which cards are you talking about? I have several sound cards in the same machine without issues you just have to configure them properly

- Maxi Sound Home Studio Pro 64
- Terratec EWS64 XL
- Audio Excel AV310
- AWE64 Gold
- AWE32

It would be 4 of the above 5, if not all 5. What they share in common, besides being ISA PnP, is that they all have SPDIF output but differ by FM output. I don't need them all working at the same time, but be able to initialise one as required using standard ports (220, 5, 1).

I've had two ISA PnP sound cards installed before, but even two was trickey when they decided to fight over resources. I've had more non-PnP cards installed without this issue of auto-assigning resources (plug-and-pray).

Rather than time-consuming trial-and-error, I was hoping there maybe some tool/ utility that could manage many ISA PnP cards...?

this may be a dumb question, but isnt it easier to just configure them statically without pnp? i mean hardware changes are not very likely to occur anyway?

Most ISA PnP cards don't have jumpers, so you have to soft-configure them.

As for having them working together - a 440BX box is new enough to have a PnP BIOS, which is where some fighting might come from. So, in the BIOS, set "Plug and Play OS" to "YES". What this does, is tell the BIOS not to set up your PnP cards, and to let the OS handle it. DOS doesn't do that automatically, you'll have to run configuration tools, but in this case, that's exactly what you want. Then just run your configurator tool before using the card you want. If you can't soft-unconfigure a card, you might need to cold boot to switch cards, though.

BTW, don't bother with the AWE32 and AWE64 in the same machine - one or the other, since they're so similar.

It does not even make sense, what do you hope to achieve by adding 4 of these sound cards at the same time? the EWS64 could easily replace all of them

jade_angel picked up on it from my 2nd post: I don't need these cards all working at the same time, but only to initialise them as required using standard ports/ resources.

The build is around various flavours of FM:

- OPL3 (YMF262, AWE32 CT3980)
- ESFM (Maxi Pro 64)
- Crystal FM (CS4236b, EWS64 XL)
- CMedia FM (AV310)
- CQM (AWE64)

These cards all have SPDIF output for the highest signal to noise ratio, so the build is around these aforementioned features. Although, I haven't tested FM through SPDIF on all these cards yet.

The Maxi Pro will be doing DAC->ADC via the daughtercard. Unless you're in a high EMI environment, I suspect you'd be well off to stay analog for that card.

^^ Do you know which audio blocks are doing DAC->ADC with the I/O daughterboard (Dream synth, Wavetable, ESFM)?

Have you any references to these conversions?

Well, the ES1868 only has an analog output. It does have a "DSP mode" for running a software modem, but I've never heard of that ever being used for SPDIF.

They could be piping the output to the daughtercard from the SAM9407 digitally (and likely are), but they're doing DAC conversion between the 9407 and the ES1868 with a PCM1718E I2S to analog IC as well as a PCM3001E codec. If the ES1868 was able to handle I2S I/O via DSP mode, I would have expected them to input directly with digital instead.

Cloudschatze did something similar
The MIDI General

Looking at his config may point you in the right direction

This can be done by using the ISAPNPTOOLS for DOS (latest is 1.27) by returning the cards to the WAITFORKEY state, see also http://web.archive.org/web/20130406155544/htt … pnp.conf.5.html

So you can release each card independently of its resources and configure only the card(s) you need.

This works right from the command line and it is not required to reboot.

@ chinny22:

I remember that thread - lots of great cards in that build. One thing with that config is that it needed all the cards working together using non-standard ports/ resources on some of them. You could getaway with that for General MIDI as most games that use GM are newer, and allow you to change resources in their sound setups to match.

My preference for this build is for using standard ports for widest compatibilty, using FM and PCM, for games that are even older than GM. I also don't need all these cards working together; just need to initialise them when I want to use them.

I did manage to get 6/7 sound cards working in this manner before: Re: WIP 1: Ezra-T slow-down machine, S370 industrial build...

However, only two cards were PnP in the above setup, and I'm looking for 4/5 PnP ISA cards working with what I have in mind.

@ elianda:

That looks very promising, and something I could test with what I have in mind (alongside what was suggested by jade_angel) - thanks.