First post, by LunarG
- Rank
- Oldbie
Right. Dramatic headline, but here goes:
I have a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold in my K6-3 system. It sounds just fine for wave playback, so no issues there. The problem is that half the time I boot the system, I get an error message about not being able to load sound font bank. I check the sound font util, and it shows the card as having 0KB of memory. The other half (or so) times, it gives no error message and shows up as having 2048KB or memory. Being an AWE64 Gold, it should have 4096KB or memory, so something is clearly not right.
I bought a SIMMCONN a longish while ago, and due to real life(TM) I've not had a chance to try it out yet. I was hoping that adding some memory via SIMMCONN might circumvent the issues with the onboard memory being finicky. But as it turns out, with every memory module I've tried, the SIMMCONN does exactly zip, zero, nada.
So I figured I'd try the diagnose util via MS-DOS (it's a Win98se system), but it simply doesn't start. As soon as I try launching the diagnose util, the system just appears to freeze up.
So... Do I happen to have a permanently faulty AWE64 Gold? I mean, when it boots with 2MB of memory, the midi playback is just fine. I actually quite like the punchiness of the 2meg creative soundfont. But I was hoping to be able to play around with different sound fonts, and perhaps even try doing some midi sequencing on it.
Any suggestions as to what to try next?
If I end up having to abandon it, I guess that's a great excuse to use my XG card instead.
WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.