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Sound Blaster Live! DOS Drivers

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Reply 61 of 83, by janskjaer

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I agree. It will probably take you more time than it's worth to get a PCI card configured correctly to do the job - if you can actually get it to work.

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Reply 62 of 83, by Jolaes76

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AFAIK the KT400 chipset works with SB Live! SB16 emulation. If my memory serves, SB16 emulation is tricky because
- the PCI card itself should have a dedicated (non-shared) IRQ,
- address range must not overlap any area between 640 kb and 1 MB, which is usually reported to be free but in fact held by a network/SCSI card or onboard integrated thingy,
- the SB16 emulation driver, just like AWEUTIL, must succeed to deploy itself in the first 4 MB of system memory, provided by EMM386 (or other memory manager)... 😅

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 63 of 83, by gerwin

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For SB Live emulation on KT400 / KT600
read my posts at this topic:
AudioPCI also supports / emulates "intelligent mode" MPU401
It might be BIOS dependant too.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 64 of 83, by filipetolhuizen

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I always found the Live so buggy, but never had a single headache with the Audigy 2 and I think it also has DOS drivers.

Reply 65 of 83, by Jolaes76

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Interesting. For me it was the other way round, did not succeed with SB16 emulation in DOS with the Audigy 2 ZS (original version, both with vxd and wdm drivers), not even with Attila Padar's hacked Audigy 1 DOS SB16 emulation drivers. In WIN98SE, the SB16 emulation kicked in, but froze in 2 seconds...

My SB Live!, however, has working SB16 emu drivers in both DOS and Windows 98SE. But I can only use it in pure DOS, because in Win98 SB16 emulation always conflicts with the real SB16 (AWE32) ISA card in my computer, no matter what resources the two cards occupy.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 66 of 83, by chinny22

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I know what you mean by not wanting to give up on legacy hardware, I'm not happy if something doesn’t work in dos, more so when I know its possible!

I had a SB Live working on a BX chipset years ago but had to swap my 10/100 realtek network card for a 10MB card or C&C would hang.

I've just got my Audigy 2 ZS working in dos on a 845G board using the hacked Audigy drivers already mentioned. I cant remember the exact error I was getting I THINK sbeinit loaded but complained about something and sbego said emulation wasn't loaded. I had to manually change ctsyn.ini to reflect what sbeint was coming up with then sbego was happy but still no sound. For that I had to add the blaster line in my autoexec.bat. Indeed Midi was mute by default.

I was using Duke3d setup for testing as I remembered it could test both 8 & 16 bit sound, but it wasn't in the shareware version I quickly downloaded of 3drelms site?

Oh yeh I noticed in Win98 my AC97 shares the same IRQ as the Audigy & dos doesn't seem to mind?
Hope some of that helps? I can check what I did better later in the week when I'm back home.

Reply 67 of 83, by filipetolhuizen

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Jolaes76 wrote:

Interesting. For me it was the other way round, did not succeed with SB16 emulation in DOS with the Audigy 2 ZS (original version, both with vxd and wdm drivers), not even with Attila Padar's hacked Audigy 1 DOS SB16 emulation drivers. In WIN98SE, the SB16 emulation kicked in, but froze in 2 seconds...

My SB Live!, however, has working SB16 emu drivers in both DOS and Windows 98SE. But I can only use it in pure DOS, because in Win98 SB16 emulation always conflicts with the real SB16 (AWE32) ISA card in my computer, no matter what resources the two cards occupy.

I never tried the Audigy 2 DOS drivers, but under Windows the card was way better than the Live.

Reply 68 of 83, by bytesaber

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In this thread, both ktorpil and fdlchris struggle to get DOS support working with PCI cards. However I could not help but wonder something. Is their trouble at all related to the fact that they were trying to setup DOS driver support for a Win9x DOS boot? They are not booting a system clean to DOS 6.22. They are trying to setup a DOS environment that builds itself on the fly from Win98 shutting down and reading in autoexec.dos and config.dos. I guess this is supposed to be the same effect as booting DOS 6.22 plain, but is it really? If it is, why would you see DOS drivers loading as Win9x boots? 😖 Do I need corrected on this concept?

I guess my question is, could they have been more successful if they dual boot DOS 6.22 and Win98 as separate partitions / OS's, and build all of their DOS driver support for PCI cards in pure DOS 6.22

Really great thread. To sum up I've gathered this:

1. PCI Sound cards will never be as compatible as a system with an ISA sound card for DOS games and programs.

2. Hardware to accomplish the above evolved and changed. It is no longer made and ultimately will be lost in time. DOSBox is a solution to carry forward for whatever platform comes ahead.

3. As a hobby, some still enjoy toying with the hardware and revisiting the past and all the headaches from then. But it can not be kept forever even if you are successful.

Reply 69 of 83, by maw

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old thread but I have a question. I have here a SB Live 5.1 PCI and Audigy PCI and with both cards I get a "pci device detect failed device not found" ... does somebody have a hint for me?

thanks

BOX#1: new rebuild no case currently | ASUS P5A | Pentium1 200 | 64MB PC100 | Voodoo3 AGP | AWE64 GOLD + SIMMConn| 16GB Kingspec DOM | DVD Drive | Dos 6.22 + Win98

Reply 71 of 83, by maw

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Jorpho wrote:

Are these cards being used in the PV42 described in your sig?

yes.

Jorpho wrote:

Do the cards work correctly in Windows?

dont know. Maybe I should install win98 for a test. Got them both on ebay and they are supposed to work.

BOX#1: new rebuild no case currently | ASUS P5A | Pentium1 200 | 64MB PC100 | Voodoo3 AGP | AWE64 GOLD + SIMMConn| 16GB Kingspec DOM | DVD Drive | Dos 6.22 + Win98

Reply 72 of 83, by Holering

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Jolaes76 wrote:

SB16 emulation is tricky because
- the PCI card itself should have a dedicated (non-shared) IRQ,

Yup... I totally agree with you there. Not only with SB16 emulation, but I've had the darndest problems with USB ports always sharing IRQ's; witnessed stupid stuff always happen on modern hardware builds with USB ports enabled (game kicking you back to desktop, intermittent hangs or slowdowns, etc).

Waiting for rs232 bracket to arrive (if it does) along with ps2 to rs232 adapter. USB ports share IRQ with pci slots (either GPU or soundcard) and I can only use one ps2 device at a time on my mobo (has combo ps2 port but only one device is allowed at a time so I have to use USB keyboard). Maybe this'll improve my situation with SB emulation in real-mode DOS, and/or SB16 emulation with SBlive!. Personally hope to use ESS1938 since it actually has good FM.

Reply 73 of 83, by Jorpho

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maw wrote:

dont know. Maybe I should install win98 for a test. Got them both on ebay and they are supposed to work.

Where did you get the drivers from, and how did you install them? Are you using SBINIT.COM or SBEINIT.COM ?

Reply 74 of 83, by maw

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Jorpho wrote:

Where did you get the drivers from, and how did you install them? Are you using SBINIT.COM or SBEINIT.COM ?

from here: http://easymamecab.mameworld.info/html/snddosdr.htm and I tried also these: http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=7 (via readme installed / SBEINIT.COM)

I installed now Win98 and used the Live ware cd - same problem, cards don't work in win and dos - win says unknown multimedia device but found at least the PCI card self. I think there is in general a PCI slot problem. Had first problems with the ATI card. I had to select manually the driver, via ATI setup it didn't find a card.

Maybe there was a reason why I switched in the past to the GA-5SMM for my other dos box. I don't remember.

update: I tested a couple of stuff today and ordered finally a "new" board. again a GA-5SMM since this one runs in my other box flawless. I also thought in general to get a CT5807. But can somebody confirm that with this one I don't have to use emm386 to let it run in DOS?

BOX#1: new rebuild no case currently | ASUS P5A | Pentium1 200 | 64MB PC100 | Voodoo3 AGP | AWE64 GOLD + SIMMConn| 16GB Kingspec DOM | DVD Drive | Dos 6.22 + Win98

Reply 75 of 83, by Jorpho

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maw wrote:

I installed now Win98 and used the Live ware cd - same problem, cards don't work in win and dos - win says unknown multimedia device but found at least the PCI card self. I think there is in general a PCI slot problem. Had first problems with the ATI card. I had to select manually the driver, via ATI setup it didn't find a card.

The only thing I can think of is to try changing the "PnP OS" option in your BIOS.

maw wrote:

But can somebody confirm that with this one I don't have to use emm386 to let it run in DOS?

All of the ISA Sound Blaster cards work without EMM386; all PCI Sound Blaster cards use either SBINIT.COM or SBEINIT.COM and always require EMM386. There's no point in worrying about it unless there's some game you really want to play that you know will not work with EMM386. There aren't a lot of them. (Ultima VII is the big one, and there are other ways to run that.)

Reply 76 of 83, by maw

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Jorpho wrote:

The only thing I can think of is to try changing the "PnP OS" option in your BIOS.

this I tried. didn't worked.

maw wrote:

All of the ISA Sound Blaster cards work without EMM386; all PCI Sound Blaster cards use either SBINIT.COM or SBEINIT.COM and always require EMM386. There's no point in worrying about it unless there's some game you really want to play that you know will not work with EMM386. There aren't a lot of them. (Ultima VII is the big one, and there are other ways to run that.)

yes it was about games. and hmm I wonder what game it was 😀 ...I will come back on that 😀 ...ps. I tested via SBEINIT.COM with ems=false option and it loaded also.

BOX#1: new rebuild no case currently | ASUS P5A | Pentium1 200 | 64MB PC100 | Voodoo3 AGP | AWE64 GOLD + SIMMConn| 16GB Kingspec DOM | DVD Drive | Dos 6.22 + Win98

Reply 78 of 83, by maw

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no as I tested the sb live first with the mameworld drivers

BOX#1: new rebuild no case currently | ASUS P5A | Pentium1 200 | 64MB PC100 | Voodoo3 AGP | AWE64 GOLD + SIMMConn| 16GB Kingspec DOM | DVD Drive | Dos 6.22 + Win98