The problem is the drivers are confused by the PCI bus on your board. This happens with chipsets from ~2000 onward.

Edit au30mmed.inf and remove the semicolon in front of this line.
;HKR,Config,DisableBusDetection,1,1

Hopefully that will get the 98 driver working.

The funny thing is the Deskpro EN is from 1999. (Intel 810e chipset) However, even the Sound Blaster Live does strange things on the deskpro. Anyway, I'll try that out. Thanks!

Ok, so, I did the edit, and tried to install it the way I did before. There was no crashing but also nothing happened. Then I tried to force it by using it as the driver for the multimedia device thing, windows said the driver isn't designed for this unknown device, but I okd it. Then it froze, I left alone for a bit, and when I looked back... my computer had this unbelievable horse shit on the bottom of the screen, working its way up the screen. Needless to say, I rushed to the camera.

Latest drivers: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/aureal.html

Just unpack, go to device manager > update drivers and point to the folder.

There is a documented issue to do with PCI recognition but you get a very specific error message. There is a workaround, but I don't think you have this problem.

Try another PCI slot...

Great. Don't tell me you uploaded that just for me! But if you did... thanks. Hopefully something will eventually work on at least the Pentium 4, which seems to have more stable PCI. (That... breathtaking crash notwithstanding.) (Edit: I just noticed the time, so I think I'll do that in the morning.)

georgeqgreg wrote:

Great. Don't tell me you uploaded that just for me! But if you did... thanks. Hopefully something will eventually work on at least the Pentium 4, which seems to have more stable PCI. (That... breathtaking crash notwithstanding.) (Edit: I just noticed the time, so I think I'll do that in the morning.)

Hehe no I uploaded this recently. Just very slow at adding more, simply too busy. But more to come.

If you get a specific error message related to PCI let me know.

I just did this a couple of days ago. My Turtle Beach Montego II was a Dell OEM. The Dell Montego II drivers worked (I installed on a Dell Optiplex GX1). Not sure if the Dell Vortex 2 is weird like the Dell SB Live.

The DisableBusDetection tweak works for i815. First hand experience.

The 2048 drivers are buggy in games. That's why 2041 is recommended as you saw on VOGONS Drivers. Or, I should say 2041 is the newest that works properly. Older drivers might be ok too, like the OEM drivers, but you'll probably lose A3D features as you go backward in time.

That trick works on the i815, eh? Good to know, that's the computer I'm more concerned about the card working on. The P4P800S has a gameport on the motherboard just for starters...

Thanks for all the advice and support everyone, it looks like I'll be very busy most of today, so I probably won't get to try a lot of this too soon, but you can be sure I will.

Haven't had any issues on my AOpen board with i815 b-step. I do remember that the Turtle Beach driver had an issue with Incoming. It would lock up after the first or second level.

This is a COMPAQ board though. They did some... weird things.

So, I tried it on the i815. I used the INF trick detailed in one of the earliest responses. It at first seemed not to do anything, but then I saw it setting up gameport and emulation drivers, and saw it load the tray. I was quite happy, so I plugged my sidewinder in and tried to install it... but it wasn't detected. So then I tried to test the card in dxdiag... which froze the computer. After rebooting, the card wasn't seen at all! Not even the BIOS can see it. Ok, so how much have I screwed up so far?

Do you have another card (there is a reason I always buy 2 or 3 items of the same kind) or can you try the card in another computer?

Of course. I've been basically using the Pentium 4 to diagnose pesky cards. My sidewinder is receiving power from the game port if it means anything. Anyway, I still haven't got it to do anything on 98 on the newer computer.

Sounds like the card may be dieing. Have you tried it as the only PCI card installed, and in different PCI slots? Win9x can be a real pain about PCI stability.

It might even be worth trying a fresh install of 98SE with APM mode forced instead of ACPI. I assume 98SE is using ACPI mode on those motherboards. ACPI can cause more PCI headaches.
"setup /p i"

I think it is in APM mode? I might have messed up drivers a bit though. I remember forever ago I tried to install this USB printer. It turned out that you had to actually plug it in during the installshield program. If you didn't it would be impossible to install at all and you'd have to format Windows 98. I think I eventually gave up and just did an XP dual boot for the printer. (My mother for some reason preferred the XP interface anyway.)

Anyway, looks like I'll be moving the card around a bit more. I really do hope I didn't kill it. 😒

Moving it to another slot, it's detected by the motherboard. Trying to install the drivers again, it freezes for a bit, then finds gameports and all the nice stuff, then since I disabled the onboard audio the card's now what Windows tries to play system sounds on... and when it tries it crashes. I also saw it put the DOS emulator in my autoexec, since I have it set to boot to DOS. The DOS program gives an error of hardware not found or something else.

(You can probably HEAR me considering getting a SBPCI128. Or maybe a board with ISA!)

The card could just be faulty...

I wanted to have a more definitive answer, so I burned Puppy Linux to a CD and used it to play a WAV of a USB drive through the Vortex2. Sounds great! I'd say the sound card works. Can't figure out the gameport in linux, but I'm guessing old game controllers aren't a huge priority in linux land.

Anyway, I'm obviously doing something as far as Windows 98 is concerned wrong.