First post, by Gahhhrrrlic
So what started as me thinking my sound card wasn't working has evolved into a BIOS problem - therefore I've diverged into a separate thread so as not to confuse the issue.
My 430VX chipset computer (Shuttle HOT-557) has an Award BIOS in it.. probably one of one the earlier revisions - very similar to the one in this video with a couple fewer features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gic3pjDp82o
My computer itself, as mentioned in another thread, has a lot of stuff in it:
Serial port panel from MB header (2 ports)
Parallel port panel from MB header
USB panel from MB header (PCI device)
ATI 3D Rage II PCI
NIC PCI
ISA Modem
ISA SB16 w/ Dreamblaster daughter card
Always IN-2000 ISA SCSI card
So while I did have all this stuff working fine at one point, I've gone and lost it now because i can't recall what I did but now there is a conflict in resourcing that is preventing all my cards from being detected properly and I think it's rooted in the BIOS.
Basically my current symptom is that my SB16 card cannot be found at 220H, despite the jumpers being set to that address. I believe that the BIOS is overriding resource management and writing something else to that address. Under PNP/PCI Configuration I tried both manual and auto modes and it doesn't seem to matter. I know the card works because it did detect before and worked just fine. This is most definitely a resource issue but unlike my 386, which doesn't care what I set the jumpers to, this BIOS seems to want to change my decisions as it sees fit and then things don't work.
My question is fairly open ended since I don't know what else to try at this point but I'm just putting it out to everyone, what should I do to try to fix this? I'd like to assign my own IRQs and stuff but I don't think I can do that the same way I did for my 386 - it just seems to get ignored. Whatever is using 220H for example is blocking my sound card but I don't know how to reserve that address specifically for my sound card (BTW, none of the other common addresses work either). With 3 ISA cards, all of which I think are non-PNP, I'm not sure how to force the computer to give them priority over everything else so that they get properly detected. Having said that, my other 2 ISA cards (modem/SCSI adapter) seem to be detected fine because I have access to my hard drive and Win95 is able to set up my modem. It's just hit and miss whether I get my sound card showing up in either DOS's Diagnose.exe or in the Win95 device manager.