It's not just you. The SB Live! drivers do suck.

Retro Games 100 put together a nice thread that might be helpful: Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4760 (X-Gamer), quick test

Stull wrote:

It's not just you. The SB Live! drivers do suck.

Retro Games 100 put together a nice thread that might be helpful: Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4760 (X-Gamer), quick test

thanks. I probibly need to find those older drivers but unfortunitly the links are dead and I cant seem to find the ISO anywhere else.

I initially had trouble finding a working 98 SB Live! driver too after my AudioPCI died a few years ago. I finally found a driver that worked here.

Might be worth a shot.

All sound card drivers suck. Except HD audio because you can use the basic Windows driver and it's entirely software so there can't be bus issues. Lol

I suggest Liveware 3 for 98. Assuming you have an original Live or Live Value that is recognized. I have posted a CD image in the past but it seems all of the links are dead. I will fix that later. The thread linked in an above post has a link to the downloadable edition.

Flashback's driver link undoubtedly works too.

thanks. the drivers provided above kind of worked. I got sound for the most part. oddly enough though I didn't get the startup and shutdown jingles but i did get sound off the desktop such as clicking on things and empying the recycling bin and such. I was still getting a conflict error with the midi/joystick port though and on restarting windows would not boot because I got all sorts of missing and/or corupt files error. It may of been that the previous drivers I was testing were still there somewhere. anyways tonight after work i'll do a clean win98 install and try fresh.

Liveware installs a cool rumbling thunder startup sound.

Ok here is a new upload of the original Liveware 3 CD for Win9x. 2-part zip.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/n13owcw4c3c … O_Win9x.zip.001

http://www.mediafire.com/download/w42aso6k597 … O_Win9x.zip.002

These days, the kX project drivers probably give better results on WinXP.

http://kxproject.com/

swaaye wrote:

Ok here is a new upload of the original Liveware 3 CD for Win9x. 2-part zip.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/n13owcw4c3c … O_Win9x.zip.001

http://www.mediafire.com/download/w42aso6k597 … O_Win9x.zip.002

how does that work? are these two seperate zip files I need to combine and then extract to get the ISO?

kx drivers don't support EAX and probably have DS3D limitations.

The download is just a split zip. I made it with 7zip. Mediafire has a 200mb per file limit.

I never had any problems with sblive drivers apart from the bloat like the stupid creative taskbar

thanks swaaye, i figured it out. the liveware cd installed and I was having the same issues I had before with the pc not detecting any conflicts and everything looking ok but no acual sound. then I installed the drivers from the link flashback posted and it all seems to work fine. somehow a combination of the two got it working fine. only problem was I had to disable my printer port to free an IRQ for the SB16 emulation.

Davros wrote:

I never had any problems with sblive drivers apart from the bloat like the stupid creative taskbar

I never had problems either.

In the early years of WDM, Creative had BSOD problems. Live made a rather horrific transition to Win2k back then. These guys have never been great at drivers for some reason and it took years to get it ironed out. There are also EAX issues with the WDM drivers and old games. It seems the WDM drivers behave differently than VXD somehow and EAX sounds wrong sometimes.

I've also had occasional problems with their various applets becoming non functional without a reboot. The Audigy equalizer for example. Creative never has understood the keep it simple philosophy.

Also there were problems in the early OpenAL days. Which reminds me- Doom3 and Quake4 have an occasional bizarre periodic visual twitch with EAX4 enabled.

I'm sure many old forum posts can be found from olden times for reading enjoyment.

I agree that Live! drivers are horrible. I used the newest ones from the site when trying to set up this card on a fresh Win2k installation and it simply would not work without any plausible reason. No CD involved, since the CD is older than Win2k itself anyway. Conversely, the card did work under 98 SE without major problems, but I used the CD and updated it with the patch from the site afterwards.

Its not easy to find sound blaster drivers these days. I hate those sites with 10 download buttons and you have to guess which one is correct and then there will be a disclaimer and a 'I agree' and 'next' box but right at the bottom in small writing is text advising you are installing a toolbar or gator software. Little do you know the I agree was for a toolbar and not the disclaimer.

I also had issues getting drivers for my sound blaster live 1024 PCI. Eventually I found them but it took some time.

However once I found the right drivers I had no issues. It worked great and sounded incredible.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a site where it had a Creative Heading and sub headings like "CT4830 version 1" Win98, Windows 95, NT 4, Win 2000, XP, Windows 7 etc clickable links to each driver. And NOT a 500 MB CD but a couple of inf and drv files without bloated ads, tables and crap.

I'll have to look at my server when I get home, but I still have the X-Gamers 3 Live! and X-Gamers 5 Live! that they pushed out way back when. I still have the original CD's and think I have updated 98 and 2k drivers from what the cd's were downloaded if anyone is interested. I kept all the CD's that came with all of my equipment from back then.

I was feeling masochistic today and I tried my SB Live (CT4760) again. Whatever version of the install CD that I had would result in BSODs immediately after installation, but the one uploaded by swaaye worked like a charm. Links are still good as of this posting.

Yeah Liveware 3 works pretty well for Live. Don't forget to rock out with the Creative Lava psychedelic music player that comes on that CD! 🤣