AWE64 - weird volume control problem in Windows 95 \ VOGONS

AWE64 - weird volume control problem in Windows 95

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First post, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-06-05, 19:10

retro games 100 Offline

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Background information: just done a fresh Windows 95 install. Then installed an AWE64 gold card. Ran the driver update package for it found on Creative's website.

Problem: the volume for all music and sound is very low. But the weird thing is, the volume sliders don't affect the volume of the music/sound coming from the card. If I click on mute to silence all sound, I can still hear the sound! It's as if the volume control panel (both the MS volume bar, and the Creative volume mixer) are "disconnected" from the sound card hardware.

Any ideas please people?

Edit: It must have been a strange driver installation issue. I reinstalled things in a completely different order, and now the volume works. I'll have to make a careful note of which things get installed in which order, and I'll write it all up when I do my quick test review of this card tomorrow.

Reply 1 of 5, by sliderider

Posted on 2011-06-05, 20:13

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Try an older driver?

Reply 2 of 5, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-06-05, 21:13

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Just before my successful AWE64 reinstallation attempt, I did not install the Windows 95 volume control component from the Win95 CD-ROM. That may have helped. In order to see the volume control in the task bar, you need to install it from the Windows 95 CD-ROM. It doesn't get installed automatically when you install Windows 95.

Reply 3 of 5, by TheMAN

Posted on 2011-06-05, 22:28

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the AWE64 Gold has NO amplifier... that's why the volume is very low

also, it's not a good idea to download any legacy drivers from creative's website... they don't have everything up there and so it's not a reliable source

you should be downloading the drivers in malik's thread instead, which also has my "super" ISO for all of the 16-bit sound blaster cards... lots of utils, fixes, and full driver/app suite... in the case of the AWE64, it is needed to get the wavsynth portion of the card working

Reply 4 of 5, by retro games 100

Posted on 2011-06-06, 11:59

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Solved. I found out what the specific problem was. I googled the archive newsgroups on the net, and discovered that the Creative driver update package called "sbw9xup.exe" causes some problems on some machines, including problems with the volume and also mixer settings. It seems that in some cases it does not install correctly.

Someone on usenet called "Knows98" posted some help about this. It's here. (About the 6th post from the top.) Basically, he describes how to manually uninstall and then reinstall this update package. I followed these instructions, and it works! 😀 I double-checked that the drivers installed were the latest ones found inside this update package, and they were.

Reply 5 of 5, by TheMAN

Posted on 2011-06-06, 22:25

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I recall there seems to be problems with the drivers with some Pentium Pro (PII/PIII counts) and K6 machines, there were updates to fix that, but it seems you got a handle of it

good job!

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