I'm not near one of my SE440BX-2s right now (love them) but in the BIOS can you change power management settings to free IRQ?

squareguy wrote:

I'm not near one of my SE440BX-2s right now (love them) but in the BIOS can you change power management settings to free IRQ?

You can disable power management from the BIOS, but this does not make IRQ 9 appear in the "Resources" menu (to allow you to reserve it for legacy ISA devices). However, in 98SE, IRQ 9 does seem to be dynamically allocated to another device when I poke around in Device Manager. But killing power management in the BIOS disables it in Windows, and I don't want to do that. For one, you can no longer turn off your machine by shutting down from Windows. I got to see a screen I hadn't seen in a long time: "It is now safe to turn off your computer."

After turning off power management, the Maui still isn't recognized in DOS or in Windows when I do a search for new hardware, PNP and non-PNP.

Not a big deal -- I'm willing to accept that this is a compatibility problem between the card and this motherboard and move on.

On some Super Socket 7 machines, the same issue is present. However, on many you can resolve it by disabling ACPI in the BIOS. Newer boards might not have this option though.

I stumbled across a similar issue when using a PCI SATA controller with a Roland MPU 401. The game Gateway would not work with this combination. Disabling ACPI resolved this issue for me. So have a look in the BIOS for this option 😀

And please test with DOS 6.22 rather than Windows 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

And please test with DOS 6.22 rather than Windows 😀

My initial testing was with MS-DOS 7.1 as well as 98SE, but I went ahead and booted with an MS-DOS 6.2 boot disk. After cycling through all of the BIOS settings, nothing changed.

I'll try with my SS7 build today.

IRQ 9 is reserved for use by ACPI as a control interrupt. It can't be changed to another IRQ. If the board has an option to switch between ACPI and APM, use APM mode and see if the IRQ is freed up. All my BX boards had an option to disable ACPI and free up IRQ 9, mostly because the early ACPI BIOS and supported OSes were buggy with it turned on.

NJRoadfan wrote:

IRQ 9 is reserved for use by ACPI as a control interrupt. It can't be changed to another IRQ. If the board has an option to switch between ACPI and APM, use APM mode and see if the IRQ is freed up. All my BX boards had an option to disable ACPI and free up IRQ 9, mostly because the early ACPI BIOS and supported OSes were buggy with it turned on.

Thanks for the info. I don't think that the Seattle has this ability to switch between ACPI and APM. These Intel boards are almost like OEMs in how little they let you play around with BIOS settings.

When Power Management is Enabled, you see these options:

Inactivity Timer [Off]
Hard Drive [Enabled]
VESA Video Power Down [Standby]
Fan Always On [No]

When Power Management is Disabled, you see none of those options.

That's about it for tweaking power settings on the Seattle.

I have Super Socket 7 boards that also don't let you disable ACPI. A bit odd that the card actually requires the interrupt, with the Roland MPU it's just a handful of games that actually require the interrupt.

I tested the card on my SS7 system (FIC VA-503+) and my 486 VLB system.

It does not work on the SS7 system, returning the same error as it did with the BX system. I fiddled with all of the power settings, reserved IRQ 9 for legacy, etc., and nothing worked.

It works without a hitch on my 486 VLB system. (Recall that it also worked on my other 486 board).

So, I really do think this has something to do with power management and IRQ 9. The Maui just insists upon having IRQ 9.

The option you need to look for is to enable / disable ACPI. Like in this image:

If your BIOS doesn't let you disable ACPI, there is not much you can do. I still find it puzzling that all your General MIDI games give you issue. If this card behaves like this, then that's a bit odd, as a Roland MPU only runs into issues with IRQ enabled games such as Gateway.

So simple games like Doom or Sam and Max, they also cause issues?

What you can do, and that fixed the Roland MPU issue with ACPI, is configure the MPU to use a different IRQ. So in Gateway you can then specify the IRQ, though some games are hard-coded for IRQ2. I hope the TB card lets you change the IRQ...

Thanks for the photo. No, I don't usually have problems with GM games; I have a problem with initializing this Maui sound card so that games recognize that I have a GM device.

For GM, I've never had resource problems using wavetable daughterboards. GM just works whether I use a DB or whether there is a wavetable built into the card.

Oh it doesn't even initialise? And there is no way to change the IRQ?

Right, it doesn't initialize. The only jumpers on the board are used to set the address of the MPU-401.

Not many options then. No config file to set the IRQ?

Also, on the 486, can you test a intelligent mode game, like Wing Commander or Space Quest III, see if you get sound. And can you hook up an external MIDI device?

Sorry, by MPU-401 I meant the address of the internal wavetable. There is a MIDI jack on the card, but it is a 9-pin D-SUB, and I don't have the cable. Pinout may be proprietary.

Is there a reason to test the internal wavetable with intelligent mode games when it works just fine on the 486 boards?

I'm kind of liking the idea of keeping in this 486 build. I'd have three different wavetables: Dream, GUS, and the Maui's ICS Wavefront (or whatever it's called).

Yea it would be good to know if the interface is intelligent mode compatible.

Maybe the card can't be used with anything more than a 386/486 - it's not uncommon. The Yamaha SW-20PC also has severe issues with anything above 486, *if* one is really really lucky maybe he can set it up on a p1 machine but anything above that is always troublesome without solution. Maybe the Maui also requires other memory addresses that used to be free on 486 machines but later mobos use them for components/functions.

Yea good point.

Yea good point.

In some motherboards (like Abit BE6-II) even with disabled ACPI, ISA cards can't use IRQ9, because manufacturer reserved this interrupt for SMBus. However, it's possible to reclaim IRQ9 - by modifying value in southbridge (in our case, the 82371AB/EB) internal register SMBHSTCFG. I used this program http://www.o3one.org/hwdocs/lsilogic/pci.exe to check if this fix is effective and yes, WSS in YMF719 could finally use IRQ9. But to make this fix permanent, proper BIOS modification have to be done.
http://www.intel.com/assets/pdf/datasheet/290562.pdf