I've been too busy to follow up but I should be able to try what was suggested when I get home.
As I previously mentioned the bios is pretty stripped back. I can charge the IRQs for some of the on-board stuff but I'm not certain I can disable it entirely. Maybe when I get home I'll take a look but it's very cut down.
You know that I think about it I did mess with the jumper that handled the base address. I think I moved it to 240 as opposed to 220. I bet the parameters it assigned while I was setting it up defaulted to 220 because that seems to be the most common address for sound cards in my limited experience. I'm going to try this one more time with the generic sound blaster drivers it gives and I'll make double certain the address matches what it is set up on the card itself.
To be fair I've been mostly working on this after I get home from work which is around midnight and I was too tired at the time to connect the dots.
I'm going to feel really stupid if that's all it was.
jjspartan0 wrote on 2026-02-15, 19:56:As I previously mentioned the bios is pretty stripped back. I can charge the IRQs for some of the on-board stuff but I'm not certain I can disable it entirely. Maybe when I get home I'll take a look but it's very cut down.
What you want to do isn't change the settings for on-board stuff, it's reserve IRQs for non-PnP peripherals.
Here's an example of the kind of screen you're looking for:
If you want to set the card to A220, I5, D1 and use 330 and I2/9 for MIDI, in this example you'd want to set IRQ 5 and 9 and DMA 1 to "Legacy ISA" and leave all the rest "PCI/ISA-PnP"
Now, on your Compaq this might look different. I tried to find examples of BIOS screens for it, but wasn't able to. The best I could find was the service manual for your system:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/manual/50 … dd544755064.pdf
It gives a generic picture of the first BIOS screen and then unhelpfully says: "NOTE: The actual menu displayed on your computer may vary slightly, depending on your configuration."
One thing is clear though: that motherboard has onboard sound (an ESS Solo-1, one of the better PCI sound options). It would be wise to disable onboard sound and MIDI, at least until you have the ISA card up and running. It's perfectly possible to have two (or more) sound cards working in the system at the same time, but that requires some next-level resource management and you don't want to try to run before you can crawl.
First thing first is finding how to reserve those IRQs and that DMA in your BIOS. If there is no way to do that, you basically can't use non-PnP ISA cards like this sound/modem combo.
When I get home I'll post a picture of the bios. It nowhere near that comprehensive there's like a grand total of 20 or so options spread across 5 tabs. I wish the bios looked like that.
Yeah there's no option to reserve irqs I can definitely tell you that though. Just the option to change IRQs for integrated peripherals. As well as change the amount of RAM to use for the onboard video chip.
Yeah this is what I'm working with. Not even close to a half way comprehensive bios. Now windows can't even tell it's there. Of course just trying to install generic soundblaster pro drivers cause Windows to crash immediately.
I think it maybe damaged now. One of the capacitors I replaced may have had it's legs touching when I installed it. The capacitor didn't explode or anything but that probably doesn't help.
I think I may give up on this soundcard.
I mean it has an on-board ess sound chip but I'm not fond of how midi sounds.
*The computer has on board ess not the soundcard.
You will likely need to disable the onboard ESS (but why? ESS often has OPL3, which is a better chip than whats in the Aztech) and likely need to force the third USB controller onto IRQ12 (Assuming the keyboard/mouse is not PS/2)
The ESS chips I've used have sounded different from what I remember. I have isa slot and figured I'd use it.
It's fine I think I'm just going to put this thing on ice for now.
wierd_w wrote on 2026-02-16, 02:49:You will likely need to disable the onboard ESS (but why? ESS often has OPL3, which is a better chip than whats in the Aztech) and likely need to force the third USB controller onto IRQ12 (Assuming the keyboard/mouse is not PS/2)
Er, no it doesn't. The ESS Solo has ESFM, which is one of the better non-Yamaha implementations, but it's still not exactly the same.
The Aztech card - see the pics - has a real Yamaha YMF262-M with YAC512 - pure OPL3 in other words.
That card is actually pretty good for DOS purposes, particularly as it's 100% hardware so no TSRs like you need with the Solo (unless using PC/PCI). That said, for most purposes the Solo should be more than good enough.
But bottom line: if there's no way to reserve resources for non-PnP cards in BIOS, you're not likely to be able to get this to work, regardless of what you disable in BIOS.
I wonder why they bothered including an ISA slot on the motherboard if there is no way to use the damn thing. They could've said 10s of cents per machine by not including it.
I found a bios update for the 5184 and the restore disc for the computer includes that one too.
I wonder if it's worth trying to update the bios to see if there are more options.
It is indeed compatible and it mentions fixing bugs so maybe it's worth a try.
jjspartan0 wrote on 2026-02-16, 17:24:I wonder why they bothered including an ISA slot on the motherboard if there is no way to use the damn thing. They could've said 10s of cents per machine by not including it.
Your machine is from around the time where ISA was almost redundant/obsolete in that class of home computer. The manufacturer certainly wouldn't be expecting mom or dad installing a previous generation sound card in there since there is a PCI based sound solution already on board. It was likely expected to be occupied by a modem/network card at most.
It should still be able to work with a sound card though. There should be a way to disable the onboard ess either in bios or via jumper. I bet it would work just fine with a newer/different sound card, my guess is the Aztec card being the main issue here. In general I've had lousy luck with "off brand" early PnP cards like that when it comes to getting them working under windows, PnP really did mean Plug-and-Pray back in the early days of the implementation, and some of these are best left to DOS as a result.
Your resource listing shows a bunch of things trying to live in IRQ5.
PCI devices 'can share' an IRQ, because each slot gets its own PCI IRQ (A, B, C, or D) to talk to the chipset with, and the *chipset* asserts the real IRQ to the processor.
ISA devices 'not so much'.
You need to get IRQ5 free.
Your device table shows lots of PCI devices all wantimg to grab hold of it. In this case, I'd do the following:
Disable the onboard LPT port to free up IRQ7.
Move the USB controller using 5, to 7.
Disable the onboard ESS Solo.
Your Aztech card should work after that.
I'll give it a try when I get home.
jjspartan0 wrote on 2026-02-16, 17:24:I wonder why they bothered including an ISA slot on the motherboard if there is no way to use the damn thing. They could've said 10s of cents per machine by not including it.
ISA PnP is a thing. The use case wasn't sound cards, as the system already has onboard sound, and it wasn't DOS as this was a Win98 era system. These days we like retro stuff, back then nobody wanted to stay in the stone age. For it's day and its (bottom-feeding low-end) market segment, this system did what was expected of it, which was to cheaply get people with little money or knowledge a system they could run Office 97 on.
jjspartan0 wrote on 2026-02-16, 01:46:Yeah this is what I'm working with. Not even close to a half way comprehensive bios. Now windows can't even tell it's there. Of […]
Yeah this is what I'm working with. Not even close to a half way comprehensive bios. Now windows can't even tell it's there. Of course just trying to install generic soundblaster pro drivers cause Windows to crash immediately.
I think it maybe damaged now. One of the capacitors I replaced may have had it's legs touching when I installed it. The capacitor didn't explode or anything but that probably doesn't help.
I think I may give up on this soundcard.
I mean it has an on-board ess sound chip but I'm not fond of how midi sounds.
Have you disabled onboard audio in BIOS (under "Security - Device security" menu)?
