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Weird issue with Sound Blaster 16 and Game Port

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First post, by sylargaf

Posted on 
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Hey all, appreciate any help on this.

I have a Sound Blaster 16 that i've been using on my 98 machine with no problem until yesterday. Yesterday, I plugged a steering wheel into the gameport and attempted to use it.

The steering wheel was recognized and I noticed a new "Gameport Joystick" entry in the System tab.

However, this seemed to have killed any and all audio functionaity of my sound blaster card, and I can't figure out how to revert it.

I noticed the boot screen changed to this SB Pro Game Settings instead of the normal SB Pro:
20230723_084755.jpg

Things i've tried so far:

Reseat the card
Disable the card in Device Manager
Reinstalled the driver

Appreciate any help!

Reply 1 of 3, by danieljm

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Based on that screen shot it looks like you've also got an ESS sound card in your system. From what I can tell, that looks like it's just the initialization software for the ESS card, not the Sound Blaster.

I would start with removing the ESS card from your system and disabling the initialization for it in the autoexec.bat file. See if that makes your Sound Blaster come back to life. If so, you've probably just got some sort of resource conflict between the two cards.

Reply 3 of 3, by danieljm

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Okay good. So, there's probably just some conflict between the two cards. At least you know where to focus your attention now.

Good luck getting them to play nice with each other. I'd probably start with disabling the DOS drivers for the ESS card. You're probably fine just using the SB16 in DOS and the ESS in Windows. And maybe look into disabling the gameport for the ESS in Windows so you just have the one active on the SB16 and hopefully that simplifies things.

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