I'm no expert and you probably already thought of that but maybe when you "collected all those files in your C: drive and stuffed them in SBAWE," you also moved IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files as well. Are you sure your C: root contains the same original files? Not the ones from your floppy boot disk.

Yes, after I did that I realized that I had accidently put command.com in there, and after it didn't work after copying back to the root, I decided to copy everything back to the root. So everything that was originally on the root is on there now. Or a least I don't see why it shouldn't be.

The question is why would you do that ?

To start with...the "drivers" you have insatalled are just updates not the ORIGINAL drivers you should start with.

If you're lookng for the drivers to enable the card in DOS they are here:

http://support.creative.com/downloads/downloa … nDownloadId=379

In retrospect, I'm not exactly sure why I did that. I thought I knew what I was doing or something like that, obviously I was wrong. I've installed Sound Blaster 16 cards on DOS machines before, but never Win95. I was actually just looking to get the original Win95 driver and then add the DOS level functionality, but I don't think they made clear on their website where that is. I have realized those are just updates though... when I look the card up the only two downloads I get are

1. Vienna Soundfont

2. The DOS level utilities (link that Amigaz posted.)

Seeing as neither of those are Win95 drivers, I went to the bottom for manual selection, put in Windows 95, Drivers, and I get:

1. SBW9XUP.EXE

2. Creative PnP Configuration Manager (which it says is for DOS6.x and WIN3.1x)

3. Wavesynth/WG Drivers Updatefor Win95

So I'm just a little confused. If I have to reinstall Windows, no big deal, but I still want to get this card working.

All 9x OSs have SB16 drivers included that work fine. For an AWE, however, which uses the same driver pack, you need the Creative drivers and a utility for the ability to upload soundfonts. They also allow the AWE's RAM to be used as a few static DirectSound buffers. This was an attempt to improve ISA sound card performance when mixing many sounds but I don't think was really used because PCI cards took over very quickly.

In DOS, a SB16 will typically just work without any drivers. There are a few cases in which you would want/need to get the DOS drivers.

- You have a PnP SB16 and your mobo lacks the ability to configure its resources. You need the PnP configure manager for pre-PnP mobos or if you set your BIOS to "PNP OS Installed" which turns off the BIOS's internal PnP management.
- You want to adjust mixer volume settings. There is a mixer app with the Creative drivers.
- You have a specific need for one of the Creative sound drivers that are for some specific apps. I've never used these myself, they aren't used for any games that I know of.

Alright, but if Win95 already has the drivers in it, how come I kept getting the new hardware detected screen when I start up, expecting to install some kind of driver? I was basically just trying to keep that from popping up. I never tried the sound to see if it was working anyway.

I had installed all the updates I could find, SP1 and Visual Basic Professional 5.0, doing this stopped a dll missing error that kept on coming up when trying to run 7zip, but Windows still wanted to look for a driver for the sound card.

manbearpig wrote:

Alright, but if Win95 already has the drivers in it, how come I kept getting the new hardware detected screen when I start up, expecting to install some kind of driver? I was basically just trying to keep that from popping up. I never tried the sound to see if it was working anyway.

I had installed all the updates I could find, SP1 and Visual Basic Professional 5.0, doing this stopped a dll missing error that kept on coming up when trying to run 7zip, but Windows still wanted to look for a driver for the sound card.

That was Win95 attempt to install the drivers.

Yes. It wanted to look on a floppy disk. Of course I don't have the disk with the drivers. It never told me to insert the Windows disk. Anyway, I'm reinstalling Win95 with the card installed this time instead of putting it in after, see if it works that way.

dont you have the awe64 driver cd ?

No, I don't have the driver CD. All my computer hardware either comes from the $3.00 circuit board bin at the electronics store, which sometimes but rarely has the disk rubber banded around the board, or it's pulled from the trash, picked up off the side of the road on bulk pickup week, found at thrift stores, or given to me by hoarders.

Old software and documentation is something I actually get excited about finding because it's more likely you're going to find a bunch of boards but none of that.

Anyway, I fixed my problem, and it turns out that the SBW9XUP.EXE was the right file.

I put my Win95 disk in and it more or less just restored my system, but when it came to looking for plug n play devices, it gave me a message, "PLEASE INSERT CREATIVE DRIVERS DISK". Dang. But what happened next was nice, because it gave me a string of messages that helped out considerably.

"The file 'filename.file' on Creative Drivers Disk could not be found. Insert Creative Drivers Disk into the drive selected below." It even went as far as giving me the destination folder for the file as C:\WIN95\System\.

In case anyone else ever has this or a similar problem, the files Win95 wants for this card are: cifman.dll, cspman.dll, sb16.vxd, sb16snd.drv, sbfm.drv, wfm0200.acv, wfm0200a.csp, wfm0201.acv, wfm0201a.csp,wfm0202.acv, wfm0202a.csp, wfm0203.acv, wfm0203a.csp

What's awesome is that all those files were on my root. All I had to do was startup in MS-DOS mode, because if not it won't move all the files because it says Windows is using some of them, move all said files, and cifman.crl, to C:\Windows\System\, and bam, no error messages. Sweet Win95 startup sound.

alright, new woe to list. My Windows 95 disk says 'with usb support', and from all that I have read, only OSR2 works with usb, so I assumed that I had OSR2 installed since it came with usb support. But this doesn't seem to be the case.

Insert the Windows disk and find the usb folder with the application and readme, open the readme, and it says before installing check you Windows version. OK, I do this.

4.00.950a?

HUH? Why would the disk say usb support if it's not OSR2? Anybody got any thoughts on this?

Actually, apparently you need OSR 2.1/2.5 for Win95's USB "support".
http://www.usbman.com/Win95%20USB%20Guide.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253756

Very strange.....

Frankly, if you want USB support you should use Windows 98 (ideally SE). Even Win95c's USB support is limited and the device manufacturers didn't support it well.

Cool, thanks for the info. If the USB support is that lousy I won't even bother with it. I just like to explore all the nooks and crannies of these old operating systems. Mostly just been playing civilization II though.

Windows was a pain to install because I found out I was dealing with a malfunctioning K6. Sometimes it would recognize the CD-ROM drive, most of the time, no. Then if I ran D:\setup, I'd get all kinds of errors. Swapping it out for a P200 MMX fixed that though, and after all this I finally have everything running smoothly.

Windows 95 needs a patch to work with K6s once they reach a certain speed.
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/windows95/troub-67.html

I tend to use Win95 on anything slower than a Pentium 200. Anything that doesn't have USB or AGP. 95 runs much faster than 98 on such hardware, mainly because the 95 shell is much simpler.

But once you have USB and AGP or just have a faster CPU and more RAM, 98SE becomes much more preferable because it is essentially a bug fixed and enhanced Win95. More recent apps work with it (like Opera). There are more drivers included. Etc.

Ah, nice to know. But this was the stock processor with the machine, an Acer Aspire 1812 with an AMD K6-233 processor, 16mb of RAM, and onboard Rage II+ graphics.

Now it's got a P233 MMX, 128mb of RAM, and I filled the empty sockets for video RAM. I never got it to run with the K6, and when I put the Intel in I added all the extras, so I can't compare the performance, but I'm sure it's better.

swaaye wrote:

Windows 95 needs a patch to work with K6s once they reach a certain speed.

I had that problem, unfortunately this was back before i had internet so i only found out about it several months later when i read about it in a magazine, then it was several months before I found someone with the patch,
but my k62-350 was never that stable even when i moved to win98

Super 7 systems had such terrible, low quality mobos compounded by crap chipsets that it's amazing that there wasn't a massive lawsuit or something. 😁 But hey they were like less than half of the price of a Pentium II setup.

I went through 3 boards trying to fix it
one of them was originally designed for the cyrix m2 and allthought the bios had a setting for 100mhz the chipset was only designed to do 83mhz (i think) but you could get about 90mhz out of it