You install the drivers through the device manager!

for both operating systems? xp did it automatically tho, or is xp not compatible at all?

Never used in under XP, there are much better cards for that.

Vortex 2 is all about A3D which are Windows 9x era games.

O gotcha so after installing Aureal A3D Support Files v3.12 under 98 i have to find the driver under device manager and i found other sites stating that xp is a no go for this card, so what im going to do is pull the card and throw it in my 98 only build then.

You just unpack the driver to somewhere on your Windows 98 machine.

You can get the driver from here: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/aureal-vortex-2.html or from the VOGONS driver archive.

Then you go to device manager and update the drivers.

And if you get an error about PCI something grab the INF tweaks and use the one that disables bus detection.
Just replace it in the driver folder and install them again.

AFAIK Aureal never released NT drivers so in 2k and XP all you get is basic audio but no A3D or other hardware acceleration.

I recently got one of those (in fact it seems that it's the exact same card). I'm more interested in its DOS compatibility (since I've read conflicting reports) and will be testing, perhaps even today. I may also test it in 98SE sometime soon.

Which driver is recommended for DOS?

The DOS driver comes with the windows one, you just need to load high au30dos.com and set the setblaster variable, it might actually add that automatically on installation.
I had set up phils dos mode starter pack beforehand so i had to add both of these lines myself, i got it to work having last touched DOS when i was 7 or 8 (close to 20 years ago) so it wasn't exactly hard.

Works as a soundblaster pro and i guess the mpu401/wavetable should work too but i don't have a device to test that yet. Under Windows you get a softsynth if you don't have a midi device, sounds quite good.

I've tried the DOS driver from this post Aureal Vortex 2 / TB Santa Cruz aka Videologic Sonic Fury unter DOS (the one modified to take the INIFILEDIR env variable instead of the default). It hangs when loaded from either the command line or from autoexec.bat and needs hard reboot. The version is 2.007

Will try this one next https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … 445&menustate=0

OK here are my results from testing pure DOS compatibility of this Turtle Beach Vortex Aureal 2 sound card with a variety of systems. All tests were done with the card + Dreamblaster S1 daughterboard under MS-DOS 6.22 with the au3dos driver modified to accept the INIFILEDIR variable, and EMM386 loaded.

1. 440BX board (Abit BH6), celeron 300A/450
-Doom: set sound to SB/SB, game works well with music+SFX but hangs at exit, needs hard reboot; set sound to GM/SB, game works well with awesome music and regular SFX, hangs at exit same as previous
-Duke3d: sound SB/SB works well for SFX+music; set sound to GM/SB works well for SFX+music (awesome music through Dreamblaster)
-Dune2: set for SB, music+SFX+voice all work
forgot to test X-wing on this board but don't expect any surprises

2. i815 board, forgot which CPU (think P3-933)
-Doom: music+SFX work with both SB/SB and GM/SB options
-Duke3d: does not run at all; setup.exe and duke3d.exe give dos4gw error; doesn't even work with dos32a.exe
EDIT: please ignore above, game files became corrupted. All sound works flawlessly after reinstalling Duke3D.
-Dune2: music, voice and SFX work well when set to SB
-X-wing: music, voice and SFX work well both when set to SB/SB and to GM/SB

3. i850 board, P4-1.8 (Willamette socker423); note: this is the only board of the lot that refuses to assign the card IRQ5, and gives it IRQ7 no matter in which PCI slot I placed it
-Doom: works when set to SB/SB; music is OK but SFX are REALLY, REALLY BAD. They sound like they have an immense amount of reverb/echo and that makes each previous sound hang around and be repeated forever. In GM/SB mode again music works well but SFX have the same weirdness.
-Duke3d: does not run at all, same problem as with the previous board. On this particular i850 board, Duke ran well with a YMF724 card+SB-Link.
EDIT: please ignore above, game files became corrupted. All sound works flawlessly after reinstalling Duke3D.
-Dune2: all music, SFX and voice work well in SB mode.
-X-wing: music, SFX and voice all work well in both SB/SB and GM/SB mode.

4. i848 board, P4-2.66GHz
-Doom music+SFX all work well in both SB/SB and GM/SB modes
-Duke3d does not ran at all, same problem as with previous 2 boards
EDIT: please ignore above, game files became corrupted. All sound works flawlessly after reinstalling Duke3D.
-Dune2 music+SFX+voice all work well with SB mode.
-X-wing: music+SFX+voice all work well in both SB/SB and GM/SB modes

I could not test anything on the i845 board. For some reason, the au30dos.com driver fails to initialize either from the CLI or from autoexec.bat and hangs the computer requiring a hard reboot.

For the sake of completeness, I have pulled out one of my Athlon/KT133A setups as well to test the Aureal Vortex 2 in pure DOS, again with Dreamblaster S1 daughterboard attached.

Abit KT7A, chipset KT133A, Athlon 1GHz, MS-DOS 6.22, same DOS driver for the Aureal card as in previous tests. IRQ5 assigned to the specific PCI slot in BIOS. Boots and messages on screen say that the card was initialized succesfully.

HOWEVER,

1. Doom: using SB/SB setup, no sound at all. No music, no SFX. Using GM/SB I hear the MIDI music but no SFX.

2. Dune2: first note, the setup program appears to run fine but hangs at exit, when "writing configuration file" and requires hard reboot. Dunno if it actually writes the config file at all. It was already configured for SB from my previous tests though. The game runs but with no sound at all. No music, no SFX, no voice.

3. X-wing: regardless of what sound options are chosen, no sound at all.

It appears that this card isn't compatible with the KT133A chipset. The only game where I got any sound at all was Doom using the hardware MIDI board attached/

IRQ5 assigned to the specific PCI slot in BIOS.

That is likely Your problem. IRQ5 what You want the SB Dos emulation to use.

An example of this would be my sblive that uses PCI IRQ10 or 11, but ISA SB settings of IRQ5, LOW DMA 1, HIGH DMA 5, and so on.

Reserve IRQ5 for non PNP/ISA devices.

Imperious wrote:

That is likely Your problem. IRQ5 what You want the SB Dos emulation to use. […]
Show full quote

IRQ5 assigned to the specific PCI slot in BIOS.

That is likely Your problem. IRQ5 what You want the SB Dos emulation to use.

An example of this would be my sblive that uses PCI IRQ10 or 11, but ISA SB settings of IRQ5, LOW DMA 1, HIGH DMA 5, and so on.

Reserve IRQ5 for non PNP/ISA devices.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. IRQ5 is assigned to the PCI slot in which the Aureal card is plugged in. Thus IRQ5 goes to the Aureal card. Same setting for IRQ that is used by the driver. Works like that on every other motherboard I've tried (yes, IRQ5 assigned to the card and IRQ5 used for emulation; works great for all Intel chipsets; if the card is assigned a different IRQ than the one used for emulation then sound doesn't work at all, period). This one however seems to be the exception.

Interesting. I've never yet assigned an IRQ to a sound card in the bios. None of my systems pre my P4P800dlx have intel chipsets, so that might explain it.

I usually just reserve IRQ 5, DMA 1 and 5 as Legacy ISA and that just works provided set blaster statement is the same.

Yeah, on most post-440BX Intel chipset BIOSes there's no such thing as "assign IRQ to legacy ISA"; you can at most disable an IRQ to be assigned to anything at all, and hope that something will be able to somehow use it without the BIOS knowing. Also on many motherboards with Intel chipsets from this era you can set the individual IRQ lines going to various slots to either auto assign, or assign specific IRQ levels. For the sound tests I usually choose a PCI slot where the IRQ line isn't shared with anything else, put the card there, verify in BIOS that the card is seen as present in the slot, and assign it the IRQ I want.

Just to make sure it wasn't the motherboard at fault, I tried another KT133A motherboard that I have (a Chaintech, unknown model, with Athlon 1.5GHz).

I got the exact same results as with the Abit KT7A. GM music works in Doom, Duke3D etc (through the Deamblaster S1 daughterboard). But the SB emulation does not work at all in any games for either music, SFX or voice. I actually did quite a bit of testing with various IRQs assigned to the card.

However, I ended up doing something that looked silly but in fact worked. I set the card to get IRQ5 in BIOS, but IRQ7 in the driver. Also reserver IRQ7 in BIOS for legacy ISA. And that got the SB emulation working. Now I get SB sounds/music.voice in games. It's counter-intuitive but works.

Good You got it working.

How about trying not assigning the card an IRQ at all, then just reserve IRQ5 (IRQ7 if You want)for Legacy ISA and load the driver in Autoexec.bat,
it should still work. If so then it would verify the way I set it up always in my SIS based 486 and Abit KT7 Raid and also Epox MVP3G5 motherboards.

I also had this card (Aureal Vortex 2) working perfectly in my Asus P4P800dlx in Real Dos and the IRQ the bios assigned to the card was about IRQ10 but the
driver still loaded it as IRQ5 for Soundblaster emulation. I did reserve IRQ5 for that to work.

Imperious wrote:

Good You got it working. […]
Show full quote

Good You got it working.

How about trying not assigning the card an IRQ at all, then just reserve IRQ5 (IRQ7 if You want)for Legacy ISA and load the driver in Autoexec.bat,
it should still work. If so then it would verify the way I set it up always in my SIS based 486 and Abit KT7 Raid and also Epox MVP3G5 motherboards.

I also had this card (Aureal Vortex 2) working perfectly in my Asus P4P800dlx in Real Dos and the IRQ the bios assigned to the card was about IRQ10 but the
driver still loaded it as IRQ5 for Soundblaster emulation. I did reserve IRQ5 for that to work.

Yup, after writing the above post I went back and that's exactly what I did. I released in BIOS all IRQs except for IRQ5 which I reserved for legacy ISA, then just booted; the card got IRQ11, but in driver it's set for IRQ5. Games set to IRQ5 work very well. This is contrary to what happens on Intel chipset motherboards, where sound doesn't work unless the card IRQ and the emulated IRQ are the same.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

You just unpack the driver to somewhere on your Windows 98 machine.

You can get the driver from here: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/aureal-vortex-2.html or from the VOGONS driver archive.

Then you go to device manager and update the drivers.

Thinks i got the drivers working perfectly on my gateway, unreal gold sounds amazing with my vortex 2 and looks amazing with my voodoo3 2000