Okay, a few more things left - swapping major IRQs:

In BIOS, change to:

Reset Configuration Data = Enabled

IRQ-5 Assigned to = Legacy ISA
IRQ-7 Assigned to = PCI/ ISA PnP

PCI Slot 3 Use IRQ = 7

Do the usual reboots by disabling Legacy Audio.
Use DMA 1 and IRQ 5 in Setupds as settings.

Nope, still "can not detect interrupt at irq5" ...

Okay, one final thing to try before I take a break and figure out if anything else has been missed:

In BIOS, change to:

Reset Configuration Data = Enabled
IRQ-5 Assigned to = PCI/ ISA PnP
IRQ-9 Assigned to = PCI/ ISA PnP
DMA 1 Assigned to = PCI/ ISA PnP

Try whatever settings in Setupds using S-IRQ and PC/PCI.

Some other things to try:
If you have changed DS.INI, try swapping it out for the default one.
If you have another 440BX board, try testing on there to eliminate the board.

No problem, I'm going to leave too

Sadly it didn't work either. I didn't touch DS.INI, and I do not own another BX board (I had another one, but it doesn't POST anymore, I checked with my POST card, and now it stops at some point, but I don't know why. I've got a third card with the sb link connector, but it's a socket 370, and I'm not really sure if it's a bx chipset (and also, it's deep in my pile of hardware, so ...)

I do have another ymf724 card, but I don't know if the 6 pin header next to the chip is an sb_link connector. It's not clearly written (and usually, sb_link has one missing pin). I also have a YMF744 but I don't really know if it works or not, plus it do not have what seems to be a sb_link header populated so I'll have to take the soldering iron out for that one

You mentioned that you updated the BIOS to enable larger hard disks... Try rolling back to an older BIOS as well. On rare occasions, this has helped me with other issues. Sometimes the latest BIOS breaks simple things...
Good luck.

Swap the orientation of the pci/pci cable on the sound card.

Yeah, I thought about that. Unfortunately, this means that I'll have to re install my windows again because my hdd is 40GB 🤣
But this was temporary anyways.

I will also try to swap the orientation if you want, but I don't think it would change anything. I'll do all that later however.

(Happy new year ^^)

I think there is still hope.

I went back to my 440BX board, and I was mistaken when I said that S-IRQ and PC/PCI are not available when the SB-Link cable isn't oriented correctly. In both cases, these settings are selectable. And I can reproduce your saving error. It goes back to when I mentioned my cables always have 180 degrees twist and not aligned straight.

I would suggest reorienting the cable, resetting BIOS settings to what we started with in this thread and follow through again, to be sure.

Happy New Year.

Oh this might also explain why in windows I saw no improvements with compatibility (such as duke nukem not working better when sfx are activated. It worked with wdm drivers though, but I don't like them because the sound become scratchy at some points, some sounds are cut and the XG synth isn't working anymore). With this, it may work without using the not so good driver 😁

As far as I'm aware, SB-Link isn't used by Windows drivers, unfortunately.

Oh 🙁

Anyways, I'm planning to have a sb awe64 for that computer in addition to the YMF724 (real opl3, xg fm under windows, sb pro compatibility, but also sb16 perfect compatibility and awe sounds 😀 )

I flipped the cable :

OH MY GOD IT DIDN'T COMPLAIN ABOUG IRQ 7 NOT RESPUNDING. 8BIT SOUND IS AVAILABLE AND I CAN FINALLY SAVE !!! I tried and it works perfectky ! Thank you very munch !! 😁

But what do I have to do to get the computer fully functionnal under windows again without screwing up everything ? Of course I'm going to edit msdos.sys and put lines in the bios to their previous values, but not all of them, right ?

This article should help with managing both SB and YMF7x4 in MS-DOS Avoid resource conflict between YMF 7 × 4 sound card and SB 16 [DOS]

Deksor wrote:

OH MY GOD IT DIDN'T COMPLAIN ABOUG IRQ 7 NOT RESPUNDING. 8BIT SOUND IS AVAILABLE AND I CAN FINALLY SAVE !!! I tried and it works perfectky ! Thank you very munch !! 😁

Good to hear, and thanks to Stretch for reminding me about my initial gut instincts on the 180 degrees cable twist.

Deksor wrote:

But what do I have to do to get the computer fully functionnal under windows again without screwing up everything ? Of course I'm going to edit msdos.sys and put lines in the bios to their previous values, but not all of them, right ?

Change these back if they were active when Windows was installed:

ACPI Function = Enabled
PM Control by APM =Yes

And if you use USB:

Assign IRQ for USB = Enabled

- Serial/ Parallel if you need them.

If you are going to reset MSDOS.SYS and go back to launching into DOS from Windows, you will need to update accordingly:

- DOSSTART.BAT
- AUTOEXEC.BAT
- .PIF files in Windows

Update also:

SET BLASTER="YOUR DOS SETTINGS FOR SBPRO 2"

PATH="YOUR YAMAHA DOS DIRECTORY"

- Copy SBPRO 2 versions of CT-VOICE.DRV and SBFMDRV.COM to "YOUR YAMAHA DOS DIRECTORY".

IIRC, in Windows, your Sound Blaster settings will be based around your PCI IRQ for YMF724, i.e. IRQ 5 for SB in your example for Windows (because you set that in BIOS for PCI Slot x), and IRQ 7 for SB in DOS. IIRC, this is because you have reserved IRQs for using S-IRQ. So remember to change game settings accordingly. Test these and see how you get on.

For speed sensitive games, you may look at 'downgrading' your CPU to a VIA C3 (Eztra/ Ezra-T) because they are great for this.

Yeah, the IRQ is 5 under windows and 7 under DOS. But since I like the XG synth, I usually set the midi address to GM 330 so I'm used to this (and I'll probably play under pure DOS only games that have problems under windows)

Also thanks for the VIA advice, but this isn't the real propose of that computer. I'm building it into the best achievable gaming machine of 1998. Some people already projects like these, but I found the sound part a little lacking in comparison to the rest (Sound blaster Live in every computer I saw). I really like the YMF724 and all it's capabilities, and even though that DOS support isn't really the most important thing of that machine, I do like to have my hardware fully functionnal (and for now, to play duke3D with proper sound, this is required). But like I said, I'd like to add a SB AWE 64 because it has some advantages that can stack upon the YMF724, and the ymf can compensate some of the disadvantages of the SB AWE64 (no sb pro compatibility, no real opl3 ...).

But I think I will also add a third sound card 🤣 : the Aureal3D Vortex 1 or 2 (I didn't really looked which one is the most time accurate of the two) for better 3D sound in windows. I don't know if 3 sound cards will cooperate, but I hope it will ! (I already managed to run 2 different sound cards in the same machine, so why not 3 ? Especially if some features of one are better than the other, I'll just need to desactivate it)

So yeah, the goal of that computer is to be able to run late DOS games/Windows 9x games maxed out to their best potential. For older games, I just have older machines ^^

Before I finish, I just have a few more questions : what are CT-VOICE and SBFMDRV.COM for ? Some games do need them ?
In order to initialize the sound card under dos, I need to add into autoexec.bat "setupds /s", right ?
I guess that the answer is yes because games crashed if I don't type this first ^^

Oh and again
Thank you very munch guys ! 😁

^^ For your questions: CT-VOICE.DRV & SBFMDRV.COM are needed by a very few games, and they are usually very old games as well. Usually, in AUTOEXEC.BAT:

SET SOUND="YOUR SOUND INSTALLED DIRECTORY WITH THESE FILES"

However, the games normally have these files in their own folders to use. SET SOUND will point the games to another directory if they are missing.

Your don't need to add Setupds /s in AUTOEXEC.BAT, you can just type from the command prompt, or add to your Windows PIF files, or add to DOSSTART.BAT if you exit to DOS from Windows. I personally just setup batch files and call them as and when I need to initialise the YMF.

Allright, so I tested it further with games, and I've heared something in Pinball Fantasies ...

There is some distortion in the sound ...

I recorded it : http://www.mediafire.com/file/2ec8g5b9yci4354 … asies_sound.ogg

I don't know if that is another configuration problem or if my card has a problem or also if that's just how the game is, but I definitely hear something. The sound of the game might have been too high for my laptop which I used to record this, but you can still hear it. Strangely, it seems that you can hear it in the left and right channel, but in the reality, I only hear that from my right speaker.

I don't have this kind of problem under windows games

Are you using Line Out or Speaker Out? Usually, there is a jumper on the soundcard to switch.

I tested Pinball Fantasies a while ago without issues. Although, my VIA C3 was slowed down to 486 speeds, and I was using headphones.

There maybe other BIOS settings you could change like 8bit/ 16bit IO wait states, or something equivalent.

Your slowed down CPU made me think "maybe my cpu is too fast ?". I disabled both caches and the problem disappeared ! Okay so this computer is just a tiny bit too fast for that game X) too bad ! But I was affraid to have another problem. Looks like it's not important. As I said, I wanted to test if it worked properly, not that I would play it on that computer later.
Setting the io wait states to 8 and 4 for 8 bit and 16 bit did nothing when the cpu had it's cache enabled though

Thank you again !