A first step for non-working DOS games in 9x would be to disable Windows detection in the .exe properties. Since you are using a PCI sound card running everything from the 98SE environment would be preferable anyway.

Yeah the SBLive won't bring you nice DOS SB compatibility. Most will refuse to work with it, especially those Sierra games. Its FM emulation TSR is awful and slow as well 🙁

If you really wanted to play Sam & Max on that system with the SBLive you'd probably have the best luck with ScummVM.

You can try copying the MSCDEX and CD-ROM device files and autoexec.bat/config.sys lines off the startup disk and add it to your C:\s autoexec.bat/config.sys, i've done that before as a lazy way to get the CD-ROM working.

I would use CTMOUSE (CuteMouse) for the mouse driver.

Aw shoot, really?! One of the main reasons I bought the SBLive was the SB16 emulation in DOS, I figured it was my best best for a machine that straddles both eras. Perhaps ScummVM is worth looking into, I've got a decent collection of Lucasarts games from the golden age.

Yeah, so how exactly does one copy files from the startup disk to the autoexec? Literally, just copy the files from the boot disk to C:\Windows, right? It's been 15 years since I even looked at an autoexec.bat, so I have no working knowledge in that field.

As d1stortion suggested, perhaps I don't bother with pure DOS at all, if I can get it working in the prompt? I don't expect there to be a simple, come-all solution but I really feel out of my depth here. Putting this PC together and getting it all running was a breeze compared to getting a single game to run...

Since you are using a Slot 1 machine chances are you have an ISA slot. I would just get a Yamaha YMF71x ISA card. Real OPL3 and good SB compatibility. You could even use it alongside your current sound card.

Yea PCI cards aren't the best for DOS games. ISA is best.

Now Sam and Max is one of the newer Lucasarts adventures, so chances are that it might work.

For pure DOS you will need to load the DOS drivers yourself. You get them by installing the Live! drivers from the CD.

Configure games with Sound Blaster 16 for speech and General MIDI for music and many games, especially the newer ones, will work.

If this all sounds confusing you might want to read up on this topic because there is a lot to it 😀

Thanks for the help guys. Before I embark on getting pure DOS working, I'd rather see if I can get in running in the 98SE environment, as d1stortion suggested.
@Mau1wurf1977 - thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not even getting the option to select sound boards; I get booted back to the main menu when I try to select.

Okay, I have MSCDEX and CuteMouse (I also got mouse.com in case). I have no idea where I can find my CD ROM device file (As I said earlier, my machine curiously seems to lack all DOS files, I don't even know why this would be the case).
After locating the necessary files, I'll dump them in C:\Windows (right?) and write up an autoexec.bat.

Is there an example of a clean autoexec.bat file I can copy from? My big issue here is that there seems to be various schools of thought and I don't know enough to know which lines I need, which ones I don't.

So far you've all been a great help, thank you so much 😀

the game should work fine in Win98SE if you can get an ISA sound card as others have suggested.

I have the game, but main problem was the CPU was too fast (a problem most SCUMM games seem to have) , which caused the games to crash or to play without the sound or music.
if you can get an ISA card like an SB16, or even something like one of the Roland devices , and slow down the CPU (either with a slowdown utility, or by disabling the cache via the BIOS), it should work fine in Win98, same goes for for other SCUMM games, certainly worked for me.

Tek wrote:

Okay, I have MSCDEX and CuteMouse (I also got mouse.com in case). I have no idea where I can find my CD ROM device file (As I said earlier, my machine curiously seems to lack all DOS files, I don't even know why this would be the case).
After locating the necessary files, I'll dump them in C:\Windows (right?) and write up an autoexec.bat.

You can try copying NEC_IDE.SYS from the disk over to C:\ and loading that first.

Maybe it should be noted that when you slow down a PII/PIII to 386 speed by turning off L1+L2 cache you can forget about running Win98 (without booting straight into DOS) for obvious reasons.

Tek wrote:

I have no idea where I can find my CD ROM device file (As I said earlier, my machine curiously seems to lack all DOS files, I don't even know why this would be the case).

There is no need to find DOS files for your particular CD-ROM drive, and they may not even exist. The overwhelmingly vast majority of people used generic CD-ROM drivers, often the Oak CD-ROM driver – the same one included on the Win9x startup floppy, if I'm not mistaken.

There are some better alternatives out there nowadays. UIDE, for example.
http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/driver.html

SHSUCDX is also a popular replacement for MSCDEX.
http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/shsucdx.html

If you want to get extra fancy, JEMM also includes a CD-ROM driver, if I recall correctly, but that's probably a little extreme.
http://www.japheth.de/Jemm.html

leileilol wrote:

Yeah the SBLive won't bring you nice DOS SB compatibility. Most will refuse to work with it, especially those Sierra games. Its FM emulation TSR is awful and slow as well 🙁

In what respect is it "slow" ?

I've had some increased frame latency while using it on <500MHz machines with audible stuttered notes... there is definitely some CPU usage put through the OPL emulation TSR.

Okay cool, I have the requisite files (I hope).

Now, I have to write an autoexec.bat to tell DOS to load all this guff up, right?

leileilol wrote:

I've had some increased frame latency while using it on <500MHz machines with audible stuttered notes... there is definitely some CPU usage put through the OPL emulation TSR.

Ah, well, for a machine that slow there's little reason to go with PCI anyway.

Tek wrote:

Now, I have to write an autoexec.bat to tell DOS to load all this guff up, right?

You need an autoexec.bat and a config.sys, yes. Again, there are utilities that can load device drivers (i.e. the binary .sys files used for CD-ROM drivers, among other things) from the command line, but there's generally no need to use those and they don't always work perfectly anyway. You also need a config.sys for loading HIMEM and for DOS=HIGH,UMB.

http://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm is pretty informative.

Oh it gets so much better! Just for kicks I popped in X-Wing. Installed no bother, the sound card was detected with no issues whatsoever! Perhaps it would be worthwhile installing a 98 build of ScummVM on here for the old Lucas (and Sierra?) games, it's fairly unlikely I'll want many more DOS games.

You have all been wonderful, but I know when I'm beaten. If I can cludge it quickly and with little bother, then I will 😀