jakethompson1 wrote on Today, 18:54:

Falcosoft wrote on Today, 11:15:

This is not true. There is no need for any 'configuration utility' if the settings configured by PnP Bios are the right ones. I have an ESS 1868f PnP in my Abit KT7a and I only need to run ESSVOL in order Dreamblaster X2 to work.

The "Plug and Play Operating System" setting in the BIOS (if any) can be a factor here, too. If it's set to "Yes" then theoretically the BIOS tries to stay hands off of cards not needed for booting.

Yes, Plug and Play Operating System is set to false on my KT7A so I always get this message at boot time:

So, updates based on all the above posts:
1. My ES1868 doesn't work without Unisound or the ESS drivers initializing it.
2. Not having a memory manager installed has no effect on my problem (Sound Blaster still doesn't work).
3. I also tried 386MAX and JEMM386 on MS-DOS 6.22 just to try everything. Neither of them fix it.
4. I am *severely* unimpressed with 386MAX, given it both bricks itself trying to optimize on my system (fails to load itself high and leaves DOS in a broken state where EDIT doesn't work) but on top of that if I get 20 KB less RAM than the same hand-written configuration with EMM386.

That's unfortunate. I'm using an ES1868 on a 486dx2-66 that does NOT have a PnP BIOS. This is on MS-DOS 6.22 with EMM386. autoexec has:

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4
ESSCFG /A:220 /I:5 /D:1 /E:0 /B:330 /J:D !
ESSVOL /V:12 /L:12 /W:12 /M:0 /C:12 /S:12 /A:12