Well, I got the sound to work but for some reason the earphone out jack on the cd-rom drive does not output sound and when I run doom and select the proper settings for sound and FX I still have no sound or fx in the game. 😒

dosquest wrote:

Well, I got the sound to work but for some reason the earphone out jack on the cd-rom drive does not output sound and when I run doom and select the proper settings for sound and FX I still have no sound or fx in the game. 😒

CD-ROM only outputs sound while playing Audio Tracks. Are you playing those? Try with a simple Audio CD.

Okay, I will try that, but when I select the audio out jack directly from the sound card I get no sounds from the game (I can get sounds from windows when I don't play the game).

make sure your game's sound card settings matches what you have set to the sound card... if you have the wrong DMA channel for example, you won't hear anything... most games won't complain either

So, do I just go through all the settings to see which one works?

What sound card do you have?
If you go into the Windows Device Manager, under Multimeda devices you should see your sound card there.

Otherwise, in the game's setup try some variant of Sound Blaster with the default settings - IO 220, DMA 1, IRQ 5 or 7

Okay, windows proper detects it but I will try to change the irq to 7

there's no device manager in windows 3.1... he could check "drivers" or "sounds" in control panel however
but, if the sound card DOS drivers were installed, there might be some sort of config or diagnostic tool to check the settings... on creative cards, diagnose.exe does that

and you can't just change IRQs by software, unless you have a PnP card... on a real legacy card, it's all done by jumpers

there's no device manager in windows 3.1

He said on the previous page he's upgraded to 98se 😉

my bad... I didn't notice 😀
well in this case, during my 9x days, I found that for better compatibility with DOS games running under 9x is to actually load/install the DOS drivers also... that way both the DOS drivers and the native 9x drivers were loaded... not elegant or memory efficient, but it worked... always (at least for me)

Okay, @dunutking the card is an sb 16 with the proper drivers for win 9X loaded. @THEMan I have 500+ mb of ram so I don't think memory usage will be a problem, as for the dual driver setup how do you suppose I go about that because I got my win9X sb16 drivers from the install cd.

go to creative labs website... download sbbasic.exe
reboot and hit f8 just as you see "starting windows 98"
select "command prompt only"
install the drivers
reboot and it should be good... diagnose.exe is included, so you can test it too

500MB or 500GB of ram, doesn't matter... DOS is a different beast in how it manages memory... you only have 640KB to work with for many things (in fact, once you get below 590KB of free conventional memory, you run into problems running DOS programs), and then up to the 1MB ceiling for the high memory area.. many drivers allow you to be loaded into high memory, and the creative drivers are no exception... you will need himem.sys and emm386.exe loaded to do this
your config.sys should have the first two lines:
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
then the rest can usually be DEVICEHIGH=

and in autoexec.bat, you can do "loadhigh" (shortform is "LH") for many TSRs

I'm obviously simplifying things, so I suggest you go google and read up about DOS memory management
himem.sys and emm386.exe will probably be in your windows directory somewhere since you now run 98 instead of DOS 6.22... so make sure what you put in config.sys reflects this

if your SB16 is PnP, things might be a little more tricky... I don't have much experience with the sound blaster PnP cards in DOS (most of what I own have real jumpers), so someone else can probably help you better with that

Yep, it's a pnp card, but for some weird reason it needed the drivers to work properly. 😒

if budget allows, you should find a non-PnP sound blaster card... anything non-PnP will always work better than the PnP card... remember you're dealing with 1st generation PnP devices and a 1st generation PnP operating system... and you're trying to run stuff inside DOS which was never PnP to begin with... obviously lots of hacks/tweaks needed to be done to even get it to work right... it's just a big headache making anything PnP from the old days to work right in those legacy OS's

I remember buying a US Robotics Sportster 33.6 modem back in 1995... it was the first thing from USR that had PnP... says so on the box... I tried it on my P75 then... it caused all sorts of weird conflicts and put itself on some weird com port that no dialup program was able to really use... so after getting fed up for 30 minutes, I pulled the card out, put the jumpers back in it to force the settings I wanted, and got on with life... I was lucky that modem had the ability to run in non-PnP mode, but PnP sound blasters weren't this way 🙁

hopefully, someone else with SB16 PnP experience can chime in and tell you how to make this work right

I have used I pnp SB16 and also a pnp AWE32. Had no problems so far. As a matter of fact, until today I've been using the awe on my 386, which is a non pnp pc at all. And under dos it makes no difference. It is installed the same way. It just needs the second disk named creative configuration manager, except the basic disk.

Well, there are lots of things I haven't tried yet so I'm not giving up yet.

Yea PnP cards are fine.

When you run the SBBASIC installer, it will pick up if the card is PnP and ask for the directory where CTCM is located.

Both packages are on the creative support site (latest version).

IMO you got to hand it to Creative, because it works really well and it's totally user friendly.

In fact, the PnP cards are more flexible. E.g. if you just need a joystick port on your PC and nothing else, you can configure a AWE64 that way!

EDIT:

Under W98 I would just install the W98 drivers. Then boot into DOS and manually run CTCM.EXE and then AWEUTIL/S or add them to whatever batch file is run when you boot into MS-DOS mode.

Again both these files are in the abobe packages.

Okay, did the win98 drivers, now to get ctcm.exe and edit the batch file (why can't I just add the line to the windows batch file also?)

@sprcorreia Okay, sorry for the late reply I tested it with a doctor demento cd and the output from the cd-rom works.

So what do I do after I run install?