borgie83 wrote:

Now this motherboard does not have DDMA or NMI routing but using Rayer's SERR Patch I've managed to enable NMI routing on the motherboard which is fantastic!

It does not seem reasonable to state that you are "so close to getting this working" if this is your primary accomplishment. (I should try that patch, though.)

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would suggest stripping everything that you don't need out of your autoexec.bat and config.sys for starters; most of the lines you have in there are already redundant. Get a simple test game working first with a bare minimum configuration and then worry about putting other things back in.

Hi Jorpho and thanks for the reply. Was honestly not expecting to hear from anyone so quickly considering how long people have been working on this issue.

And I agree with you regarding your comment. I have just been getting just a little excited lately seeing some progress as initially I had got as far as most others. That being that the sound blaster live emulation wasn't being detected at all. At least now it seems to recognise it but then, as stated previously, hangs or resets the computer. This occurs in SBEGO.EXE and also if I try to start a dos game. Most hang on the loading screens. The computer also sometimes hangs in the game setups when I go to select a Sound Blaster card from the list of available sound cards. That Rayer's patch seems to have helped a bit. I'd provide the link to his website but I'm not sure I'm allowed to post links on vogons?

Whats strange though is that editing the STACKS line has various results. Setting it too high doesn't detect the sound emulation at all. Same thing goes with setting it too low. Taking the line out all together results in the "is sound blaster emulation enabled" error message. Does anyone have any recommended STACKS settings?

I'm not at home to edit the AUTOEXEC or CONFIG files so I'll have to do that tomorrow night.

Admittably, I did initially try running this with minimal lines in the AUTOEXEC and CONFIG files but that was before I found the Rayer's SERR Patch. So it may just work. Either way, I'll be sure to let you know.

Thanks again.

Ok, so I finally got around to testing this with minimal lines in the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. After removing all the non essentials, basically only leaving HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE to load, I went to load SBEGO.EXE from the Sound Blaster Live's Dos driver folder and it gave me an error message regarding STACKS overflow and suggested I edit the CONFIG.SYS file. Everything I try seems to be coming down to this damn STACKS line in the CONFIG.SYS file. I've tried using the following,

STACKS=9,256
STACKS=9,512
STACKS=9,128
STACKS=64,512 (Max allowed)

I've also tried editing the SYSTEM.INI file under the [386Enh] heading, edit the MinSPs=9 to match the STACKS in the CONFIG.SYS file with no luck either.

If I use any settings above 9, SBEGO.EXE gives me the "is sound blaster emulation enabled" error message.
If I use any settings from 9 and below, my sound blaster emulation settings are detected but after this the computer hangs or resets depending on how she's feeling...

If anyone has got Sound Blaster Live Dos sound emulation working on an older motherboard, I'd love to know what your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT settings are.

Oh and here is a photo of my SBEGO.EXE screen after it has detected the Sound Blaster Emulation settings. In this Pic the computer has frozen forcing me to have to do a hard reset.

borgie83 wrote:

If anyone has got Sound Blaster Live Dos sound emulation working on an older motherboard, I'd love to know what your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT settings are.

An older motherboard requires no exotic configuration in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for Sound Blaster emulation. It pretty much just runs, as long as you have EMM386 loaded.

I would've thought the same regarding using an older motherboard but on my other Windows 98 system I have a older motherboard with an ISA Slot and when I inserted the Live card in that PC and installed the latest drivers the same error message came up in SBEGO.EXE. And that's with EMM386 and HIMEM loaded. That motherboard has a VIA chipset though so I'm not sure if that makes any difference.

I'm surprised that after all these years no one has created custom drivers to get this working. Similar to how DosBox uses sound blaster emulation.

borgie83 wrote:

I would've thought the same regarding using an older motherboard but on my other Windows 98 system I have a older motherboard with an ISA Slot and when I inserted the Live card in that PC and installed the latest drivers the same error message came up in SBEGO.EXE. And that's with EMM386 and HIMEM loaded. That motherboard has a VIA chipset though so I'm not sure if that makes any difference.

I'm surprised that after all these years no one has created custom drivers to get this working. Similar to how DosBox uses sound blaster emulation.

Tell me about it. From what I remember, it was pretty darned faithful to the SB16 sound when played through games..

borgie83 wrote:

when I inserted the Live card in that PC and installed the latest drivers the same error message came up in SBEGO.EXE. And that's with EMM386 and HIMEM loaded.

You are running SBEINIT.COM before SBEGO.EXE, right?

borgie83 wrote:

That motherboard has a VIA chipset though so I'm not sure if that makes any difference.

VIA chipsets specifically and Sound Blaster PCI cards are known to have serious problems. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but see for instance:
http://www.realworldtech.com/via-soundblaster-1/
http://www.realworldtech.com/via-soundblaster-2/
http://web.archive.org/web/20010628064615/htt … t133a-1-en.html

I'm surprised that after all these years no one has created custom drivers to get this working.

Well, there's MPXPlay.

Similar to how DosBox uses sound blaster emulation.

DOSBox has an entire OS running underneath it to take care of the actual hardware.

Yes I'm loading SBEINIT.COM. Loads through AUTOEXEC.BAT. And yes it loads fine...well at least it says it does.

Thanks for the links btw. Very informative read.

I'll be sure to check out this MPXPLAY. Never heard of it before.

In the mean time I have been experimenting with different BIOS settings but I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Tried setting PNP to enabled, tried assigning PCI/IRQ 1-5 to IRQ 5 and also 10....10 being where the SBLive is currently assigned, again tried changing the emulation IRQ between 5 and 7 and also setting these two IRQ's to reserved in the BIOS, tried enabling/disabling Pallet Snooping and lastly I even got desperate and tried using the onboard AC97 audio. Hmmm...

Btw, has anyone tested the PCI Diamond MX300 dos sound blaster pro emulation using this motherboard or on any pentium 4 motherboard without isa slots?

Apparently you and I are at the same impasse, I would be really interested to see if you can get the SB Live PCI card to work. I have a Sb0200 and I can't for the life of me get DOS games to detect it. Works great for windows applications though. So ironically I am running DOSbox on windows 98. 🤣

King_Corduroy, yeah it's very annoying! I've tried everything as you can see from above. I've also got a diamond mx300 pci sound card which I haven't got around to testing as yet. It has sound blaster pro dos emulation. I didn't really want to use it though as this pc is dual booting with windows 98 se as well as windows xp pro and the diamond mx300's xp drivers are far from stable. What brand/model motherboard are you using?

I'm using a Sony Viao PCX-RX860 so no idea what the board is but it is a 1.6ghz p4 with 512mb ram and 3 or 4 pci slots. I was basically asking the same thing in the windows section and eventually someone said the quickest fix is to toss the SB live card and go buy a SB PCI 128. So eventually that is most likely what I will do (Since the Live! card only cost 5$).

Hi, I was unaware the PCI 128 had dos sound blaster emulation? Could you please tell me more about this. You've spoken to someone who actually has this card working fine in dos using a pentium 4 motherboard? If this is the case I'll happily swap out my live card for a 128. Even though the live is the better card.

Around the year 2000 I used both the SB PCI 128 and later the SB Live! cards for everything. Because that was what was available and seemed OK. They seem mediocre now. A bit below Yamaha and Aureal.

It comes down to this:

SB PCI 128 is a rebranded and slightly modified Audio PCI card originating from the Ensoniq company. With modified AudioPCI based legacy dos drivers to emulate SB16, Horrible FM Music, Passable General Midi Softsynth based on ECW soundbanks. Requires EMM386 in pure DOS.

The newer SB Live! is mostly hardware originating from the EMU company. But they adapted the same AudioPCI legacy drivers for it. FM music was told to improve a little. The rest is the same for DOS.
There are some SB-Live! models that are incompatible with some SB-Live! drivers. My first SB-Live! refused to install in windows 98 with the Windows Dosbox legacy features, and I returned it for another PCI 128. Maybe it was a rare problem, but I remember it well. Later I used other SB-Live! models which did install with all features.

Yeah I have now bought a Packard Bell Platinum 55 which is in mint condition. I was using it simply to transfer files to my PCjr by shoving the 5.25" drive in it but now I'm trying to get it to work properly so I stuck in that Sound BLaster Live! OEM card and it works great under windows, but once again DOS games cannot detect it and when run under DOS it does not function. I think this card must just not be compatible since I have tried every suggestion I could find. 🙁

I know the real version of the PCI128 works because my father had a Packard Bell 55 also when I was a kid (Unfortunately it was tossed about 5 years ago) and he had a PCI128 in it. It was probably my favorite computer to use for DOS gaming because the midi was phenomenal. 😁
(At that time I had never heard a Roland though. 😜 )

The problem with Sound Blaster is all these off brands. All the strange OEM and Value cards that look almost identical to the original card, it makes it very hard to tell which will work.

@King_Corduroy, yes creative did release many different models which was quite annoying. It basically means that if you don't know much about the card you're wishing to purchase then you're going to have to do a little research first to find the appropriate model number.

Regarding the PCI128, I'm under the impression that all creative PCI sound blasters will only work if your motherboard supports NMI. So regardless of it being a PCI16, PCI64, PCI128, PCI512 or a Live it's not going to work unless you have the right motherboard. Your previous working PCI128 may have had a different motherboard in it than the one your trying to use with your live.

In my experience anything newer than a socket 370 board is going to give you trouble with PCI Dos sound emulation. I now prefer to stick to slot 1 440BX chipset boards for my retro builds.

Yeah which means it should work in the Packard though since it is a Pentium 1 133mhz with 16mb ram, a proper vintage machine. Which is why I said that I'm thinking that the OEM Sound card may simply not support SB16 emulation under DOS.

Also he had put a different board in yes, it was some form of Aopen Dual processor board from the early 90's, still you would think the sound card would work fine on the original Packard Motherboard. Although that may be why he upgraded the machine, but he says it was all to get Soda off road racing working. So of course he put in a video card as well. 😜

What you really want to do is get an ISA sound card for that Pentium machine. You will have much more reliable results and it will most likely sound better, particularly FM synthesis. The Creative/Ensoniq DOS PCI sound driver has terrible FM quality and the wavetable synth isn't exactly super either. It's also all done in software and on a Pentium that's not gonna be good.