dr_st wrote on 2020-10-30, 08:51:

So this CTCU thing is a mystery to me. In all of my PnP Sound Blasters (an SB16, a Vibra16 and a couple of AWE64s) I never needed to run CTCU every time.

I only need to run CTCM in AUTOEXEC to initialize the card. CTCU only had to be run once to initialize and store the settings.

Why do I see people claim that you must run CTCU on every boot? Could it be that if CTCM is loaded in CONFIG.SYS (instead of being run in AUTOEXEC.BAT), then you have to also run CTCU? Then why do people load CTCM in CONFIG.SYS? I understand it is required if you want to use the CDROM interface (since AUTOEXEC is too late to load CDROM drivers). But if you are not using the CDROM interfaces on your SB, it seems like the simplest setup is just to run CTCM (and on AWE, also AWEUTIL) in AUTOEXEC, to initialize the card (optionally MIXERSET to initialize the volume).

As per Creative's readme files and description on the download page, which match my experience:
CTCU is only used to configure the card and writes the correct SET BLASTER... in autoexec.bat upon exit. It's not required to initialize the card.
CTCM "If the BIOS does not support ISA PnP there is a need for a tool to initialize the ISA card upon system startup. If the motherboard BIOS supports ISA PnP, which is usually the case for a 486 or Pentium, running CTCM.EXE is not necessary and may actually crash the system due to address conflict.". That is for PnP cards of course.