Maybe Turtle Beach 56K line (Pinnacle or older Multisound) ?

peklop wrote:

Maybe Turtle Beach 56K line (Pinnacle or older Multisound) ?

Interesting, but i dont have any of those and prices seems to be too high. Theese cards operate in a different matter than other ISA Cards since you mention them?
Another thing i found about the Winbond W83626F bridge chip is that it doesnt support ISA busmaster. Do soundcards use that?

Scraphoarder wrote:

peklop wrote:

Maybe Turtle Beach 56K line (Pinnacle or older Multisound) ?

Interesting, but i dont have any of those and prices seems to be too high. Theese cards operate in a different matter than other ISA Cards since you mention them?
Another thing i found about the Winbond W83626F bridge chip is that it doesnt support ISA busmaster. Do soundcards use that?

Yes, you're spot on, that's why it won't work. Every ISA sound card I know about at least needs DMA.

There are a few newer industrial boards that supports ISA bus mastering, but generally it's a good idea to stick to Socket 370/A boards and older if you want ISA sound. Intel and Microsoft did away with ISA pretty effectively back in the day, it was a part of a programme to standardize the "multimedia PC" if I remember it right.

kaputnik wrote:

Scraphoarder wrote:

peklop wrote:

Maybe Turtle Beach 56K line (Pinnacle or older Multisound) ?

Interesting, but i dont have any of those and prices seems to be too high. Theese cards operate in a different matter than other ISA Cards since you mention them?
Another thing i found about the Winbond W83626F bridge chip is that it doesnt support ISA busmaster. Do soundcards use that?

Yes, you're spot on, that's why it won't work. Every ISA sound card I know about at least needs DMA.

There are a few newer industrial boards that supports ISA bus mastering, but generally it's a good idea to stick to Socket 370/A boards and older if you want ISA sound. Intel and Microsoft did away with ISA pretty effectively back in the day, it was a part of a programme to standardize the "multimedia PC" if I remember it right.

Thank you for making this more clear. So then i go in hardware properties in Winows 98 SE and see a DMA like 1 or 3 is allocated to an ISA soundcard, that wouldnt have any effect? Could not understand why it wouldnt work because most cards looked fine and green in Windows, but no sound.
Is there any utility that can test/query if ISA DMA busmaster is available instead of trying a bunch of sound cards with their different DOS programs?

A lot of the 845/865 will support sound cards, but not all of them. Some just inexplicably don't even when the bridge chipset does, just because they cheaped out and didn't run the extra lines needed to the ISA slot!

Check this page about Turtle Beach Multisound cards:
http://alasir.com/software/multisound/

they don´t use standard DMA like almost all other soundcards.

Fiji is cheaper ompared to Pinnacle.
(Classic and Tahiti are old gen.1 cards designed for windows 3.x)

Why do you advise a cards on Motorola chips? A man will pay a lot of money and will not get sound in DOS games! It is necessary to decide current issue and do not nonsense. And maybe the sound cards won't work not because of DMA. How buy Turtle Beach will decide it?

I saw and tested about ten i845 and i865 boards with ISA bus. ALL OF THEM have DMA settings (PCI and ISA PnP/Legacy ISA) in BIOS setup. Please check it first. If present (and if BIOS is its own) it MUST play sound.

I know only one board with ISA on i865 chipset that doesn't support DMA. It is IPoX IP-4PCI2E. Because its southbridge is not ICH5. Never had this board.

Scraphoarder wrote:

peklop wrote:

Maybe Turtle Beach 56K line (Pinnacle or older Multisound) ?

Interesting, but i dont have any of those and prices seems to be too high. Theese cards operate in a different matter than other ISA Cards since you mention them?
Another thing i found about the Winbond W83626F bridge chip is that it doesnt support ISA busmaster. Do soundcards use that?

Turtle Beach Multisound series feature a very high audio quality, and they don't use DMA. But it's not guaranteed they will run on your system. That said, they are very tricky to setup, especially in newer systems. I for one couldn't run a Turtle Beach Pinnacle on a Pentium 4 Windows 98 SE system no matter how hard I tried - there always were some resource conflicts.

If you manage to avoid or solve these conflicts, you will get sound and MIDI in Win98 (Tahiti and Fiji will give sound only as they have no MIDI synths). But concerning DOS, the situation is less bright:

- Multisound Classic will give you sound and MIDI, but with just few games out of the box. Some tinkering with the drivers will give you maybe 100-200 game titles. And you need a MIDI driver patched by me, otherwise you'll get mismatched drums.
- Tahiti is like Multisound Classic but with no MIDI engine. You will get PCM sound in maybe 100 titles if you tinker with drivers.
- Pinnacle will give you a quality MPU-401 MIDI that is compatible with nearly everything, but no sound as Pinnacle's PCM engine has no drivers for DOS games.
- Fiji will give you nothing as it's just a Pinnacle without its MIDI engine.

Also have in mind that TB cards are somewhat rare and expensive, and usually you have to pay about $100 for one.

So, let's sum up:

Strengths of TB Multisound soundcards:

- very good quality low noise output
- high quality MIDI engine (in Classic and Pinnacle)
- no DMA needed (although it's not anyway guaranteed that they will work with your motherboard)

Weaknesses:

- resource hogs, high probability of conflicts especially on later systems
- hard to set up
- incompatible with SB and Adlib standards
- not so much DOS games support Multisound Classic PCM audio - only titles that use DIGPAK sound library
- really fucked up DOS support of Multisound Classic's MIDI engine: both patch loader and AIL driver work incorrect. I kind of fixed the AIL driver (minor inconsistencies still remain), but not the patch loader, and to get patches loaded correctly one needs to run Windows 3.1, wait for its drivers to load patches into the soundcard, then exit Windows 3.1, and only then you are ready to go.
- no DOS PCM audio support for Pinnacle and Fiji
- hard to get and expensive

Imho, if you like to spend 100+$ for the sake of experiment, you might buy a Multisound Classic to see if it works with your system. But anyway you won't get many DOS game titles working even if you succeed. If you just want to play games, you better turn away from TB Multisound series.

Although, if you're aimed primarily at Windows gaming, then your chances are substantially higher.

Myself, I have both Classic and Pinnacle. Currently I use Classic in a Pentium-60 Socket 4 system with DOS and Win 3.1 (as it is currently impossible to use the card without Win 3.1).

It's not one of those motherboards where you can use the onboard sound or a separate sound card, but not both at once, is it? If so, disable onboard sound in the BIOS and try again...

yawetaG wrote:

It's not one of those motherboards where you can use the onboard sound or a separate sound card, but not both at once, is it? If so, disable onboard sound in the BIOS and try again...

I tried to disable the onboard also, but no luck with that. I have put that motherboard back in a box and will try some others i have with a different bridge chip. The reason i wanted to use the Intel D845WR was because it could fit in a nice small mATX case. Because lack of space i want one system that are capable of tripple boot Win98se, WinXP and Win7.

Sorry. I adviced card without DMA usage. Not card working under DOS nor DOS games.

I know TB Hurricane architecture cards were only for professionals and are so obscure for daily use in computer from different era.