I should have replied to this ages ago.

I have a sblive in my old Athlon system working perfectly as a pure dos sound card along with a 64mb ti4200 video card.
I was having a look at Your autoexec.bat and config.sys files, there seems to be an awful lot of unnecessary lines in there, but I run mine from a floppy
boot to avoid any windows issues. I have the ctsyn line above the set blaster, not sure if that makes a difference or not though.

I am curious to know how much conventional memory You have free when You run mem/c/p

Have a look at my files and see if anything helps there, I have a lot of rem statements where I can change lines if required.
I used a lot of alternate drivers as the standard ones wouldn't leave enough conventional memory free when used.

One other thing might be to turn off the parallel port in the bios as that used irq 7 by default. Asus P4P800 was one of the best
mobos around, mine is in storage awaiting a resurrection at some future date.

Excellent post Imperious 😀

Hi Imperious.

Yes, there were several unrequired lines in there originally but I did also try using sound blaster emulation loading the bare minimum in Autoexec.bat and Config.sys with the same results. My parallel port and serial ports were also disabled in the bios for 2 reasons. Firstly to prevent any conflicts and secondly because those ports were not required.

Looking at your Config.sys settings, I'm curious as to why you have EMM386 and HIMEM on several lines with the same switches written more than once? Also what is HIRAM.EXE?

Did you have the SB Emulation working in pure Dos or via Win9x?

Lastly, what motherboard are you using exactly?

Disregard my pure dos/win9x question as I re-read your post again and you've already stated it was working fine in pure dos. Sorry.

Disregard Hiram.exe as according to the docs it was designed for cpu's up to 486, no wonder it never worked.
The motherboard I use for Dos/Win95/Win98 is a ABIT KT7-Raid. (Caps replaced due to bulging due to Abit quality issue)

I think the Ti4200 uses a large chunk of the upper memory, and I had a lot of trouble getting enough conventional memory freed
up so that games would run properly. What You see is various alternative memory managers I was playing around with, but eventually I
achieved around 600k free by using alternate mscdex, mouse, and cdrom drivers.
Any line with a REM in front does not load, so can be disregarded.

Thinking about this a bit more jogged my memory a bit
Just remembered that Win98/95 loads the autoexec and config files every boot, and it was the legacy sblive settings that were being loaded that was causing sound card
problems in windows, not dos, which is why I went down the floppy disk boot method.

According to Your motherboards manual (P4P800 SE) You can change the IRQ settings in bios from Available to Reserved, where reserved sets it to legacy/isa mode. So if You
are using IRQ 7 for the sblive set that to Reserved.

I found a sblive dos help file in my docs, so see if anything there helps too.

The Abit KT7 Raid is an older motherboard which still has an ISA slot. The older motherboards (slot 1 and S370) I've tested sb live dos emulation with work fine. The issue I was trying to work through was getting emulation working on socket 478 motherboards onwards. If I had an ISA slot on this build in particular, I wouldn't bother using a PCI sound card for dos sound at all as they're nowhere near as compatible and don't sound nearly as good. Plus I love my midi daughterboards and PCI sound cards most of the time lack a waveblaster header.

I believe the main issue with modern boards is their lack of NMI and DDMA. I think my best bet is with the Vortex 2 PCI cards. I only briefly tested my Diamond MX300 PCI sound card but had trouble with the latest drivers and then decided to wipe Win98 SE and make this a dedicated XP Pro rig with a 7800 GS and 3GB of Ram.

Regarding reserving IRQ 5 or 7 in the Bios, that's the first thing I tried but didn't have any luck unfortunately.

Lastly, in terms of your TI4200 graphics card using up upper memory, graphics cards from my knowledge don't use up any dos memory at all as dos doesn't require graphics card drivers to be loaded in dos. Usually dos games had a driver inbuilt into the game itself to access specific graphics cards like S3 or Voodoo cards. Some games that use SVGA graphics may also require UNIVBE due to VESA issues to work correctly but again, loading for instance ATI or Nvidia drivers is not required nor do I think dos drivers are even available. Correct me if I'm wrong though as I love to learn new things 😀

I think it's more the hardware of the video card using the high memory area. I could be completely wrong, but I remember running some dos programs that identify what memory
areas are being used by and am fairly certain it was video card/AGP using that up.
I do actually have a sb16 here so I could run that in the ISA slot if I wanted. I was trying to get the best of both worlds as I use that computer as mentioned in Win95/98 also with
a voodoo 1 or voodoo 2 graphics card for glide games.

I remember that around 2000 my old sb16 couldn't keep up with Windows game speed requirements due to the lagging ISA slot.

Thanks for letting me know about all You have tried, it does look like You are running out of options.

Imperious wrote:

Thanks for letting me know about all You have tried, it does look like You are running out of options.

As I said, the Vortex 2 chipset PCI cards like the Diamond MX300 may be our salvation when running SB emulation in Dos using modern motherboards. Not gonna give up hope just yet 😀

I tried to get SB Live DOS Emulation to work with a SB0220 on a P4 build but it would never work. Just got to a new Athlon 64 build on an Asus A8V-Deluxe and it works flawlessly so I guess it's all about having the correct motherboard and chipset 😀

I remember my old sblive using DOS SB16 emulation on my old socket 423 P4.