Hi, all. I recently built a retro gaming PC, with a Pentium 2 and a Soundblaster 16 PnP Value CT2770. It has worked great so far with FM synthesis music, as well as digital sound effects. Yesterday I hooked up an IDE CD-ROM drive to it and decided to play some games that require CDs.

I first made sure to have the CD-IN connector on the soundcard connected to the CD audio connector on the IDE drive. Then I fired up a random audio CD under Win98. It played just fine!

So I thought to install Descent 2 and enjoy the glorious Redbook soundtrack it comes with. It also worked fine under Win98! Seeing as this was a success so far, I assumed the game would work fine under DOS too. So I rebooted and chose not to boot into Win98, but just to the DOS prompt. I fired up the Descent 2 setup program. Whenever I start the setup for Descent 2, the CD-ROM starts spinning, indicating that it does indeed see it. But when choosing the "Test Redbook Audio" setting, there is no sound coming out of it, and the CD doesn't spin any faster/slower.

A similar problem also happens with Rayman. When starting up the game, it just instantly opens the CD tray, asking for the Rayman CD-ROM, whereas on Win98 the sound plays fine.

At first I thought this might be an incorrect setting in the DOS drivers, but later on I played the audio on the CD with Creative's PLAY.EXE, and it was working just fine. Not only this, but I later installed Quake and Tempest 2000, and they loaded up the soundtrack from CD just fine.

I am using VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:MSCD001 for the CD-ROM driver, and have the following soundcard setup in my AUTOEXEC.BAT:

1SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
2SET SOUND=C:\SB16
3LH C:\SB16\DIAGNOSE.EXE /S
4LH C:\SB16\MIXERSET.EXE /MA:225;0 /BA:220;0 /CD:225;0 /Q
5MSCDEX /D:MSCD001

I am not sure what could be causing this. There are not too many games that I tested on CD so far, but out of all of them, it is only Descent 2 and Rayman which don't play ball with the CD audio. What could be going on here?