So I finished my long planned voodoo5/vortex2 build today. By far and away the biggest pain was the Diamond Monster II MX300. I am obviously not the first person to encounter this, but I thought the solution might be of interest, it might save you the 4 hours it took me.

First the problem.

- I have the original driver CD (1.02), so I installed that.
- When the drivers are loading on reboot, it gets to the SB Pro emulation and crashes.
- Bit of searching, some dim memories from my late teens came to bear, and I remembered something about reserving legacy IRQs in the BIOS. 5 and 7 reserved, done.
- The driver install finishes this time, but when the Win98 desktop finally appears, there is an error message saying the card is not installed or malfunctioning.
- Bit more searching, maybe the wrong PCI slot. I had it in the fifth (last). I moved it up to the fourth, and low and behold, windows starts, no error message, and I have a little "music note" icon in the system tray.
- I open that, and yep a nice little Diamond configuration utility. I play around a bit, do the basic speaker test which works, nice.
- Then I go into the A3D demo and run one and BOOM. Garbage across the screen, I thought it fried my V5 for a second. Reboot and no it was just the card.

Deep breath.

- Bit more searching. OK maybe use the reference Aureal Vortex2 drivers. Go to Phil's and download the drivers he recommends for gaming, 2041.
- Totally uninstall any Diamond crap and then install these reference drivers on a relatively clean slate.
- Reboot and ... wow everything works. Nice windows logon sound. Speaker test. And the A3D demo works! Cool! It comes with it's own little tray icon that looks like [A].
- But I still want to get the Diamond software installed...I don't know for sure but I suspect the SPDIF daughterboard probably needs the Diamond drivers to enable it.
- Can I install the Diamond drivers over the top of the Aureal ones and have them work together nicely?

Fast forward.

- Nope. The Diamond installer totally removes the existing drivers and deceives and re-installs the ones it comes with.

*Light bulb*

- Ones it comes with?
- Look into the MX300 install CD. All comes down to one directory called Win9x.
- It appears to a directory mixing up Diamond drivers and programs with the stock Aureal ones. They basically fatpakked the reference Vortex drivers into their own install directory.
- Now what if...I just copied the reference drivers into that directory, overwriting any common files?
- So that when the Monster installer tries to install the Aureal drivers, it installs the reference ones instead? Can't hurt to give it a try after all this.

Fast forward again.

- It worked! I now have a fully functioning MX300 using reference Aureal drivers combined with Diamond's own drivers and add-ons...and I get the Diamond tray icon...and the A3D demos work!
- Just to be sure...I fire up UT and it still works. The graphics and sound are amazing with that V5/A3D2 combo.

I need a drink.