Does CD AUDIO work in DOS, through the speakers?

Why not use the official SB16 drivers from VogonsDrivers?

What exactly is that SB16-compatible card?

Windows requires sound drivers of it's own.
When using the original SB16 drivers it has a check box to install windows and dos drivers.
I haven't used Unisound so not sure if this is an option or if it's even supported?

Alternatively you can use a dos cd player in windows as this will fall back onto the unisound drivers
You may even be able to install the original creative drivers for windows but load unisound for dos, I suspect the 2 are independent of each other but have never checked.

Edit: miss read and thought it was a Creative card, Same rules apply but will need to install the drivers matching which card you have installed.

What is a reliable DOS CD player? I will test tonight when I get home from work!

I can definitely try the official driver - Unisound was recommended by a friend so I went with that.

It is some generic SB-compatible, I’ll also check the chipset when I get home. Should have done that last night when I posted but was tired and frustrated - my oops!

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 12:12:

What is a reliable DOS CD player? I will test tonight when I get home from work!

http://www.6502.org/users/sjgray/software/sjg … jgplay_dos.html

The card in question. Vibra 16?

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 20:26:

The card in question. Vibra 16?

Why is the card missing its components?

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 20:26:

The card in question. Vibra 16?

As chinny22 mentioned, Windows requires drivers on it's own to get sound. The official drivers for the SB16 comes with those.

UNISOUND will only initialize the sound card for DOS usage.

dominusprog wrote on 2023-08-28, 20:47:

Why is the card missing its components?

Those components were intended for installing a non-IDE CD drive and whether it has them or not depends on the revision. Has nothing to do with the lack of audio coming out of the speakers in Windows.

I do get Windows 3.11 system sounds however - does that mean it is finding something somewhere? Or there is some sort of driver on there but it is the wrong one?

Which one of those drivers do I need? The one that says "Vibra16?"

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:30:

I do get Windows 3.11 system sounds however - does that mean it is finding something somewhere? Or there is some sort of driver on there but it is the wrong one?

Seems that you have a sound driver installed beforehand, likely the PC Speaker one unless I'm wrong.

Which one of those drivers do I need? The one that says "Vibra16?"

Yes. Note that your Vibra 16 model isn't PnP.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:58:

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:30:

Yes. Note that your Vibra 16 model isn't PnP.

I am painfully aware 😜 I messed with Win 95 to test the NIC (yes 95 on a 486 honks hard) and I know that the NIC is PnP but it had no idea what to do with the sound 😜

It will prolly be the weekend before I can pick this back up again b/c work. Will report back!!

One more quick question-can I run Unisound drivers in DOS and official in Windows? I am in the middle of a live stream playthrough of Ultima 6 and I don’t want to mess up what I do have working - getting it all balanced for output to OBS was tricky .

Yes, as long as you remove any changes in both CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT after installing the official drivers. I suggest keeping the changes done to environment variables (except BLASTER because of UNISOUND) for compatibility purposes.

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:30:

I do get Windows 3.11 system sounds however - does that mean it is finding something somewhere? Or there is some sort of driver on there but it is the wrong one?

Which one of those drivers do I need? The one that says "Vibra16?"99

Windows 3.x doesn't support music CD playback by default.

Support has to be added via "add driver" button (Control Panel-> Drivers).
Select "[MCI] CD Audio".

After that, Media Player should be able to play audio tracks.

PS: Another nice software is "PKCD" that comes with the PAS16 driver diskette.
That software isn't hardware-dependant to the Pro Audio Spectrum 16, though.

Source: Wikimedia

For DOS, there's a cute CD Player peogram called "PLAYCD" that comes with the Mitsumi LU005 intergace card.
It works via MSCDEX, so it's not limited to any specific hardware.

https://www.ibm-pc.se/drivers/cdrom/MITSUMI/mitsumi.html

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-27, 21:19:

I have the cable going from the analog out on the back of the drive to the correct pins on the sound card. It is one of the ones that has extra plastic on the connectors to make sure it goes in right.

There was more than one standard of these cables, so it may still be wired wrong.

Update based on yesterday and this morning.

MCI CD Audio is installed in Windows, no luck.
DOS CD Player does not play through the sound card, only from the headphone jack of the CDROM drive.
It looks like the CreativeLabs SoundBlaster 1.5 drivers are loaded in Windows.
The Vibra16 drivers seem to affect DOS and WIndows, so I don't want to mess with too much a couple hours before I need it. I may wait until after I'm done U6 to really get tinto this.
I only have one of the CDROM-Sound Card cables so I can't test the cable.
I tried to do an "Add Driver" in Win 3.11 and Windows 3.11 refused to look on the A drive.

Also, unrelated, PC cases are sharp and I need to start wearing gloves when I poke around in there!

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-27, 21:19:

I installed Willow Pond Media Rack from Internet Archive. It is not seeing a system mixer ...

Apologies if you've already checked this, but sometimes when I've had audio issues, the problem is that the mixer channel in question was muted or set to a volume of zero (I think those are two separate possibilities depending on the card). Are you able to check this? I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if a card of that vintage didn't have a separate mixer channel for the CD audio. The lack of a system mixer that you mention above seems a bit suspicious.

Perhaps if you get a DOS CD player tool, you can use whatever DOS mixer tool you have before you try playing the CD from DOS. In fact I seem to recall that at least some Windows drivers don't reset the mixer when Windows starts, so changing the volume from DOS might help in Windows too.

I seem to remember long ago having a tool in my AUTOEXEC.BAT - maybe called SBPSET, which would probably have been from the official Creative drivers for Sound Blaster Pro - which set mixer levels on boot.

doshea wrote on 2023-09-19, 03:13:

Apologies if you've already checked this, but sometimes when I've had audio issues, the problem is that the mixer channel in que […]
Show full quote

LadyAIluros wrote on 2023-08-27, 21:19:

I installed Willow Pond Media Rack from Internet Archive. It is not seeing a system mixer ...

Apologies if you've already checked this, but sometimes when I've had audio issues, the problem is that the mixer channel in question was muted or set to a volume of zero (I think those are two separate possibilities depending on the card). Are you able to check this? I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if a card of that vintage didn't have a separate mixer channel for the CD audio. The lack of a system mixer that you mention above seems a bit suspicious.

Perhaps if you get a DOS CD player tool, you can use whatever DOS mixer tool you have before you try playing the CD from DOS. In fact I seem to recall that at least some Windows drivers don't reset the mixer when Windows starts, so changing the volume from DOS might help in Windows too.

I seem to remember long ago having a tool in my AUTOEXEC.BAT - maybe called SBPSET, which would probably have been from the official Creative drivers for Sound Blaster Pro - which set mixer levels on boot.

I just checked that ....So I don't actually have a mixer installed, that part of Media Rack says it can't find it, so that's something to check. I suspect it goes back to not having the correct-est drivers installed.