First post, by Echtzeit
Salutations!
I have been trying to fix a problem for the last days and good old search engines have been leading me to this lovely forum many times. Sadly, my exact problem was never discussed.
I got an Omnibook 600ct here with a ESS688 and I'm trying to enable digital sound FX in MS-DOS 6.22. It has never been mentioned before that they wouldn't work, but for some reason they don't work for me or at least behave very strangely. Here is the list of things I have figured out so far.
- Music through OPL3 is working in almost every game when selecting Soundblaster Pro, as was suggested many times
- there are a ton of different esscfg.exe out there, but the one that seems to be the right one for my card only lets me change IRQ and DMA (which looks to be right, according to different sources), but it doesn't matter what combination I try, none worked so far
- sound effects are working in almost no game I've tried (with a few exceptions)
+ Wing Commander 1 - well, at least you can hear the shots, those are digital, right? (in WC2 the speech is not working)
+ the game Lollypop only lets you pick AdLib as card, but effects are working (jumping sounds etc.)
+ SimAnt has sounds working (digging etc.)
- some setup routines give you a hint of might be wrong, here are a few examples:
+ the setup from Dark Forces (iMuse) can't auto detect my card, but when I enter the details manually, music plays fine, sound doesn't (the bar starts to move, then aborts pretty quickly)
+ the game Oldtimer has a setup called idMAS and if I try to start it after putting in my details, it tells me that: "The soundhardware for VOICE uses a DMA channel that doesn't respond". Huh, never heard that before. What does it mean, not respond? The setup pre-selects the correct channels my card is supposed to be at... Again, tried all of them.
- Fate of Atlantis and Civilization won't start at all, all I get is a black screen
- last night I had the idea that maybe the card is plug & play and maybe it would work if I installed it in Windows 98, after trying out a couple of different drivers I found one that works in Windows and let's me play sounds AND MIDI (all the others would crash my system, play no sound or only play MIDI), but this sadly changes nothing for DOS games, they still behave the same way as in pure DOS
So, after all this testing, I actually don't have a clue what hell is going on. Is the card broken or supposed to behave that way? ANY hint at all is highly appreciated. Maybe you guys know a few other games with good setup routines that can be used for troubleshooting or something like that? Is there an actual driver for this card to use for DOS? So many questions... (sorry!)