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cannot find PC Chips M863G V5.1C board audio drivers

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First post, by nathanieltolbert

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Hello again everyone. I am again at an impasse for an old board I am working with. This one is again an issue of finding drivers. I'm a little flummoxed but not for the same reason as the Packard Bell Sound Card. As the title says I have a PC Chips M863G V56.1C mATX board that just arrived that I am working with. The board boots perfectly, and I understand the caps issue, and I will keep a close eye on them. After getting Windows 98 installed I decided to go find the drivers for the board. Many thanks to the user here who uploaded all of the SIS drivers to an archive and placed them here for use. From that I was able to get the IDE and AGP driver as well as the LAN drivers. However, the audio chip for the board is not a SiS branded audio chip. Here's where the first step of obscurity starts for me. Multiple websites list the audio chip as a C-Media CMI9738 4 Channel Integrated Audio. I had a jump over to the C-Media website and the highest device they have a driver listed for is a CM8788 and is listed for dedicated sound cards rather than integrated audio chips. Looking around even Google is like, 'Do you mean C-Media CMI8738?' Now all of those driver guide sites claim they have drivers, but I don't really know if there is any accuracy to their claim. A long time ago I used one of those sites to get a driver from something and it wasn't the right driver. So, I have a couple questions. First, is the CMI9738 a real card or are all of these websites incorrect with their naming on the integrated audio. Second, if it's right, where can I find a driver for it, or if it's wrong what driver does it actually use? I used to have no issue finding drivers for everything that I work with, but I have found the more I move away from the mainstream common parts, like creative and ATI and nVidia, etc., as expected drivers are more difficult to procure. Any advice would be very much appreciated. I don't currently have a PCI Sound Card that I can install to bypass the built in audio. Thank you for taking a look and offering suggestions and help. I very much appreciate it.

Regards,

Nathan

Reply 1 of 6, by AmiSapphire

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This is likely on a PC Chips Driver CD starting from V8.11 or V8.12. Reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20020601103818/ht … .tw/driver.html

They should be on this CD image: https://archive.org/details/CDV823A

Site update: cwcyrix.duckdns.org -> cwcyrix.nsupdate.info due to the former no longer working.

Reply 2 of 6, by nathanieltolbert

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Wow! Thank you! I checked archive.org and I didn't find anything. I will see if those drivers work after I get it downloaded and installed. Thank you so much for the help AmiSapphire.

Reply 3 of 6, by nathanieltolbert

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The driver disk did indeed work. I don't know about the video graphics. Everything described it as SiS Mirage, and the drivers identified and installed something called SiS 315. Boy, are the graphics pathetically slow and bad. I didn't really expect much from an integrated graphics processor from 2003-2004, but it was even less than I had anticipated. Thank you again for the link to the ISO AmiSapphire. I really appreciate the help. My google-fu is just failing me so much these days. My brain doesn't work so well since I've been sheltering in place.

Reply 5 of 6, by nathanieltolbert

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Interestingly enough. It starts off saying C-Media Device and then the name changes the SiS 7002 PCI audio card. The Chipset for the audio is correctly identified as the C-Media CMI9738 and identifies the proper number of speaker outputs (4 channels) and works properly. However, there was nothing I could do to get the built in audio to work in DOS of course. Midi for the device goes through the Microsoft SoundFont GS setting. Sound quality it is okay, but nothing I would go out of my way to get working again now that I have worked with it and know that it's not very high quality.

Reply 6 of 6, by nathanieltolbert

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I really can't find a lot of information regarding this integrated sound chip. It was used a lot with the SiS 741GX chipset, and I have found another board other than the PC Chips with the same layout from ASUS; the ASUS K7S41GX. The Audio is labeled as AC97 Codec 5.1CH audio. With very little else listed. However, if you look carefully at the picture of the motherboard, you can see the c-media chip on it. Unfortunately it's too small to read clearly. It almost feels like they just wrote off the chip and went on their way. Makes you wonder if the audio quality was worse than the previous chip, the CMI8738 chip.

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