a DB50XG daughterboard to attach. One card series I knew that did have these were Aureal Vortex 2 series cards like the SQ2500, but finding on might be hit or miss. Haven't seen one in years.

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Ended up getting a sound blaster live 5.1. Looked at many others and to my suprise, none had spdif input or they had blank solder-pads for spdif pins (wanted to capture laserdisc audio); even if they did I think the Live is just better and more secure to have.

Still a very impressive card after all these years (came out circa de 1998-1999) and beats the crap out of new $200+ soundcards (asus comes to mind). Hardware midi rendering, unlimited soundfont memory (after kernel patching), 32 simultaneous sounds without using main CPU, and spdif capture (according to articles and reviews, recording from spdif input does not resample audio; only playback resamples); also supports a Livedrive module for many more inputs and adjustments. It also has really good sound-blaster compatibility and midi rendering in real-mode dos (this alone adds a ton of value if you want to play older dos games in real-mode dos without emulation). It's not completely XG midi compatible (partial compatibility) but there's Timidity++ for that when it's really needed; or an external XG midi module if it's really needed.

Can't believe they don't make cards like this anymore. Most games cheat and use cheap pre-rendered music now (you can't even overlap two songs this way and adjust playback speed at the same time).

Many thanks for your help!