First post, by XtoF
Hi! My sound blaster give me some headaches, maybe you can help.
I’ve got a 486 full ISA PC, in which I plugged this Sound Blaster AWE 32 CT2760 (rev1?).
This was a model I bought in 1994 and which served me well, until the disappearance of ISA slots from motherboards. In fact this is the last sound card I ever bought!
I is equipped with 8Mb of memory that I added back in the days.
On my 486 I play games ranging from the end of the 80’s to 1993-1994. I thought the AWE32 would be well perfect with its “plain” sound blaster compatibility and the direct support from the most recent games of that era.
Unfortunately, perfect it is not.
Indeed, my computer sometimes freezes when playing digitized sounds.
The behavior:
- In most DOS games there is no freeze. Ultima Underworld intro or games with 8-bit sound effects are OK. All the most “recent” games such as TIE fighter, Doom are also OK.
- It will always freeze at the same moment in
- Wing Commander II, as soon as a few seconds of sound are played. In the intro or during the game.
- Day of the tentacle. Late during the intro or if I interrupt a spoken dialog.
- It randomly freezes in Windows 3.11 if using the plain Sound Blaster 2 driver
- It freezes in Windows 3.11 as soon a sound is played if using the AWE32 drivers
I don’t remember those kind troubles with this very sound card back in the time. But my memory may be faulty. I am sure that Windows was stable, but I am not sure that I used it with “older” games such as Wing II.
I of course tried many combinations of IRQs and DMAs and my AWEUTILS is 1.11. I never git any problem in diagnose.
Any idea? Is this model known to be "unstable"?