In my experience making PCI cards work under DOS can be a pain. I own a YMF724 and had lots of problems with it, the only way I could make it work properly was together with a motherboard that supports SB-Link and a SB-Link cable, obviously. But even then it made weird clicks when playing music and I ended up buying an Aztech ISA sound card.

One thing you can try is putting it in another PCI slot, assuming you have more than one.

Sorry that I can't help more than that, I'm no expert (first message by the way, hello everyone), but I'm sure soon someone will come and give better and more detailed help.

810 chipset should work with DDMA... I think.

Those cards can be picky about the DMA though

One system I have likes the DMA to be set at 0 in setupds.

Is setupds /s loading in autoexec.bat?

A screenshot / pic of what is says when it loads would be great.

Spam F8 when booting and select the one that lets you step through the startup and then take a pic and post it of what it says when it loads setupds /s.

Like the other reply said... You may need to change the PCI slot the card is in.

Are there any BIOS settings to reserve IRQs and or DMA for specific slots? You would also need an option to change from PNP/Auto to manual configuration for IRQ/DMA in the BIOS.

In general, you will only ever get a (mostly) hassle-free sound experience under MS-DOS with an ISA sound card, which of course you unfortunately cannot install on the V3100. With PCI sound cards it's always a bit hit and miss which games will work with the drivers and which won't. In some cases, you'll have more luck with VDMSound under Windows 2000.
In the PentiumII generation, the computing world moved on from MS-DOS compatibility, so hardware compatibility problems with old games become much more common than in the PentiumI and (even more so) 486 era.

You don't 'need' an ISA sound card to have a near-perfect DOS experience... or, more specifically, it's complicated. In my experience, PCI sound cards work beautifully on certain platforms, while being unusable on others.
The Yamaha YMF7xx cards are especially fussy. They seem to work best on 440BX (not all motherboards, though), or VIA chipsets such as the KT400/KT600.
I also had very good DOS results on i865/ICH5 (Asrock 775i65G), but funnily enough, on these motherboards the YMF7xx is unusable in Windows (frequent blue screens with all the drivers I tried).

My advice for someone who wants a relatively fuss free PC for Windows 98 & DOS, is to go with a VIA KT600 motherboard (the Asus A7V600-X is my favorite) + Athlon XP (ideally an unlocked Thoroughbred, but a late locked Barton is fine too for most people).
The YMF7xx works great on such a platform (although it does need an expanded memory manager for DOS SB Pro 2 compatibility). You can also get 386/486 equivalent speeds using BIOS settings and tools such as setmul, throttle. An unlocked Thoroughbred, in particular, can be extremely flexible on this type of motherboard: (not really required) but even slower SKUs can be easily overclocked to around 2 GHz which makes them ultra-lightning fast for any Windows 98 game, and for DOS you can decrease the FSB/multiplier down to 5 x 100 Mhz, disable L1 and L2 caches + use Throttle, thus obtaining virtually any speed that you want (386 SX-25 / 386 DX-40 / 486 DX-33 / 486 DX2-66 / 486 DX4-100 / Pentium MMX, etc)

Anyway, if the YMF7xx cards don't work on your particular motherboard, it's worth to try other good PCI sound cards, like the ESS Solo-1.

My point exactly. 😁
I'm not saying it's impossible to run DOS games with PCI sound cards, I'm just saying it requires a lot more luck and fiddling around than with an ISA card. You do have an additional compatibility layer in the system, it's never going to be as hassle-free as ISA.

BraveToaster wrote on 2021-05-06, 13:52:

My point exactly. 😁
I'm not saying it's impossible to run DOS games with PCI sound cards, I'm just saying it requires a lot more luck and fiddling around than with an ISA card. You do have an additional compatibility layer in the system, it's never going to be as hassle-free as ISA.

Yes, of course, ISA sound cards are usually easier to deal with when it comes to DOS. Of course, they themselves are far from being hassle free. I guess it all comes down to experience and getting to know what works on what platform and what doesn't. 😀

Thank you for all the replies. I would have gone with an ISA card, but I'm only working with 3 PCI and a AMR on this machine, so my option are limited.

After a solid week of tinkering, I have this kinda working. First I added the expanded memory manager from Phils Computerlab. Now I have enough memory to do the following:

-Boot machine into windows
-Restart in MS DOS
-The driver for the sound card will load and ask me to select the card. I'm assuming this because it still can't find any DMA on Channel 1. Everything else in the menu is correct. The only thing I can do here is exit without saving.
-Select 4 in the Phil's Menu
-Allow DOS to finish loading and switch to the YMF744 directory and run setupds /s. Go through the same step again as above.
-Run DSDMA
-Load game (In this case Duke3d) and everything is working fine.

So, this does work... it's just a gigantic pain in the ass doing this every time. I dunno if I'm missing something or what but I do have to boot into Windows 98 first in order for this to work? I think eventually I'm going to have to ditch the Toshiba and get a different mobo with some ISA slot, but for now this is passable.

Ok, since you are having trouble with DDMA, you should be able to set it up to load DSDMA on boot without having to go through all that.

You may actually need to use one of the modified setupds programs to get DDMA to work with your setup.... it may work, it depends on how the motherboard was designed.

After a bit of digging, it looks like the southbridge is probably the ICH4. In that case, DDMA will probably only work IF the motherboard has a separate chip that provides DMA support.

Look in my sig for the needed modified setupds utilities and for dsxgdos-DSDMA. I think Phil probably has all of them as well since I am pretty sure he got them from me.

The official installer must be run from within Windows though. There is a batch file that runs at bootup and if it detects that DDMA is PC-PCI is not working, it loads the DSDMA driver if I am remembering correctly.

IMHO, the one of the best PCI sound cards for DOS are ESS Solo-1 ones. Highly compatible, do not need EMS to get initialized.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-07, 16:46:

Ok, since you are having trouble with DDMA, you should be able to set it up to load DSDMA on boot without having to go through a […]
Show full quote

Ok, since you are having trouble with DDMA, you should be able to set it up to load DSDMA on boot without having to go through all that.

You may actually need to use one of the modified setupds programs to get DDMA to work with your setup.... it may work, it depends on how the motherboard was designed.

After a bit of digging, it looks like the southbridge is probably the ICH4. In that case, DDMA will probably only work IF the motherboard has a separate chip that provides DMA support.

Look in my sig for the needed modified setupds utilities and for dsxgdos-DSDMA. I think Phil probably has all of them as well since I am pretty sure he got them from me.

The official installer must be run from within Windows though. There is a batch file that runs at bootup and if it detects that DDMA is PC-PCI is not working, it loads the DSDMA driver if I am remembering correctly.

So I finally got around to trying this tonight and now not only can I not get sound, but the old configuration isn't working either.

I don't think I'm cut out for this...🤣.

DecepticonZero wrote on 2021-05-11, 02:13:

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-07, 16:46:

Ok, since you are having trouble with DDMA, you should be able to set it up to load DSDMA on boot without having to go through a […]
Show full quote

Ok, since you are having trouble with DDMA, you should be able to set it up to load DSDMA on boot without having to go through all that.

You may actually need to use one of the modified setupds programs to get DDMA to work with your setup.... it may work, it depends on how the motherboard was designed.

After a bit of digging, it looks like the southbridge is probably the ICH4. In that case, DDMA will probably only work IF the motherboard has a separate chip that provides DMA support.

Look in my sig for the needed modified setupds utilities and for dsxgdos-DSDMA. I think Phil probably has all of them as well since I am pretty sure he got them from me.

The official installer must be run from within Windows though. There is a batch file that runs at bootup and if it detects that DDMA is PC-PCI is not working, it loads the DSDMA driver if I am remembering correctly.

So I finally got around to trying this tonight and now not only can I not get sound, but the old configuration isn't working either.

I don't think I'm cut out for this...🤣.

Ok, go ahead and post the contents of your autoexec.bat and I'll set up a system to use DSMA and post needed Autoexec.bat commands as well as the other files.

I should even be able to test with a motherboard with the same chipset. I'll test DDMA as well just to confirm whether or not it should work or not.

Sometimes these can be tricky to get working properly on OEM systems due to the lack of some BIOS options. Once you get them working properly, the sound output is great though.

Edit: The specs sheet says it has an integrated Aureal Vortex 8810 sound chip. Does it actually have onboard sound? Do you have it disabled in the BIOS?

@ECHO OFF
PATH C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS \COMMAND;C:\DOS

REM ========APPEND CD-ROM DRIVE=========
REM - BY WINDOWS SETUP - C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CDROM001
REM ========APPEND CD-ROM DRIVE=========
COPY C:\DS-XG\DOS4GW.EXE \
CHCP437
C:\DS-XG\SETUPDS.EXE /S
DEL \DOS4GW.EXE
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

The machine does have working onboard sound in Windows, however I cant get any sound out of DOS stuff no matter what I select for a sound device. Another odd thing I noticed is that this machine will not let you rearrange cards for different IO range. I purchased a s3 virge and was gifted a voodoo card and when I install them, the sound card will always change from 220 I5 D1 to 240 I7 D3, no matter what pci slot its in. When the sound card is not in the A220 I5 D1 setup, it wont run at all regardless of how many times I follow the above steps or set blaster.

Thanks for the help!

Follow up dumb question. When poking around the Toshiba manual I noticed it says the onboard sound is "Soundblaster Pro Compatible". Shouldn't I be able to get sound out of Doom and Duke 3d using that onboard sound?

DecepticonZero wrote on 2021-05-14, 14:48:

Follow up dumb question. When poking around the Toshiba manual I noticed it says the onboard sound is "Soundblaster Pro Compatible". Shouldn't I be able to get sound out of Doom and Duke 3d using that onboard sound?

Yes, it should work fine. But the FM music is going to be pretty bad compared to a real Yamaha OPL3 chip.

I mentioned it before, it is an Aureal Vortex 8810. Have you tried disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS?

I'll also get an 810 based board set up and see how it goes with an AOPEN card. The one I have also has onboard sound so I will also need to disable it in the BIOS.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-15, 03:14:

Yes, it should work fine. But the FM music is going to be pretty bad compared to a real Yamaha OPL3 chip. […]
Show full quote

DecepticonZero wrote on 2021-05-14, 14:48:

Follow up dumb question. When poking around the Toshiba manual I noticed it says the onboard sound is "Soundblaster Pro Compatible". Shouldn't I be able to get sound out of Doom and Duke 3d using that onboard sound?

Yes, it should work fine. But the FM music is going to be pretty bad compared to a real Yamaha OPL3 chip.

I mentioned it before, it is an Aureal Vortex 8810. Have you tried disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS?

I'll also get an 810 based board set up and see how it goes with an AOPEN card. The one I have also has onboard sound so I will also need to disable it in the BIOS.

The model with the Aureal is the one that came preloaded with Windows NT. This one came preloaded with Windows 98 and has the ADI Soundmax. Both machines are listed as V3100 but this is the model that was sold at People PC.

Need to know the exact ADI chip model number to see if it is really Sound Blaster compatible.

Are there any settings in the BIOS for it?

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-05-16, 22:51:

Need to know the exact ADI chip model number to see if it is really Sound Blaster compatible.

Are there any settings in the BIOS for it?

Just checked. The model with the Aurreal use an Au8810, which is can see a spot for silkscreened on the motherboard, but its certainly not there. Right above it is a AD1881, which is what the soundmax is using. Thanks again for your help with this!

Ok, so that is an AC97 chip. The only way you will get SB Pro "support"on that is by running the DOS games from within Windows 9x which has it built in.

It will work ok-ish with some stuff but is not that good.