Have you selected the right midi port in game?

I'd suspect the awe32. On mine, a ct2760, I can't get external midi working. I am just using windows drives though.

Thanks for your help 😀

I select General MIDI/MPU-401, port 330, IRQ 5 (same as SB, for the few games asking for it).

Games I tried so far are Colonization, Doom, EF2000 v2.0 and MechWarrior 2 (vanilla edition).

System is on PC DOS 7.1 in real mode (except of course for Colonization).

Sound Blaster is on standard settings, A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6, and works great with digitized sounds, FM and native WaveTable music.
DIAGNOSE reports everything is fine. CTCU reports no conflicts, Plug-and-Pray OS setting in motherboard's BIOS is set to NO (tried with YES also but I get weird settings, like A260 I10 D3 H5 P330 E620 T6).

I tried disabling devices in CTPNP.CFG, to no avail.

I tried initializing the card through AWEUTIL /S and then removing that line from AUTOEXEC.BAT. I removed also the SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0 environment variable.

I got no joystick plugged in, no additional memory, no CD-ROM plugged in the IDE interface.

I don't know what to do. Maybe planets aren't aligned or the goats' blood wasn't fresh enough. My female friends aren't virgins since a looong time ago so it's useless to sacrifice them to the Dark Gods, and I'm running out of candles... Is there any diagnostics tool that can check the daughterboard?

Thanks for your patience!

I have two dead DB60 cards, one was DOA and the other just suddenly stopped working. Same symptoms as yours, chips getting hot but no sound.
I tried to find out what caused that but really I have no idea where to look. I did notice the µC was holding down the reset pin on the DAC, that was kinda odd, but trying to pull it up manually didn't do anything. Maybe the µC just spontaneously erased itself, I dunno.

Sorry for your loss man, that's some expensive hardware :'(

I'm starting to think those gadgets are made of suck. They make for expensive thermal paste spreaders (they're way too light for paperweights).

So back to tomorrow, starting all over. Little quiz for you people:

Let's say I got a motherboard with 2 ISA slots. Let's say I want to use a SB64G for sound effects, WaveTable music and joystick support. Let's say also I'd like another ISA card that can do General MIDI *WITHOUT* a daughterboard and has a real OPL. I'd like it without TSRs and if at all possible, somewhat easy to find...

Also I might have a SB-Link connector on the motherboard and I'm open to have a PCI sound card, if and only if it could work in pure DOS without TSRs and without expanded memory.

I found some cards with Yamaha chipsets PCI, without Wave blaster header (ymf724 in various flavors). Wikipedia says they got some form of General MIDI, but I'm not sure how do PCI, ymf724, SB-Link, FM and General MIDI correlate for DOS games...

Some of you got any ideas please?

Get an ISA Yamaha YMF71x (easy to find as "Audician 32") and an external module, e.g. Roland SC-55. Also look into actually using your AWE, some games sound ok with the ROM soundfont.

Also, just for the record, are you talking about a real DB50XG or the XR385 clone from China?

Thanks for the tip, that's another option. I already got an Audician 32 Plus, so I might get a Canvas...

Of course I'm using native SoundFont wherever I can, it sounds quite good. It's just that for every game I got that supports SoundFonts, there are 10 for General MIDI...

I'm talking about a proper DB50XG from Yamaha, not a clone. Couldn't even hear one note from this thing...

Goddamit...

I took my ews64 out of my test pc and moved the db50xg from that [where it was working] to my awe32. try to play midii.. some buzzing then nothing. My DB50XG is now confirmed dead after putting on an awe32. It was working immediately before, on a different card in the same machine, but testing it on a santa cruz now [where a roland sc7 works] - nothing.

Good job I bought an NEC clone as a spare, but no way am I putting that on the AWE32 as that looks like the culprit to me.

Just a wild guess: Could the DB have touched something on the AWE? Those boards came with plastic spacers after all...

Totally off topic but ratfink, what do you think about the Dream synth on the EWS64? I find it to be pretty quirky (percussion too loud, random volume changes, doesn't handle resets properly and sometimes even refuses to play 😒)

you could be right about the db getting shorted or some such. it made some crackling noises and died. but i was using the plastic pegs on the corners.

the ews64 is really weird and incredibly annoying to deal with as it seems to not have a clear, single, unequivocal way of doing things. if you have the patience it's very flexible and i did get to the point where i actually understood how to get it to do what i wanted but much like the meaning of life i forgot to write it down.

so there should be a logic to dealing with all that reset and not playing crap it gives you. the promix control panel, cs32mix.exe and the original control panel all seem to be necessary in my recent experience.

some of the annoyances are because of the routing on the card [it's pretty much two cards in one] and it's often not clear how you have got the card set up [ie what state the driver is in once you've spent 20 minutes pressing everything in the desparate hope the midi board might actually play something without either remaining silent or deafening you]. none of the 3 programs/control panels show everything and what they do show is not laid out in the clearest and most helpful way.

i played with this card again last weekend and ended up plugging my mt32 into my livedrive on a 2000 box instead.

i've probably strayed from what you asked - i'm not sure what the dream synth itself does. midi on the card [other than produced by the fm synth] depends on sound sets [sound fonts] and i used to think the big gss one was close to roland. now i actually have an sc155 i feel the ews64 is not as clear. haven't done a proper comparison though - with the ews64 i spend most of the time trying to work out what it's doing etc.

Yup I have similar experiences with the card from using it for about half a year now. I mainly use it because it's the only thing that I could find affordably that has a usable waveblaster connector that is 100% bug free, lol.

That cs32mix DOS panel has a life of its own for sure. The values always seem to get changed at random for me. Nothing about the card "just works", but that's the challenge of it. I couldn't even figure out how to properly record stuff without it being too quiet yet.

What I find disappointing is that such a "professional" card has audible squeaking etc. when the CPU is busy. The "consumer junk" AWE64 is better in that respect. I could lower it with some ProMix changes but it doesn't go away completely. Not sure if it's due to the ISA bus or what...

What I meant about the Dream synth was the fact that many people claim that it comes so close to a real Roland/Yamaha that you can't hear the difference. While the GSSBK320.94B certainly comes close in terms of samples I simply find the volume balance of the instruments too far off, even to the point where some songs just sound broken due to the percussion being to loud and other instruments being too quiet, etc. And I don't think there is any way to change that with this synth; I use the recommended values for Reverb/Chorus etc.

d1stortion wrote:

Just a wild guess: Could the DB have touched something on the AWE? Those boards came with plastic spacers after all...

That could be possible of course, although I was careful enough to put some rubber spacers that came from a 12cm fan. I guess I'll never know why or how, I just have to assume it's fried and hope I'll get it replaced.

At least I got both the Audician and AWE64G working together without a prob. I think I'll grab an external MIDI module, though I have no idea which one to choose...

I see there are loads of DB50s and NEC clones on Taobao but I'm not familiar with that site. How well does it work buying from there?