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Issues with Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold in Windows98

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First post, by gaffa2002

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Hello everyone,
After my frustrating attempt to upgrade my PCI video card on my SS7 system, I finally gave up and ended up finding a motherboard with both ISA and AGP slots, the Epox ep-7kxa. It came with a 750mhz Athlon classic and an Geforce 4 MX4000 AGP (not what I'd like to have but it works for now).
System is running good, except for a little problem: My AWE64 Gold ISA card is not fully working on Windows 98. I can only hear MIDI music, but cannot play sound effects (it says there is no device to reproduce sounds), so I can't even open wav files or test any sound. Games also have no sound and dxdiag only lists the music tab.
This ISA card was working fine without any extra drivers on my previous system (K6-2 450mhz with V72MA motherboard). Already tried disabling the onboard sound and legacy sound support in BIOS but still didn't work.

Anyone has any idea of what could I be missing here? Is there any special BIOS configuration I need to do in order to make it work?

Thanks in advance 😀

LO-RES, HI-FUN

My DOS/ Win98 PC specs

EP-7KXA Motherboard
Athlon Thunderbird 750mhz
256Mb PC100 RAM
Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP (128 bit)
Sound Blaster AWE 64 CT4500 (ISA)
32GB HDD

Reply 1 of 4, by cyclone3d

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What drivers / software did you install for the AWE64?

Do you have the motherboard drivers installed? Latest motherboard BIOS?

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 2 of 4, by pentiumspeed

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Again this is 686A south bridge might give you issues. Back in of the day, I couldn't find a athlon board without any 686 series, and not VIA. I was not aware of nforce series until too late. 🙁
This move prompted me to get off the via motherboard I had to optiplex 780 few years after battling with crashes and funny noises the Asus socket A motherboard based on VIA.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 4 of 4, by gaffa2002

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TechieDude wrote on 2020-04-25, 00:46:

It sounds like conflicting IRQs or something. Have you checked Device Manager?

Yes, no warnings there. Will try updating bios as suggested by cyclone3d. This mobo has an older bios version that has some issues like causing general protection fault error if I use an hdd larger than 36gb so I have to update it anyways.

As for the drivers, I installed VIA 4 in 1 chipset drivers and also the ones at the AWE64 gold installation CD available at vogonsdrivers. Those always worked for me while using the older motherboard.
Edit:Updated bios to latest version, still same issue.
Edit 2: Nevermind, it worked now. Issue was on the drivers...had to install one from TheMan’s sound blaster driver compilation CD (win9x ones).
Next step is to find a decent videocard for it, the MX4000 that came together with it is the worst possible model (32 bit memory bus)

LO-RES, HI-FUN

My DOS/ Win98 PC specs

EP-7KXA Motherboard
Athlon Thunderbird 750mhz
256Mb PC100 RAM
Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP (128 bit)
Sound Blaster AWE 64 CT4500 (ISA)
32GB HDD

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