There's an XP patch by HeliX666, which I can't link to since it's mostly found on piracy sites.

I need the music CD to work on 98, not on XP.

On XP it works just fine, except I can't boot it anymore due to the missing hal.dll problem (I'll eventually just reinstall XP for the 26th time)

Elia1995 wrote:

The thing that I do not understand is: same drivers, why does it work under XP and not under Windows 98 ? (Thus the audio cable is connected correctly)

XP doesn't need a separate cable. It can play CD audio over the IDE interface.

If you turn this off in device manager, music will probably stop working in XP too.

It's greyed out...

The cable is properly connected and the letter drive is correct.

That's from Win 98, right? Win 98 doesn't have that option. AFAIK it was introduced with Win 98 SE.

What I meant with my post is that the fact that music works on XP doesn't prove that everything is ok with the audio cable.

EDIT: So you have 98 SE?

Yes, it's Windows 98 SE with the Unofficial Service Pack 3.

No idea why it's greyed out.

I suggest you check the audio cable though.

The same audio cable works flawless in my DOS computer with the CT3670...

The CT4750 has three slots for this cable, I plugged it in the middle one which says "CD IN"

Are you sure you're using the WDM drivers and not the VxD drivers? What makes you think you have the "same drivers" in XP and 98?

You should also probably check the CD volume. Can you get CD music from any other program in Windows 98? The Windows 98 CD player is a good test. As noted above, Windows XP will function independently of the cable in question.

Do you have multiple CD drives, or a virtual Daemon Tools drive? The game may be looking for the music on the wrong drive letter. I think this may also happen if you have network drives with a lower letter than your CD drive.

I only have one physical DVD drive and a virtual one with MagicISO on both 98 and XP (I also have the virtual drive here on 7 aswell, but that doesn't really matter as CD audio works differently with SATA drives).

I have no idea what that WDM and VxD drivers actually mean, I just installed them from my sound card's CD on both systems 🤣

CD music doesn't work at all here on 98, but it indeed does on XP.
There doesn't seem to be an issue with the audio cable because as I said earlier, the exact same cable works fine with the CT3670 on the DOS PC (tested with Rayman).

I also noticed that on Windows 98 "Creative PlayCenter" just crashes with an error saying that it can't find PLAYSVR.DLL.

PlayCenter is the software I also used on XP to try my other audio CDs and it worked fine, it even ejected the CD.

Elia1995 wrote:

I only have one physical DVD drive and a virtual one with MagicISO on both 98 and XP (I also have the virtual drive here on 7 aswell, but that doesn't really matter as CD audio works differently with SATA drives).

Okay, so what if you disable the virtual drive?

I have no idea what that WDM and VxD drivers actually mean, I just installed them from my sound card's CD on both systems 🤣

Well, that hardly means they're the "same drivers", I should say.

WDM drivers may be needed to enable that digital playback option. If your sound card installer did not directly provide an option to use WDM drivers, then you should be able to download them from the Creative website.

I also noticed that on Windows 98 "Creative PlayCenter" just crashes with an error saying that it can't find PLAYSVR.DLL.

That is almost certainly an unrelated problem.

I just got it working not even knowing how.

I just went and reinstalled the sound drivers once again, I rebooted and changed the drive letter in that CD music window from E: to G: (my virtual drive), applied and then from G: to E: back again, launched Cold Shadow and the music worked...

that digital CD music thing is still greyed out, but the music works, I guess with that audio cable.
It's very unstable though, it worked, then I tried to launch the game again and it was without music again, after I restart there's the music the first time I launch the game and from the second time onward isn't there anymore and I have to reboot to get it back.... it's quite annoying, I hope there's now a fix for that aswell :\

Ah, I almost forgot, after I reinstalled the drivers, Creative PlayCenter works aswell... so if someone got that PLAYSVR.DLL error, just reinstall the drivers 🤣

Many old CD-ROM games did not expect systems to have more than one CD-ROM drive. When you get no music, it is probably because the game is trying to play music from the wrong drive. (I'm not entirely sure what the drive letter setting in Multimedia Properties is supposed to do.) I think there's some discussion of how this happens at http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2015/02/10/w … shadows-empire/ (as well as potentially a means of patching the program), but from what you describe you may be able to reliably solve the problem by setting your virtual drive to drive E and setting your CD-ROM drive to a lower drive letter.

Since the standard, default cd-rom drive should be "D:", and "D:" is used by the second hardisk, I should also try to move the second HDD's letter to E: and the DVD-rom's to D:, maybe most old games look under D: by default.

Jorpho wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what the drive letter setting in Multimedia Properties is supposed to do.

I think it's supposed to set the default letter drive from which all games should look for in order to play CD music.

Elia1995 wrote:

Since the standard, default cd-rom drive should be "D:" <snip> maybe most old games look under D: by default.

No, they don't. There was never any kind of standard, unofficial or otherwise, that assumed the CD-ROM drive would be "D:". (I'm sure there's probably at least one very badly-coded game that assumes the CD-ROM drive must be D:, but you can find bad code that assumes just about anything.) It is far more common for games to look at the last assigned drive letter, or alternatively to look in the first drive letter that is not assigned to a hard drive.

Well, in every PC I had and have with only 1 hardisk and CD-ROM drive, the letter of such drive is always D: