Hi,

I have been trying to get Wing Commander: Privateer running on a system with FreeDOS 1.3. The game works perfectly if I disable all sound in the setup program, but refuses to launch with any sound card specified either as FM music or digitised sound, giving the error message 'Your Privateer sound configuration is incorrect'. I have tried using both ESS' original drivers for the ES1869 and UNISOUND 0.80/0.81. The BLASTER environment variable is set to 'A220 I5 T4 D1 H5 P330'.

Interestingly, other games like System Shock and Duke Nukem 3D do work with sound when the system is first booted, but after attempting to run WC: Privateer with sound once, those games cannot detect the sound card either until a power cycle or hard reset.

Also interesting is that Quake 1.08 (from Phil's benchmark pack) does not like to run on the Am486DX2-80 (it crashes with a floating point exception) but does run on an Am5x86 -P75 as a drop-in replacement.

I have DOS loaded high with 'DOS=HIGH,UMB' in fdconfig.sys and JEMM386 loaded with the 'RAM' option. Mouse driver is CTMOUSE (loaded high) and CD driver is UDVD2+ SHSUCDX (also loaded high)

System specs:

Octek Hippo 15 motherboard with 256KB L2 cache
Am486DX2-80 NV8T running @ 66 MHz CPU
16MB stick of FPM RAM
Diamond SPEEDSTAR 24 (Tseng ET4000AX core) with rev 5.00 VBIOS video card
3com 3c509-TPO NIC
Generic ESS AudioDrive ES1869FC based sound card/Creative AWE64 Value
Transcend 8GB CF card in Startech CF-IDE adapter as Primary master
LG IDE DVD drive as Primary slave
3.5 inch Panasonic 1.44MB floppy drive
Seasonic G-360 PSU with ATX-AT adapter

I have tried this with both an ES1869-based sound card and a genuine Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Value card, which gives the same error message.

Picture of the system is attached below. Thanks to anyone who can help.