First post, by RichPimp
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello all, I've been visiting these boards for years but this is my first post. Big thanks to Phil's Computer Lab for reigniting my interest in 90's vintage computer hardware with his excellent YouTube videos. Anyways, on to my question:
I have a Windows 98 machine with the following specs:
ASUS CUV4X Mobo
P3 733 MHz Coppermine
512Mb RAM
2 Voodoo 2's 12Mb in SLI
Gainward Geforce 3 Ti 200 128Mb
ESS Audiodrive ES1868F ISA PnP
Sound Blaster Live SB0220 PCI
I have the ESS card currently installed and it's working great. Through the BIOS I have disabled the parallel and serial ports, as well as the onboard sound, and I have reserved IRQ 7 and DMA 1 for this card. So far DOS games played in a DOS window in Win 98 sound just as I remember (I haven't set up pure DOS yet). However, I find the music in Build games (Duke3d and Blood to be specific) to be very underwhelming. My hope was to install the SB Live PCI card (used it long ago in my old XP machine) to live alongside the ISA card, and switch the resources in the game settings (or config files in the case of Duke3d) to use whichever card I wanted. The install of the Live card went fine and there were no hardware conflicts in Device Manager. It was, however, assigned IRQ 4, so I again went into the BIOS and reserved IRQ 5 for the PCI slot that the card was installed. Back in Windows, the card was now assigned to IRQ 5 and there were still no conflicts (there are no other resources showing that can be changed for this card). The problem is, although Windows sees the card just fine, I can't get anything to play from it. Under the multimedia settings, only the ESS card shows when selecting a preferred device. When I set the config for Duke3D to use IRQ 5 instead of 7, I receive a notification that no sound card is present. From what I've read on these boards, it should be possible to have multiple sound cards in one machine as long as there are no resource conflicts, but the Audiodrive always takes precedence. Maybe I'm overlooking something very basic here. Any thoughts on how I can get the two cards to play nice? Ideally, I'd run the line out from the ESS card into the line in of the Live card so I don't have to replug the speaker cable when using the other card. If all else fails, I may purchase a different ISA card, maybe a SoundBlaster Pro 2, though the only one I've seen for sale is more than I currently want to spend for a sound card.