So, I recently picked up a fully functional Packard Bell PB5310 desktop with the original monitor and keyboard. It has a Pentium 75Mhz, 40MB EDO (upgraded to 72MB), 1MB CL-GD5430 (upgraded to 2MB) onboard video, ~600MB hard drive, 4x NEC CDROM and an Aztech MMSN841 AZT2316R-based soundcard\modem with a real Yamaha OPL3. It has Windows 95a and what looks like all of the original Packard Bell software installed (mostly shortcuts to things on CDs). Amazingly, I picked up a pile of CDs from a thrift store last year and got what appears to be the entire set of disks that would have been bundled with a PB from this era. The disks all match the shortcuts on this system... score! 😀

Anyway, this is apparently identical to my wife's first PCs and she has fond memories of playing with one of these back in the day so it seems like we might actually be able to keep it around for a while. My daughter has already enjoyed playing with Spiderman Cartoon Maker (which is HYSTERICAL, and my wife was very happy when I found the disk for it last year).

Since it will be staying with us, I decided to try to keep it mostly stock but with some add-ons for extra functionality. I liked the idea of making use of one of my decent wavetable-based sound cards for this system to give it some extra music options (because why not? I have a huge collection of them... it seems silly to not put one in a PC that's actually going to be used). I thought an Ensoniq OPUS would be a good option since it has excellent wavetable (1MB ROM) and doesn't have much overlapping functionality with the Aztech card (no SBPro or WSS compatibility, no OPL3).

I knew it'd be a pain in the butt to manage the resources, but now that I've "fixed" the issues, it still doesn't work right! After much tinkering, there are no resource conflicts reported in Windows, and yet I will still get a box that pops up and tells me that the Aztech card "isn't responding properly" and that I should reconfigure it (seems to be a message from the sound card's driver? I've never seen a message like this before, though it could be win95 specific). I get a few sound effects from the Aztech card before it does this but it never sounds quite right. I usually get no Windows startup sound... only a few short sound effects from Windows themes before they stop all together. The errors seems to come up whenever the first sound plays.

What finally allowed me to get rid of resource conflicts was to switch the "PNP OS" BIOS option to "NO". This was the first system I've ever had that actually had it set to "YES", so I left it alone until the end. I'm not sure if it's related, but even though I disable COM1, COM2 and LPT1 in the BIOS, they still show up in windows. I've disabled them in device manager, but could it be possible they are still causing issues? I have tried the "reset configuration data" setting multiple times as well.

If anyone has any suggestions as to why these cards wouldn't work together, even when Windows reports no resource conflicts, I'd love to know.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I have disabled the Sound Blaster emulation of the Ensoniq since the Aztech has that already. I've disabled basically everything optional. In device manager under sound devices I only have "Packard Bell Sound Card" and "Ensoniq Soundscape OPUS" listed, with no disabled or conflicting devices. The add hardware wizard doesn't find any lost components that are floating around looking for resources either. Independently the cards work fine but I have to physically remove one from the system to get everything working, whether there are any conflicts or not. Even with no drivers installed for one of them, the other still doesn't work properly in Windows. I don't have them both set up in DOS at the moment since this system will mostly be running early Windows applications, but when I run config.exe for the Aztech card, everything is set properly and the diagnostics all work perfectly (OPL3, 8bit and 16bit audio), and this is with the OPUS in the system (with no DOS drivers though).