The Live! seems to work in pure DOS with EMM386 too. I just copied the lines added to AUTOEXEC.BAT by the Windows installation to a DOS 7.0 bootdisk. SB16 emulation working fine in Descent, Doom, and Duke 3D.

My question is about GM. GM music works great in pure DOS. If there's no wavetable ROM, where is the Live! accessing the instrument sounds from?

It uses system RAM. Try loading any cache software before the SB emulation and it will complain that it needs the first portion of your EMS (or XMS, don't remember) memory free. If you go to the driver's folder you will see an ECW file it loads when it starts.

SB Live (value) causes crashes for me in Duke 3D and Blood. Specifically the reverb sound causes a crash. It's a shame because the card can do a lot of other things well.

alexanrs wrote:

It uses system RAM. Try loading any cache software before the SB emulation and it will complain that it needs the first portion of your EMS (or XMS, don't remember) memory free. If you go to the driver's folder you will see an ECW file it loads when it starts.

Thanks. I knew it was using system memory, but I didn't know where the patch set was located. Turns out the DEFAULT.ECW file is in the Windows\System directory, and it is about 2MB in size. I didn't know that ECW stands for "Ensoniq Concert Wavetable." I wonder if this patch set is similar to what was on the 2MB Soundscapes. I'd like to find other ECW sets just to play around with them. (EDIT: Just found them on Vogonsdrivers!)

Being able to use the Live! in pure DOS for GM is a huge plus for the card. It would be fun to compare the music to that from a Soundscape.

ECW to me means; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4fZINe1AeQ

A quick update. I had lots of problems trying to run games in pure DOS using the Live! (for GM) alongside a PnP ISA cards with a genuine OPL3.

I decided to use a CT1600 with jumpers, and got some games to work, but my Athlon XP rig was causing speed problems.

I then used a CT1740, and now some games work in pure DOS with the Live! providing GM and the SB16 providing digital effects.

The only problem is with Doom engine games: GM music but no digital effects. When I disable the Live's SB16 emulation (meaning no GM), the digital effects play fine in Doom.

Live! SB16 emulation is using A220 I5 D1 H5 P330
OPL3 card is using A240 I7 D3 H6 P300 (did not use high DMA for SB Pro cards)

I'm going to keep experimenting with combinations, but right now the Live! with a non-PnP SB16 shows the most promise.

GM and Dos4gw games don't go together very well. The other downside to the sblive's emulation is it requires Emm386, and some games don't like
that, Pinball Illusions is an example. I also found that Whiplash(Fatal racing) went extremely laggy running in 3dfx mode in pure Dos with my sblive.

I'm currently playing with a Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI card which has very good SBpro emulation and supports stereo sound in games where available, SC2000 and
Pinball Fantasies tested very nicely as well as Whiplash. Downside again is that it requires EMM386 with DSDMA to work.

Another advantage of using a non-pnp sb16 or other non-pnp card is that Win98 doesn't know it's there unless You tell it to go searching. That way I could use
the SB16 for dos and the sblive for Win98 all using the same IRQ's and Dma channels without any issues. Multiple Dos boot configurations help with this.

The only way around the GM and Dos4gw issue is to run from a Win98 Dos window. One thing I haven't tried is AWE32 games with a sblive, not sure if that is
possible.

I settled on an OPL3 card to go along with the Live!: a Reveal Sound FX Wave (SC500). In addition to the genuine OPL3, it has a Crystal CS4112 patch set ROM for GM. The sound is very good, IMO. Surprisingly, this ISA PnP card is not recognized by Windows (I tried on two different systems), which is a bonus.

With these two cards, here are the options I have:

SB 16 emu + Crystal onboard wavetable (real mode DOS)
SB Pro (OPL3) + ECW SoundFont (DOS + EMM386)
SB 16 emu + ECW SoundFont (DOS + EMM386) * Reveal not used
SB Pro (OPL3) + Crystal onboard wavetable (real mode DOS) * Live! not used

The setup would be even better if the ISA card had a Waveblaster header. However, I ran into resource problems with other ISA PnP cards that WERE recognized by Windows, so I'm not sure if there is a card that has everything.

The easiest way of dealing with PnP ISA cards is, weirdly enough, setting the IRQ and DMA resources to "Legacy ISA" in the BIOS. This will ensure that neither the BIOS nor Windows tries to allocate any devices there (not even the desired ISA cards). Then just specify everything manually - marking something as "Legacy ISA" in the BIOS setup will prevent automatic allocation, but won't prevent manual assignments. I had nothing but trouble coercing my AWE64 to cooperate with an Aztech card until I did that.

alexanrs: Actually your description is not completely correct.
Setting "PnP OS = Yes" in BIOS prevents the BIOS from setting PnP resources.
If PnP OS = No is set then the BIOS allocates resources for PnP cards excluding reserved resources set by changing to "Legacy ISA".
Win9x has it's own mechanic to deal with reserved resources in the device manager.

For Pnp OS = Yes the exclusion setting in BIOS does not apply as the BIOS is not going to set any resources.

I did not had any case yet where setting PnP OS = No is required as any PnP card brings its own program for resource setting and initialization. Whether these programs use any information from the BIOS for Legacy ISA reservation is typically not documented.
However since programs as CTCU have features to add own reserved resources tables it is unlikely that they copy any information from BIOS.

The usual approach in getting cards configured is by plugging them as only card first and enter in eeprom template 001 the desired resources. This can be done without actually applying those. Template 000 is fixed and not changeable as safety fallback.
If resources of template 001 do not overlap between every card in the same system the subsequent calls of the resource initialization tools of the manufacturers will not collide.

elianda wrote:

alexanrs: Actually your description is not completely correct. Setting "PnP OS = Yes" in BIOS prevents the BIOS from setting PnP […]
Show full quote

alexanrs: Actually your description is not completely correct.
Setting "PnP OS = Yes" in BIOS prevents the BIOS from setting PnP resources.
If PnP OS = No is set then the BIOS allocates resources for PnP cards excluding reserved resources set by changing to "Legacy ISA".
Win9x has it's own mechanic to deal with reserved resources in the device manager.

To get things working I had to both have PnP OS set to Yes AND the IRQ/DMA resources to Legacy ISA. With just the "PnP OS" option the video card insisted on grabbing IRQ 5 and I could not override that for the life of me (it only had Template 0, and that one cannot be modified), and I had no valid IRQ settings left for the AWE in my setup. Setting IRQ5 to Legacy ISA on BIOS moved the video card to another IRQ (IRQ3 - I had COM ports disabled) and then I was able to manually assign IRQ5 for the AWE and things worked fine since them.
The "PnP OS" setting will prevent the BIOS from setting PnP resources for non essential cards, but it still has to set up essential hardware like video cards and IDE controllers. And in my case Windows had no control over the IRQ it assigned to the video card.

Ok this can still happen for essential PCI cards that map resources to ISA.
So what graphics card do you use, as sticking to ISA IRQ 5 is quite unusual for PCI graphics cards? (usually they go for 10 or 11)

It is a good old regular Voodoo3 3000 AGP. I believe the issue here is that my Aztech card itself was using 3 IRQs: 7 for the SBPro part, 9 for the MPU interface and 10 for the WSS part. If I set PnP OS to no I could manually control the four IRQs used by the PCI IRQ steering to the remaining free ones (I had disabled my COM and LPT ports to free up resources), but for some unknown reason my Aztech just stopped working (it worked fine with PnP OS: No without the AWE card installed) and the device manager did not indiciate any conflicts. With PnP OS: Yes the Aztech card worked fine, but for some reason this made the BIOS ignore the IRQ settings for the PCI bus even for essential hardware initialized during the boot process, so IRQ 5 was taken and Windows could not move it.