Received ESS 1938 soundcard (has sb-link header on card) and that doesn't even work. Driver loads fine and shows tdma used, but get same results as au8830; nothing can find the sound blaster resources. Used pciset to enable lpc legacy DMA and serr to nmi, but no difference what so ever (some of these options are enabled by default according to sb750 data sheet). Enabled all nmi settings I could find according to sb750 data sheet on my sb950. Thing is, cards all initialize and drivers load fine without using pciset and I get the same results; with SBLive!, au8830 and ess1938. Guessing it's a DMA problem with these AM3+ southbridges or I didn't use pciset properly (pciset showed settings change). Only difference between sound cards, is live! midi port can't be detected in addition to SB resources; with au8830 and 1938, midi ports are found and only SB resources aren't.
Windows 95 requires vxd drivers. WDM drivers are not supported (only partial wdm implementation exists for Win95 and nothing seems to use it. At least for live card.).
Windows 95 results for sound in Dos games:
Live! sb16 emulation with vxd drivers, cause hard locks, blue screen or no sound at all; have to disable sb16 emulation device in safe mode to continue using windows. No sound for Dos games whatsoever.
ESS 1938 didn't work either. Has sound blaster emulation device for Dos enabled but games will not detect SB resources whatsoever. Behaves the same as in realmode DOS (didn't test midi). At least it doesn't bluescreen or cause no sounds to be heard for Windows (can set default midi device to FM and midi player uses it hehe). Don't know if different resource settings in device manager might've fixed this.
AU8830 does work! Dos games under Windows95 find appropriate resources and can be heard just fine. Midi works too; dls 1 soundbanks. You can even use software midi backends like Yamaha sw70, midi yoke with timidity++ and probably others (think you have to disable sound acceleration in A3D control panel or software midi backends don't work at all). One game that didn't work was Mortal Kombat 2; it crashed and it might have to do with the odd SB resources being irq9 and DMA 3 on au8830. You also have to lower game volumes to avoid crackling-clipping (not all games allow this unfortunately). Another problem, was I had to manually select a resource configuration for gameport, sb emulation, and mpu401 in device manager or system crashed or DOS games couldn't detect resources. Win95 isn't too good at assigning resources on its own, but thankfully it can be user adjusted; it actually gives you more control than 98 for changing memory ranges and other resources which I find to be a good thing.
Windows 98 has no problem with Live! sbpro emulation via WDM drivers up to 09-2001 (had problems with newer version from 03-2002). It's also very nice with soundfonts for DOS games. Soundfonts are free and kill any 4mb external midi module; no ground loops and totally digital. Hardware wavetable (soundfonts) doesn't have proper XG midi compatibility (how many DOS games use XG midi anyway?) and software midi backends don't seem to work for DOS games. There is no loud volume issue with Dos games, and Mortal Kombat 2 doesn't crash. It's very compatible and probably the best setup for native DOS gaming on AM3+ motherboards (and other problematic mobos).
MINI Windows 95 + Montego II review (the hunka chunka):
All in all I find Windows 95 and au8830 to be a good option for AM3+ sb950 users (perhaps current-modern mobo users in general). Everything works inside Win95 for Dos games without problems (except games that can't lower volume and don't like odd SB resources), and A3D sounds very impressive in modern games like Half Life (think you need patch from BlueShift expansion), even after all these years (way better than EAX IMO); games up to Quake 3 have A3D. It also seems to be a better hardware design (card isn't spammed with dac's to cause EMI (Live! has better DAC for rear channels than front; what's up with that?), more dynamic range (18-bit vs 16-bit standard; might be bad too haha), doesn't hog up your pci bus (Live! hogs up PCI bus and only addresses 31 bits of memory space. What the heck?), is small, has midi daughter board connector, and SPDIF expansion header (proprietary spdif expansion bracket with inputs and outputs). It's also very nice that Win95 OSR2 uses only 77.2 megabytes of HDD space with compact install and multimedia component (not including swap space), and you can remove Internet Explorer; plus it shows resource conflicts that 98 hides in device manager (i/o and/or memory ranges) and let's you change most of them (think sometimes shared memory ranges can improve performance even if it shows as conflicting. Had slower performance changing memory range for rage128 from sharing pci-pci bridge. Maybe that's why 98 hides them?). USB mass storage devices do work in 95 with appropriate drivers (currently hot swap smartphone and it's fine). Vxd drivers are closer to metal which is another plus.
As a note: SB950 sata-ide emulation doesn't work too well (using gigabyte ga-970a-ud3 mobo). Smartdrv has lots of cache misses (almost %80 cache miss or worse sometimes). Games that load resources off HDD in realtime (mk1+2) experience pauses during gameplay. Only workaround is creating ramdrive and copying game contents to ramdrive and running off that (can be automated through batch file for each game). Windows 9x also needs 32-bit disk drivers disabled and an unofficial 48-bit LBA driver to re-enable; also, you can enable DMA but not for optical drives (disk access hangs entire system), and Daemon tools can cause intermittent pauses for games that run off discs (Ffvii minimal install). Mk1+2 still experiences pausing mid game despite running inside Win9x with DMA and huge cache setting; even with uide.sys (still have to run off ramdrive).
Regards
EDIT:
Tried USB-IDE emulation for optical drives and that does work good! Can enable DMA for optical drives with no hang ups this way. Sweet.
