A little more info.

Hardware address for the card is d800 along with irq 10. I have disabled ultra dma mode in the bios to no effect.

-Edit- the drivers installed by the Sound Blaster Live CD are the VXD drivers. I don't know if that makes a difference.

Posting your config.sys and autoexec.bat would be useful. Somebody might spot something relevant .

That being said, my personal opinion about using an SB Live! in DOS on a motherboard with ISA slots is : don't bother .
In other words, use the Live! in Windows and get a decent ISA sound card with an OPL3 FM chip for DOS . It will :
- be more compatible (no EMM386.EXE required either)
- have decent sounding FM music (the Live! is rather crappy in that respect)
- likely be easier to get working

nathanieltolbert wrote on 2021-04-29, 01:06:

...
I found something regarding the SB Live! Value OEM cards not wanting to load the SBEINIT.COM file if a UIDE is loaded. Does this mean I can't run the board with Ultra DMA-33 running? Do I need to drop to DMA mode 1 or PIO mode 4? ...

Nope. UIDE means UIDE.SYS that can occupy XMS in the low 4MB region thus it prevents SBEINIT.COM to load.
http://home.mnet-online.de/willybilly/fdhelp- … d/base/uide.htm
Your problem has nothing to do with DMA /PIO modes.
As darry suggested above showing your config.sys/autoexec.bat could be useful since this problem usually means that some driver/TSR occupy XMS/EMS before SBEINIT.COM could use it.

darry wrote on 2021-04-29, 01:36:

Posting your config.sys and autoexec.bat would be useful. Somebody might spot something relevant . […]
Show full quote

Posting your config.sys and autoexec.bat would be useful. Somebody might spot something relevant .

That being said, my personal opinion about using an SB Live! in DOS on a motherboard with ISA slots is : don't bother .
In other words, use the Live! in Windows and get a decent ISA sound card with an OPL3 FM chip for DOS . It will :
- be more compatible (no EMM386.EXE required either)
- have decent sounding FM music (the Live! is rather crappy in that respect)
- likely be easier to get working

The thing is, I grew up with MT-32 and a Sound Canvas, so FM Synth doesn't hold the same Nostalgia for me as it does for others, and the majority of games I intend to play in DOS on the machine support General Midi or CD-Audio as they are much later releases. I did indeed look into a YMF744 card in the event I couldn't get this one working. I have put that card in a machine I gave to someone recently and it's support in Windows was decent and the audio was supported in DOS well enough. The vast majority of software being used on this machine will be Windows 98, and as is the Live! card is a pretty decent Windows sound card.

I did figure out (I think) what was causing the issue, and it's something I have never changed in all the years I have been using a computer. There was a setting in the BIOS called 15-16MB memory hole address. It was enabled. I was under the impression that it was normally set to disabled. So I changed it to that, and the error message went away. And the card now successfully works in DOS. But I am curious as to what the 15-16MB memory hole address does. I looked it up and it said something about reserving 1MB of RAM for ISA cards in the lower memory that need it, so I can see how that would cause the problem, but it didn't really go into detail as to what it really did.

Falcosoft wrote on 2021-04-29, 04:14:

Nope. UIDE means UIDE.SYS that can occupy XMS in the low 4MB region thus it prevents SBEINIT.COM to load. http://home.mnet-onli […]
Show full quote

nathanieltolbert wrote on 2021-04-29, 01:06:

...
I found something regarding the SB Live! Value OEM cards not wanting to load the SBEINIT.COM file if a UIDE is loaded. Does this mean I can't run the board with Ultra DMA-33 running? Do I need to drop to DMA mode 1 or PIO mode 4? ...

Nope. UIDE means UIDE.SYS that can occupy XMS in the low 4MB region thus it prevents SBEINIT.COM to load.
http://home.mnet-online.de/willybilly/fdhelp- … d/base/uide.htm
Your problem has nothing to do with DMA /PIO modes.
As darry suggested above showing your config.sys/autoexec.bat could be useful since this problem usually means that some driver/TSR occupy XMS/EMS before SBEINIT.COM could use it.

Ahh. So it's a specific program. Thank you for that. I was unaware.

nathanieltolbert wrote on 2021-04-29, 16:56:

I did figure out (I think) what was causing the issue, and it's something I have never changed in all the years I have been using a computer. There was a setting in the BIOS called 15-16MB memory hole address. It was enabled. I was under the impression that it was normally set to disabled. So I changed it to that, and the error message went away. And the card now successfully works in DOS. But I am curious as to what the 15-16MB memory hole address does. I looked it up and it said something about reserving 1MB of RAM for ISA cards in the lower memory that need it, so I can see how that would cause the problem, but it didn't really go into detail as to what it really did.

I think you will find that setting also effectively limits the available RAM to 16 MB, despite what the name implies. Of course, most DOS games don't require more than 16 MB of RAM, so you're unlikely to notice any difference in DOS – but you should check what Windows thinks of it.

You can further experiment with this by leaving the memory hole disabled in the BIOS and then using HIMEMX to limit your available RAM to 16 MB.

Jorpho wrote on 2021-04-29, 17:17:

You can further experiment with this by leaving the memory hole disabled in the BIOS and then using HIMEMX to limit your available RAM to 16 MB.

HIMEMX is part of FreeDOS, right? I haven't had much of a chance to work with that before.

You can easily download HIMEMX separately from https://www.japheth.de/ .

Jorpho wrote on 2021-04-29, 18:29:

You can easily download HIMEMX separately from https://www.japheth.de/ .

Okay, thank you for the link. Just to confirm, this won't cause any issues with Windows 98 at all?

It seems people regularly use HIMEMX when they need to run Windows 98 on a machine with too much RAM, so I doubt it.

Even if it does cause issues, the solution then would be to stop using it..?