The DSP factory and SW1000XG were high end soundcards at the end of the 1990's and they were launched with great fanfare and hype for the MAC and Win 95 platform. The DSP music factory (DS2416) and the SW1000XG had great specs at the time (48khz 24bit max) and just as suddenly Yamaha pulled the plug and discontinued it just before winxp was launched but thankfully they managed to squeeze in a winxp asio driver.
So what is this all about? I just got a SW1000XG from TPC for 1k in mint condition! minus the mini midi cable and the connector to a DSP factory card. what has it going for it? well it is a recording soundcard, it has built in effects (70 variations) and a full blown XG synth in the form of the guts of a MU100R hardware module. although this is XG/GM territory remarkably the sounds still hold up when I play a couple of midifiles. Of course I had a difficult time installing it and I expected installation and driver hassles, it is still worth it. considering this card cost more than 15k php back in 1999. So what, I cant install the bundled XG gold software there are still other ways to access the patches and navigate around it. For now I am very happy listening to near realistic midi emulations of "Welcome to Jurassic Park" - using 3 ports (take note three actual midi ports for complex sequencing and playback) and "Satch Boogie". And the best part is that I can trigger the sound card with a usb midi controller and get an instant response without fiddling around with Asio latency. Other Pluses on this card are a SPDIF coax out and recording MIDI to AUDIO via loopback recording.