Hi,

I have a Pentium MMX running Windows 98 SE with 233 MHz, a ViRGE 3D video card and 64 MB RAM.

I originally had a Sound Blaster AWE32 card with which Hocus Pocus ran just fine in both Windows 98 SE and MS-DOS, but I kept having weird sound issues where Jill of the Jungle would randomly produce garbled sound (though the shareware version's audio would sometimes work only on the first run) and where audio levels would arbitrarily be low when running certain games (for some games only in MS-DOS and with other MS-DOS games only in Windows 98 SE depending on the game).

I tried to troubleshoot this best I could with various audio tools and configurations, but ultimately I chalked it up to AWE32 doing a lot of magic related to MIDI playback that I assumed some games had issues with, so I decided to buy a Sound Blaster 16 card instead in order to have a more predictable sound card setup that I assumed more games would accept and be able to handle.

I installed the Sound Blaster 16 card the other day, but strangely enough Hocus Pocus now spits out the error "Could not detect FM chip" while running in MS-DOS mode. It works just fine in Windows 98 SE, but in MS-DOS it somehow has issues with the sound card. Meanwhile other MS-DOS games work just fine in both Windows 98 SE and MS-DOS.

With Jill of the Jungle I'm still having issues. The full version of the game won't recognize the sound card at all, while the shareware version recognizes the sound card just fine for both music and digital sound but for some reason won't play any digital sound effects.

So to summarize, with AWE 32 the situation was:

• Some games had very low audio levels for music in MS-DOS.
• Some MS-DOS games had very low audio levels for music in Windows 98 SE.
• The full version of Jill of the Jungle could detect the sound card but produced garbled audio.
• The shareware version of Jill of the Jungle would have working audio on the first run, but not on subsequent runs.

And with Sound Blaster 16 the situation is:

• Hocus Pocus works fine in Windows 98 SE.
• Hocus Pocus gives the error "Could not detect FM chip" in MS-DOS.
• The full version of Jill of the Jungle can't detect the sound card at all.
• The shareware version of Jill of the Jungle recognizes the sound card for both digital audio and music, but for some reason only plays music.
• Other games' audio work just fine in both MS-DOS and Windows 98 SE.

Any ideas?