Something odd just happened. I tried something unusual. I put in both sb cards at the same time, then the sb16 worked properly and had the correct settings. I turned off and removed the awe64 and turned it back on, and the sb16 is still working. Tried a few games and midi and sound work perfectly. I'd like to try the awe64, but now I'm afraid to change anything since it works now for some strange reason. Is the midi emulation on the awe64 worth it over sticking with the 16 now that it seems to be working? Btw, yeah msd still shows irq 5 to be used by lp2 even though it's working.

Well many games support the AWE directly, so it depends on what games you are playing.

For newer DOS games I would definitely use the AWE as the MIDI music sounds nice compared to FM.

I'm sure you will get it going somehow 😀

AWE64 is SB16 + wavetable synthesis. If none of your games use it, then there's no reason to use it over the SB16.

DOS doesn't recognise sound cards. That's why you will never see MSD reporting a sound card at any resource.

And MSD says Detected No for LPT2 (and LPT 1 as you've disabled it), so that should mean nothing that DOS can recognise is using those resources.

AdamP wrote:

AWE64 is SB16 + wavetable synthesis. If none of your games use it, then there's no reason to use it over the SB16.

DOS doesn't recognise sound cards. That's why you will never see MSD reporting a sound card at any resource.

And MSD says Detected No for LPT2 (and LPT 1 as you've disabled it), so that should mean nothing that DOS can recognise is using those resources.

I was thinking that's what it meant, but for some reason sound blaster setup was reporting that irq 5 was in use as an error, until it started working. Not sure what games take advantage of awe wt synth.

Thanks for everyone's replies, they were all helpful! Think I'll stick with the sb16 for now! 😀

thewidow13 wrote:

Not sure what games take advantage of awe wt synth.

The games that I have that can use the AWE (or wavetable in general) are:

Dungeon Keeper
Theme Hospital
Theme Park
Little Big Adventure
Lands of Lore (1 and 2)
Simon the Sorcerer (1 and 2) (1 has mt32 only I think)
Discworld
Simcity 2000
And probably more that I can't remember off the top of my head...

Dungeon Keeper specifically uses the AWE to load soundfonts to have extra ambient sound effects (see here)

Went ahead and tried the awe64 and it worked, kind of. Most games seem to work fine (doom, warcraft, commander keen, god of thunder, and a few others) but there are issues with other games that worked fine with the sb16. Lemmings has no sound now, and King's Quest 5 has midi and sound, but for some reason no video. KQ5 just has a black screen and I can hear the audio in the background and was able to click around and find my way to the prologue via audio cues. Unless I can figure out what's going on I think I may just stick with the sb16 and buy another 16 for the pc I took it out of.

That shouldn't be causing problems as the AWE64 uses the same core as the SB16. It may be power related, as I suppose the AWE64 may use slightly more power than the SB16.

Strange, it worked when I rebooted and didn't load cutemouse. Maybe I should try a different mouse driver.

Hi !

I know this feed is very old but that could help other users who still look for a solution to that issue (like me because I just had the same problem...
All you have to do if you are sure the resources you want your card uses are available, is to set « RESET CONFIGURATION DATA » on YES into the PCI/PNP CONFIGURATION option, this will force the system to reset all resources parameters and use the first available.

I just tried it as a final attempt after having set blaster environment variable, ctcu/ctcm, diagnose dozens of times 😁

Now I can play one of my favs DOS games Supaplex with nice music and sounds ?! Yiiihaaaaa 😎