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Audigy 2 ZS: SB16 Emulation Driver Not Loading

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First post, by lmttn

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I apologize in advance for any gaps in info this post might have. I recently hooked my Pentium III PC back up for the first time in about a year. Its sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, which works wonderfully in Windows games: especially ones with EAX support. However, when booting Windows, I get a message saying that it can not start the SB16 emulation that I would need for DOS games. The message reads:

C:\>SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330

C:\>SET CTSYN=C:\WINDOWS

C:\>C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM

  Creative SB16 Emulation Driver, Version 5.00
  Copyright(c) 1996-2001, Creative Technologies Ltd., All Rights Reserved.

  Creative Audio @ Port d000, IRQ 10
  error: cannot open
      Creative SB16 Emulation Driver NOT loading.

C:\>

After that, Windows boots normally. As I said in the beginning of the post, it's been a while since I started this PC up. I have no idea what I set up incorrectly to cause this to happen. I would greatly appreciate any help fixing this. If there is any more info about my setup that I need to provide in order to troubleshoot this, please let me know. Thank you all in advance!

Last edited by lmttn on 2023-10-14, 00:15. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 6, by mattw

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C:\>SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 F330

F330?! that has to be wrong. unless, it's not a typo when you wrote the post, in any way the correct one is P330, i.e. IOPort 330, maybe that's why it cannot open, because it doesn't know the IOport.

Reply 2 of 6, by lmttn

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Yes, my bad, that is a typo. I'll correct that in the original post.

Reply 3 of 6, by Stretch

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If you have disabled your parallel port, I suggest you re-enable it. The sb16 emulation can share the resources with the parallel port.

Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Cubilux 7.1 USB

Reply 4 of 6, by lmttn

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My parallel port options in the BIOS:

Onboard Parallel Port: 378H/IRQ7
Parallel Port Mode: Normal

Are these correct? I've never edited them. My motherboard is an Asus P2B-F.

Reply 5 of 6, by Gmlb256

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The DOS driver requires EMM to be loaded in order to work and it is only required when running MS-DOS mode. When running DOS games within Windows, those drivers are totally unnecessary and there should be already a SB16 emulation driver in the Device Manager.

Reply 6 of 6, by lmttn

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Windows does detect the SB16 emulator in device manager. I tried installing a few different games and all of them freeze when testing in the config programs and crash immediately upon starting the actual games. Auto-detect options in these config programs either detect nothing or detect the wrong card.

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