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Problems with CT2230

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Reply 20 of 38, by shspvr

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Stojke wrote:

No matter, IDE 1 or IDE2, master, slave or cable select. The hard drive electronics were interfering with the sound card. Once i switched to an other hard drive, everything worked fine.

I see

Reply 22 of 38, by Stojke

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[Revive]

In the past few months ive tried various hard drives, from WDC to Maxtor to Seagate to Quantum, you name them.

This exact same error occurs EVERY TIME!
It is extremely annoying that i cant use any other hard drive bigger than this 3GB Samsung where it works perfectly.
Surely there has to be some more technical explanation than "it isn't compatible"?

Ive just tested 3x 40GB hard drives (Maxtor, WDC, Seagate) and all failed to work correctly with the OPL3 tracker. Can any one help?

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Reply 23 of 38, by 5u3

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Just wanted to mention that Adlib Tracker II has speed issues on all my machines. The only thing that works for me is to use a 486 CPU at 25 MHz or slower.

Reply 24 of 38, by Stojke

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Strange, i didn't experience any speed issues. I am running it on a Dell OptiPlex system, 700MHz Pentium III.

But that might be it, but i highly doubt it since it works perfectly on a 3GB Samsung HDD...

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Reply 25 of 38, by jwt27

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5u3 wrote:

Just wanted to mention that Adlib Tracker II has speed issues on all my machines. The only thing that works for me is to use a 486 CPU at 25 MHz or slower.

What kind of speed issues do you mean? Tracks playing at the wrong speed or other random things (like hard drive problems or keyboard keys getting stuck)?

I did notice some tracks with excessive macro abuse will really slow things down even on a Pentium 3.

Reply 26 of 38, by 5u3

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Nevermind, it seems that whatever bug caused my problem, it has been fixed in version 2.4.00 😁

With the earlier versions my OPL chips only produce deafening garbage instead of lovely FM sound - unless I slow down the machine to 25 MHz or disable L1 cache. Of course the tracker is almost impossible to use at those speeds.

Update: I found the setting that fixes the garbage sound in the config file: opl_latency=1 in ADTRACK2.INI. It was set to 0 by default in earlier versions but changed to 1 in v2.4.00.

Reply 27 of 38, by elfuego

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I never heard of IDE conflicting with a sound card before. Why dont you try deleting (or moving away from the root) autoexec.bat and config.sys completely and trying to run Win98 in pure-windows mode. I've noticed that sometimes sb16 dos driver and windows driver do not like each other. Especially the PnP-ones.

Reply 28 of 38, by 5u3

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elfuego wrote:

I've noticed that sometimes sb16 dos driver and windows driver do not like each other. Especially the PnP-ones.

Usually the reason for "fighting" DOS and Windows SB16 PnP drivers is that they may use different CTPNP.INI configuration files (one in the DOS drivers directory and one in the Windows directory).

Reply 29 of 38, by Stojke

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The thing is, the widnows system and everything else installed on the hard drives is identical to the samsung hard drive where it works perfectly...
Well maybe not identical, i did add some stuff to the sys.ini (himem, etc), but i doubt thats the cause. Oh, and i did install some drivers for SB Live when testing it. I dont know, i should reinstall the windows on the Samsung one and see does it work than.

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Reply 30 of 38, by HunterZ

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Maybe your controller can't properly handle drives over 4GB? Most drives can be jumpered or have overlay software installed that can make them more compatible with older controllers, although it may limit their capacity.

Reply 32 of 38, by Jolaes76

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I do not think that the Hard disks themselves are to blame here. Check what DMA mode the controller enforces on your system and try to lower that (or disable UltraDMA completely)

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

Reply 33 of 38, by HunterZ

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You mentioned the SB card has a CD-ROM controller of some kind. Are you able to disable that via the CDIRQ jumper?

Does the Windows Device Manager report any IRQ or other resource conflicts? (I guess that's a moot point if you can't boot, but maybe boot off the working drive and try one of the problem drives as a slave?)

Reply 34 of 38, by Stojke

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Yes the CDROM is disabled on all 3 cards i have.

How do i disable UltraDMA in Windows 98se?
And what IRQ conflicts should i search for?

In the device manager nothing is reported under 5 , and there are lots of things under 11.
A little deeper explanation would be grateful, i am not that informed on this sort of things.

EDIT

I just tried some Saxion Adlib discs with songs, it works perfectly... Have no idea what is the problem. Plus, windows can not reboot into DOS mode it says

Windows protection mode error or something.
But i can start it from F8 startup menu

Reply 35 of 38, by HunterZ

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In Win9x with a Plug-n-Play BIOS, the higher IRQs can supposedly be shared by some PCI devices. Generally you don't want multiple devices on the same IRQ, though, because then they end up having to fight to communicate with the CPU. This can result in instability, poor performance, stuttering, etc.

In this case, you'll want to make sure that your sound card and disk controller(s) are not sharing IRQs with other things (and especially not with each other). One way to do this is to turn off PnP OS support in your BIOS, which will cause the BIOS to assign IRQs on boot instead of letting Win9x do it. Usually the BIOS does a better job, as Win9x tends to be too aggressive about stacking up multiple devices on a single IRQ.

Disabling UltraDMA can often be done by opening the properties for your disk controller's entry in the Windows Device Manager. Sometimes the BIOS will let you control it as well.

Reply 36 of 38, by Stojke

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Ok, i have reinstalled windows on the Samsung drive and installed MS-DOS 7.1

The app does not work at all. So it wasn't the hard drive in my opinion but the program it self or some configuration issue.

Might be a speed issue as one member mentioned. Also, now the volume is 2x louder than it was in Windows MS DOS mode...

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Reply 37 of 38, by vetz

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The horror of this card. It took me hours, but I managed to figure it out. I had the same issue as Stojke. Here is what I did. Please note that this is my first experience with a non-PnP Soundblaster card.

Pulled out the old PnP AudioExcel 310 card and plugged in the CT2230. Windows hangs at boot, so I go into safemode and remove all sound devices. Reboot into Windows, install Windows 98 Soundblaster 16 driver. Won't activate as Stojke described in his first post. I run diagnose.exe and here I do get some sound, but it won't let me continue as the DOS driver is not installed. Argh. I download the DOS driver and finds out that it won't run under Windows 95 even though I boot into pure DOS. Luckily a Youtube comment from Mau1wurf1977 saves the day with using SETVER. I get pass the previous error message it and install the DOS driver. The installation program also runs through the Windows folder, but I don't stop it (mistake I would pay for later on). When I reboot I now see three messages pop up on the boot screen: "Sound conflict error, midi conflict error, joystick conflict error". I think wtf? The integrated soundcard is supposed to be disabled. So I change the jumper on the CT2230 from 220 to 240 and MIDI port from 330 to 300, but I get the same errors.

Meanwhile I try to enter the BIOS but to no availability. I have no idea what is wrong as the computer does not react to repeated pressing on F10. So Google tell me that early Compaqs use a 2MB partition on the harddrive to run the BIOS UI. Jeez, and I'm using a newer harddrive. Ofc I can't find that software on the internet for my system, so I connect the old harddrive and run the whole restore CD that came with the Compaq (since the drive has been formatted previously). Finally I can get into the BIOS UI to deactivate the integrated ESS 1888 soundcard again! I don't know how it activated itself automatically. Also it should be PnP and not cause these kind of issues, but anyway, it got fixed with deactivating it again.

So back into Windows. All DOS games now have sound, but nothing in Windows. Until this point I've been using the driver from creative.com, but then I gave the integrated Windows98 driver a shot. I get some sound! but... alot of systray, rundll32 and other error messages pop up giving a page fault error in sb16snd.drv everytime I try to play some midi files or open the mixer. Some more time on Google and I find out it has to be the previous DOS/Win 3.x driver install that is messing it up. Luckily it created backup files, so I switch them and after a restart finally everything is working.

Now lets update my signature 😉

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Reply 38 of 38, by Stojke

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Whoa, i know that feel 😁

Also, it seems that the error was caused by Serial ports on my side too. So disabling those as well might fix the problem more quickly.
I still have no idea how to play MIDI with Sound Blaster 16. Nor how to use it in Impulse Tracker.

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