What are you actually selecting in Dooms setup program?

kolderman wrote on 2020-05-23, 05:14:

What are you actually selecting in Dooms setup program?

OK so I'm selecting for music: Port 220 ( I think my sound card said it uses port 220)
for sound fx: Port 220, IRQ 7, Available DMA Channels 1 (default), number of digital channels three (default)

After you run the SB Live! config utility run the SET command.
There should be a BLASTER= environment variable. Can you post the settings. Those should be what you pick.

Why do you select IRQ 7 when the sound card is set to 9? Wrong IRQ will cause the system to freeze.

If you're still using the Dell Dimension V400 then the onboard YMF724 will be a much better option for DOS gaming.

For the Live! you will need two IRQs, one PCI IRQ and one for Sound Blaster emulation. Reserve the IRQ for the emulation in the BIOS so no other device steals it.

derSammler wrote on 2020-05-23, 07:00:

Why do you select IRQ 7 when the sound card is set to 9? Wrong IRQ will cause the system to freeze.

I don't get the option on Doom for IRQ 9, and on the sound blaster it picks an IRQ itself.

Kamerat wrote on 2020-05-23, 07:16:

If you're still using the Dell Dimension V400 then the onboard YMF724 will be a much better option for DOS gaming.

For the Live! you will need two IRQs, one PCI IRQ and one for Sound Blaster emulation. Reserve the IRQ for the emulation in the BIOS so no other device steals it.

I'm happy you remember that I have a Dell V400. I use that for windows 98, but this is a different computer that is only dos. technically it's an HP Vextra XM2 but I've swapped many parts in and out of it.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-23, 05:53:

After you run the SB Live! config utility run the SET command.
There should be a BLASTER= environment variable. Can you post the settings. Those should be what you pick.

ok the config utility gives me:

PCI Hardware: Port=FCE0 IRQ=9
SB16 Emulation: Port=220 IRQ=7 DMA=1, 5
MPU-401 (midi) emulation: Port=330
Adlib Emulation: Port=388

after the set command:
BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6

I hope this helps

thenix wrote on 2020-05-23, 15:15:

I'm happy you remember that I have a Dell V400. I use that for windows 98, but this is a different computer that is only dos. technically it's an HP Vextra XM2 but I've swapped many parts in and out of it.

If it's still got a 486 installed I wouldn't even bother getting it to work in that machine as the Sound Blaster emulation of the Live! is a resource hog. You also have to make sure that the system supports NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupts).

You should really get yourself an ISA Sound Card for this computer.

Kamerat wrote on 2020-05-23, 16:49:

thenix wrote on 2020-05-23, 15:15:

I'm happy you remember that I have a Dell V400. I use that for windows 98, but this is a different computer that is only dos. technically it's an HP Vextra XM2 but I've swapped many parts in and out of it.

If it's still got a 486 installed I wouldn't even bother getting it to work in that machine as the Sound Blaster emulation of the Live! is a resource hog. You also have to make sure that the system supports NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupts).

You should really get yourself an ISA Sound Card for this computer.

do you have any suggestions for a general card? doesn't have to be top of the line or whatever just something that'll give me sound and midi and all that.

Ok so part of the confusion is there is an actual irq (9) and then there is another irq (7) used for Sound Blaster emulation.
So the IRQ 7 is what you should tell the game. But the issue here as others have stated is that you have to use both this card and a software program that pretends to be a Sound Blaster 16 and converts back and forth.
I'd buy either some form of a Sound Blaster 16, or a compatible. I like the ESS ES1688.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-23, 18:03:

Ok so part of the confusion is there is an actual irq (9) and then there is another irq (7) used for Sound Blaster emulation.
So the IRQ 7 is what you should tell the game. But the issue here as others have stated is that you have to use both this card and a software program that pretends to be a Sound Blaster 16 and converts back and forth.
I'd buy either some form of a Sound Blaster 16, or a compatible. I like the ESS ES1688.

For the sake of trying to use what I have since it could take 3 weeks for another card to ship to me, let's look at what I got. So on the game I can't select IRQ 9 as an option, only IRQ 7 (and a few other options) Should I fix one of the initialization files to tell sound blaster to use IRQ 7 instead of 9?

You said that it has BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
That means, as far as your games are concerned, the IRQ is 7.
I'm confused why the games keep asking you for these settings rather than reading from the BLASTER variable.
Could you try a different game? How about Wacky Wheels?

jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-05-23, 18:41:

You said that it has BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6 That means, as far as your games are concerned, the IRQ is 7. I'm confused wh […]
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You said that it has BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
That means, as far as your games are concerned, the IRQ is 7.
I'm confused why the games keep asking you for these settings rather than reading from the BLASTER variable.
Could you try a different game? How about Wacky Wheels?

I'll try Wacky Wheels specifically. I also have Wing Commander loaded up. It doesn't play music at all saying I don't have EMM enabled (although I do but whatever it also plays way too fast)

well so it looks like Wacky Wheels was put out on cd and I can't fit it on a floppy so I can't use it. I got where in time is carmen sandiego but I think it only uses a beeper speaker. Well I'll find something eventually.

So I loaded up Wolfenstein 3d and in the options for sound it just doesn't let me pick anything other than pc speaker. I'm starting to think this card just isn't going to work for this.

yeah so the driver when I initialize it looks like it's setting up the 16 bit emulator, but when I try to use it on anything including the SBEGO.EXE to test it out, it says it can't find it.

Yeah, I wish I had more ideas. But if there were a PCI version of a Sound Blaster that worked without trouble like this, we wouldn't be scrounging around for ISA cards and ISA capable motherboards...
As others have pointed out there is a bit of a time disconnect here and that could be part of your problems. Nobody put a PCI sound card in a 486. PCI sound cards were more in the Pentium III/4 time frame. It could be that the emulation software is just too much for a 486.

Could also be PCI bus issues (much older PCI revision than the infamously picky SBLive wants - perhaps similar to the "SBLive vs Via chipset" issues back in the day).

However there's potentially a simpler explanation: IRQ7 was default for Soundblaster in XT days because IRQ5 was used by HDC. Once AT became the norm, the HDC moved up to IRQ 14/15 and 5 was preferred. Why? Because 7 was also used by the parallel port. Do you have a parallel port on this system? Is it disabled? If not, try disabling it, or changing SB DOS IRQ from 7 to 5.