First post, by pr04
Quickly and straight to the point, here's the rundown:
Pentium 4 3.2GHz HT Prescott (1M L2) installed on Asus P4P800
1024MB PC3200 DDR400 RAM
Motherboard running at 800MHz FSB
1 AGP, 5PCI
AGP: NVidia GeForce 6800GT
PCI
**
Creative soundblaster Audigy 2ZS (Not recognizable within DOS anyway)
Creative soundblaster 16 PCI (4th PCI slot is reserved IRQ 7)
etc. etc., the rest is not important
THE PROJECT:
Dual booted across 3 partitions on a 370GB HD
1st Partition,
2GB, FAT16 DOS installed
2nd Partition,
250GB, NTFS XP installed
3rd Partition,
120GB, NTFS Backup, who cares 😀
When booting into real-mode DOS 6.22 the system seems fine. So far, for the lack of expertise and current understanding, PCI slots are a b**** to be recognized within DOS, however with my Asus MB I am able to reserve IRQ7 for my sound blaster 16PCI.
Here's the problem,
Even though I can get the IRQ to be recognized at 7, the base address for the slot is 8400 and need 220H (etc.,) in order for the sound card to be detectable and fully compatible with DOS, like the old ISA cards.
My temporary solution,
Install DOSDRV and change the autoexec.bat file so that my sound card is reading 8400 IRQ 7 on startup and change it to 220 IRQ7 when DOS is botted and ready to use. This is not the BEST way to do this because when running the sound configurator for many DOS games, the system crashes because it can not detect anything on base port 220.
So in the middle of some games and when loading, the games crashes with a DOS/4GW error (2100) and I'm ASUMING it's because of either two things:
1)
Either there is a conflict or the sound card is not properly being read by the program (ODSDRV doesn't fully support the installation I am using).
or
2)
The CPU on my 3.2GHz Prescott is making some calls in the games and is not compatible with some functions and crashes.
I am not fully literate when it comes to making this work, but my next task is to take the sound blaster 16 PCI out and not load any drivers in my config.sys or autoexec.bat and see if it crashes. If it does, I can expect that there is a compatibility issue with the new CPUs and old games.
However, if it doesn't, I can then assume that there is still a better way to get my sound card working. Shave off the bugs and completely trick my computer into thinking it's an original ISA? Or find a whole new solutiion.
Please HELP!
Kindest regards,
Phil