VOGONS


First post, by fluxrez

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I have a 486 Unisys computer. I grabbed a Sound Blaster 16 on ebay (CT4170). I installed the creative labs PnP manager. I installed the sound blaster drivers. Everything seems to work perfectly. No errors. Games detect the everything fine and tell me everything is good, but no sound is coming out of the speakers. I took the audio cable out of the sound card and plugged it into my phone to make sure the wires and speaker setup were fine. The mixer software didnt show anything muted. There are no volume controls that I could find. No weird jumpers.

Does anyone have any ideas? Not sure what else to try. It might just be a bad card.

Reply 1 of 22, by Jo22

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Hi, is the audio missing for both FM and samples (sound effects) ?
AdLib (FM) is sometimes not enabled by that PnP utility.

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Reply 3 of 22, by collector

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Wrong forum. Ask old hardware and driver/configuration questions in Marvin. This forum is for DOS games on modern systems. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

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Reply 4 of 22, by chinny22

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the drivers should create a directory called SB16.
in here is a program called mixerset.exe that controls the volume.
You could also try the line out rather the speaker out.

Or install WIn95 as a test if you don't want to mess round with dos drivers at first.

Reply 6 of 22, by TimMer1981

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Using the correct output port? How does the card look near its outputs? No funny looking stuff?

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Reply 7 of 22, by fluxrez

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Yeah ports look normal. Well labeled. I tried all the ports. I dont have a cd-rom drive on this. I am just going to be running DOS.

Mixer program looks fine. Nothing muted.

Again, games say everything is detected fine...

I did run "diagnose.exe" from the SB16 folder. It gave an error: "Failure setting Low DMA CHannel at 1"

Reply 8 of 22, by CkRtech

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fluxrez wrote:

I did run "diagnose.exe" from the SB16 folder. It gave an error: "Failure setting Low DMA CHannel at 1"

What does CTCM report for the sound card's resources used upon execution?

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Reply 10 of 22, by TimMer1981

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The problem, I think, is the H1, which is the high DMA channel: it's identical to the low DMA channel, which cannot be.

"I will take your bones, still alive and in great pain, and make them into a chair. I will call it "My Screaming Chair". Every morning I will sit in it and listen to you scream. Any questions?"

Reply 11 of 22, by bjwil1991

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There's your issue. Check to see if there are any ports using DMA 1 (Parallel port might use that if the port is set to ECP/EPP mode) by going into the CTCU program (CTCU.EXE), go to the resources by going to the menu and click the first option, and it'll say what conflict there are.

Also, use the MSD program (Microsoft Diagnostics) to check for conflicts and which ports are using DMA 1.

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Reply 12 of 22, by fluxrez

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Interesting. So I went into CTCU.exe. It said no conflicts. When I hit the "test" button though it tested DMA 1 and 3. instead of 1 twice. Saved out and rebooted.

It changed the BLASTER environment to: BLASTER environment is set at: A220 I5 D1 H3 P330 T6

I ran the DIAGNOSE.exe and still "Failure setting low DMA CHannel at 1"

Ran doom sound setup, ran doom, no errors, but no sound.

Plugged it into my phone again to be sure speaker setup is good.

Darn, thought we had something there

also, just so you guys feel the pain, I ordered a second cheapo card... a CT2770... it is about 1 CM too long to fit in this case. =(

Reply 13 of 22, by TimMer1981

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Check your BIOS, maybe you can reserve the DMA channel for it.

"I will take your bones, still alive and in great pain, and make them into a chair. I will call it "My Screaming Chair". Every morning I will sit in it and listen to you scream. Any questions?"

Reply 15 of 22, by skitters

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Not being able to set a high DMA is actually normal for a ct4170.
Here's one site that mentions it.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO.html#AEN882

I used to have one of those ct4170 cards that I used in Windows 95 and 98.
Not having high DMA didn't affect sound in Windows or DOS.
I may not have played any DOS games that required high a DMA.

In order to get sound in DOS mode, I had to put this line at the very beginning of my autoexec.bat

C:\WINDOWS\CTCM.EXE /t /b /p

Keep in mind this was on a Windows 95 computer and CTCM would be in a different folder in DOS 6.22.
But I think adding that line (pointing to wherever CTCM is located on your computer) is worth a try.

Putting this CTCM /t /b /p line at the beginning of the autoexec.bat was the suggestion of a Creative tech back around 1999 or 2000, when Creative newsgroups were still active. I don't remember the explanation of why it worked, but it made the difference between no sound at all in DOS and all sounds in DOS with my ct4170.

Reply 16 of 22, by fluxrez

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skitters wrote:

C:\WINDOWS\CTCM.EXE /t /b /p

Unfortunately, that didn't help me. No changes.

I did however manage to get another sound card in there. Sound effects work fine now. But for some reason, it isn't playing music. The synthesized music test in the "diagnose" program doesnt work either.

No errors again, just no sound =/ I'll do some lurking and troubleshooting and start a new thread if it comes to that.

Thank you for all your help.

Reply 18 of 22, by dr.zeissler

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are we talking about These small CWD models? I do not get any! soundcard working on that thing!
It has to do with the onboard-lan that I really need. It would be the best Little machine if I get Sound and Lan working on it.

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Last edited by dr.zeissler on 2017-12-21, 16:08. Edited 1 time in total.

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