The way I would do it is disable whatever card you don't want to use in device manager. You might have to reboot.

Use a simple AV switcher, they can be had for little money on eBay, to switch the output.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The way I would do it is disable whatever card you don't want to use in device manager. You might have to reboot.

Seems excessive. What's wrong with just changing the sound device in the sound options?

you can also connect line-out from sound soundcard 1 to line-in from soundcard 2.
Then from soundcard 2 to the speakers.

(this only works if you are using a 2.0 or 2.1 Speaker system)

You can than select soundcard 1 or 2 as Playback device.

Even if you set Soundcard 1 as output-device, you should be able to chance the mixer to soundcard 2 and raise the volume for Line-In.

Btw:
I always used 2 soundcards in this way:
A SB-Live for the Games, connected to the Speakers.
And a (cheap) second soundcard (maybe onboard) for headset and mic.
(For teamspeak, and so on)

But you need a headset which not covers your ears, so you can still hear the game sounds from speakers too.

dr_st wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The way I would do it is disable whatever card you don't want to use in device manager. You might have to reboot.

Seems excessive. What's wrong with just changing the sound device in the sound options?

It's just my preferred method that I like to use 😀

Tempting idea, with Thief and Thief 2 having no real A3D support and the EAX reverb being quite suited to its catacombs i might just...

Would this negatively affect the vortex card in dos mode?

Edit: already snagged a CT4620 for an acceptable price, ready for an adventure

I'm gonna play with this soon, not sure if it would be helpful. Anyone know of any other Windows 98 apps that are similar/better?

Sound Control 2.15

http://www.reallyeffective.co.uk/sound-control/

Sammy wrote:

you can also connect line-out from sound soundcard 1 to line-in from soundcard 2. Then from soundcard 2 to the speakers. […]
Show full quote

you can also connect line-out from sound soundcard 1 to line-in from soundcard 2.
Then from soundcard 2 to the speakers.

(this only works if you are using a 2.0 or 2.1 Speaker system)

You can than select soundcard 1 or 2 as Playback device.

Even if you set Soundcard 1 as output-device, you should be able to chance the mixer to soundcard 2 and raise the volume for Line-In.

This worked. I thought it might be muted but it wasn't. I only care about 2.1 since headphones are the only way I play games.

Didn't have a chance yet to play with Sound Control 2.15 but will soon.

My CT4620 came in and i got it running fairly easily. The only small issue is the SBL hogging IRQ5 which was easily fixed by reserving it for the Vortex2 PCI slot in the BIOS.
I have disabled the SB16 emulation and Gameport in the device manager, the vortex dos support and gameport still work fine.

Switching the default playback device before starting a game works just fine.
Running it through the Vortex line-in works fairly well but volume is low, it's better to just swap the plug or use an external mixer IMHO.

PS: holy hell is the creative software bloated, i'm sure the midi stuff was great for hobby musicians though.

I got the machine loaded with Windows 98 and all drivers installed. I used the Web Release for the SB Live 5.1 and only installed drivers and Audio HQ. Make sure the SB Live! didn't overwrite your A3D.dll. I hope to have time to play more with it soon.

Good catch, it did overwrite a3d.dll!
Given my card isn't a 5.1 but the original Live! i used the drivers off the liveware 3.0 disc. Creative don't seem to offer a full driver download for it, only an update.

I couldn't run the installer on my Windows 7 box to try and get extracted files but I was able to decompress SBL51VXD.LIB from the installer and take a look at the inf files. Here are the models I saw in the web drivers.

Looks like you are covered! 😀

CT4620 - SBLive! (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_00211102)
CT4670 - SBLive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_00201102)
CT4760 - SBLive! (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80401102)
CT4760 - SBLive! (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80611102)
CT4830 - SBLive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80261102)
CT4831 - SBLive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80311102)
CT4832 - SBLive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80271102)
CT4850 - SBlive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80511102)
CT4870 - SBLive! series (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80281102)
CT4780 - SBLive! Value (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80221102)
CT4871 - SBLive!2 (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80321102)

SBlive motherboard (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_002F1102)
SBlive motherboard (PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0002&SUBSYS_80251102)

long story short...

games can do weird things that support both EAX and A3D and are actually polling the hardware in your system. You might have trouble using the sound card you want for the API you want.

Create two hardware profiles. I have one A3D and another one EAX that I choose on boot. enable/disable what you need in each profile and voila, done.

I will be buying an A/V switch or mixer to select proper output.

Sorry to pseudo-necro this thread, but something to add onto SquareGuy's response:

Also make sure to untick the box in the properties of each card to show that they do not exist in all profiles. That way it's much easier to ensure each profile has its own unique sound card enabled.

Now the only thing to figure out is this: how do you manage each card's a3d.dll file.