mattlacey wrote:

It's not a PnP card, and I've set the various addresses etc. to 'Unavailable' in the BIOS. I *think* this is correct, the BIOS shows those reserved by the system and the rest you can toggle between Available and Unavailable, so I'm assuming "Unavailable" means count those as used because I've configured hardware as such.

So what happens if you just leave everything as "Available" ?

On an unrelated note is there a good (cheap) source for 3dfx-style passthrough cables?

Depending on how often you use your 3DFX card, you may want to consider just dispensing with it entirely, and manually plugging your monitor into the card when you need it.

Otherwise, it looks like Monoprice has some 1.5 ft cables.

So what happens if you just leave everything as "Available" ?

Leaving it all as available didn't seem to make any discernible difference, so whether it's worth it or not I have no idea.

and manually plugging your monitor into the card when you need it.

How did this never occur to me? 😀

how do you play music in doom ? the author of dosmid underlined that to init the FM midi part of the awe32 you had to init it first. You can use aweutil and the init only switch to do that. Some SB cards are bugged in that matter. This problem should not arise if you play doom music using the emu8k.

What I understood from reading these forums (never actually owning any non-PnP Creative card) is that DIAGNOSE is needed at every startup for non-PnP while CTCM is needed for PnP. AWEUTIL may be needed for some AWE flavors (those with the FM portion integrated into the main chip) but not for those where it is a separate Yamaha/CT1747/CT1978.

mattlacey wrote:

Weirdly it shows the available memory has a little over half of what 'mem' reports.

Keen always does this. I don't know why. As long at it shows 400+ KB of total memory, you'll be good. You'll usually get away with ~350 KB as well.

dr_st wrote:

What I understood from reading these forums (never actually owning any non-PnP Creative card) is that DIAGNOSE is needed at every startup for non-PnP while CTCM is needed for PnP. AWEUTIL may be needed for some AWE flavors (those with the FM portion integrated into the main chip) but not for those where it is a separate Yamaha/CT1747/CT1978.

For earlier Sound Blaster models (the ones that weren't completely configured via jumpers), Diagnose is used to also configure your sound card's settings and then to write those settings to your startup files.
Obviously, Diagnose is also meant to test the functionality of your card, depending on the settings that were selected (this applies to both non-PnP & PnP versions, but with the latter, Diagnose will simply complain if you select a DMA or IRQ setting that doesn't agree to the setting you have already selected in your PnP utility).

You are correct that, under DOS, you require CTCU (only for versions prior to the integrated DOS 7.x from the Windows 9x series) & CTCM to configure your card.
CTCU is your Configuration Utility (under Windows 9x, this is "driven" by a file called CTPNP.CFG in your Windows folder) and CTCM "manages" those settings.

On any AWE based card, AWEUTIL is required to initialise your FM (or CQM) OPL3 based synthesis, via the "Aweutil /S" parameter. This is because the FM synthesis output is also routed via the AWE chip, and for cards with the CT-1747 chip, you can then also apply reverb and chorus effects to your FM synthesis output using some additional Aweutil parameters.

jesolo wrote:

You are correct that, under DOS, you require CTCU (only for versions prior to the integrated DOS 7.x from the Windows 9x series) & CTCM to configure your card.

If you "disintegrate" DOS 7.x from Windows 95/98 by setting bootgui=0 in msdos.sys, then you need ctcm and aweutil /s too.