No Sound in DOS :( \ VOGONS

No Sound in DOS :(

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First post, by guitarbloke

Posted on 2019-12-11, 00:17

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I've recently bought an old PC in an attempt to re-live my mispent youth 😀

However I'm having no luck getting sound in DOS games.

It's a Windows 98SE machine, and sound is perfect in anything I run within Windows.

But some of my games require me to drop out of Windows to DOS, and when I do, either the games launch with no audio, or they refuse to launch because they can't find an FM chip (I'm looking at you Duke Nukem 3D..).

The sound card is an AWE32 CT3670. I tried the Creative diagnostic tool in windows and it detects the card just fine and runs the audio tests successfully. It also gives me the following info:

A220
IRQ 5
DMA 1
H DMA 5

So my issue is only when I leave Windows to go to a DOS prompt.
Is the problem because I'm not running a dual boot system with 6.22 installed alongside Windows?

Any assistance would be gratfeully received!

Thanks in advance

Reply 1 of 7, by Shagittarius

Posted on 2019-12-11, 01:19

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You need to install the DOS drivers for the card. There should be a setup program for DOS on the installation diskettes. DOS doesn't know where to look for that Plug and Play card.

I see some drivers called 95DOSAPP.EXE... or maybe just running the sbbasic.exe setup...Here:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/sb-32-ct3670.html

This appears to be another topic also with the same issue:
[Help] Msdos Drivers - Creative Labs SB32 ISA CT3670

Reply 2 of 7, by BloodyCactus

Posted on 2019-12-11, 03:17

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if your booting dos you need to run diagnose to init the card.

--/\-[ Stu : Bloody Cactus :: [ https://bloodycactus.com :: http://kråketær.com ]-/\--

Reply 3 of 7, by dr_st

Posted on 2019-12-11, 09:24

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If it's indeed CT3670 (SB32 which is really a RAM-less AWE64) then it's PnP and should not need DIAGNOSE in pure DOS, only CTCM.

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Reply 4 of 7, by guitarbloke

Posted on 2019-12-11, 12:51

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Thank you so much guys - I'll download the drivers that Shagittarius linked and will have a go this evening.

It's been a long time since I dabbled with all of this stuff (about 23 years by my reckoning!), so I'm no doubt going to end up asking some silly questions along the way whilst I familiarise myself with things again... 😦

Reply 5 of 7, by guitarbloke

Posted on 2019-12-12, 11:41

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Shagittarius wrote:
You need to install the DOS drivers for the card. There should be a setup program for DOS on the installation diskettes. DOS d […]
Show full quote
You need to install the DOS drivers for the card. There should be a setup program for DOS on the installation diskettes. DOS doesn't know where to look for that Plug and Play card.

I see some drivers called 95DOSAPP.EXE... or maybe just running the sbbasic.exe setup...Here:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/sb-32-ct3670.html

This appears to be another topic also with the same issue:
[Help] Msdos Drivers - Creative Labs SB32 ISA CT3670

Thanks again for this info – it helped! I had to run the 95dosapp.exe and then add ctmbbs.exe to my startup. Now Duke3D works perfectly!

There are still some games where there’s no sound (Dune2, Lemmings and a few others). These are REMOVED versions, which I copied over from a USB stick, so I’m not sure if that might be something to do with it. On any games where I have the disks, things seem to be much better!

Last edited by DosFreak on 2023-12-05, 00:21. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 6 of 7, by dr_st

Posted on 2019-12-12, 12:25

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Lemmings has a known issue detecting the sound card if the CPU is too fast. Perhaps Dune2 as well?

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 7 of 7, by guitarbloke

Posted on 2019-12-12, 17:08

guitarbloke Offline

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dr_st wrote:
Lemmings has a known issue detecting the sound card if the CPU is too fast. Perhaps Dune2 as well?

Oh! That's good to know, I'll try disabling the cache and having another go!

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