VOGONS


First post, by keropi

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I am facing this prob on my retro-pc, and I have no ideas left ... here is the short story:
I put together a 440BX m/b, a slot1 p3/550 , 396MB ram, an agp voodoo3 and an ISA SBAWE64 pnp... installed also win98se + it's unofficial sp...
in windows all is working great, general midi, sb wave, awe midi etc...
I got the Basic DOS Sound apps [for dos win9x] from creative's site, and installed them. I run ctcm on startup (creative pnp manager) it initializes 2of3 creative cards? and in general I got it to work ok with games that support sb, and awe midi. ctcu refusess to work, saying something about dos/win3.1...
the prob is its dos general midi emulation... I searched and downloaded synthgm.sbk, synthmt.sbk and synthgs.sbk. I run this to get midi to work: AWEUTIL /S and for GM I just add /em:gm it says it loads OK synthgm.sbk but when I try to test General Midi output the pc freezes... the same test in dosbox under win98se runs ok... ALL the games freeze when I select GM for music in pure dos. if they support AWE all is well. so only the emulation does not work...
any ideas people?

damn, it makes me happy I had a YAMAHA SW20 back then, sb-pro + opl4 wavetable + dsp for FX... too bad the cards addresses conflict with anything better than a pentium 1 cpu ... awe64 is a joke compared to the yamaha, but I am stuch with it I guess... unless I get a db60xg doughterboard and sove it to a lame als1000 pnp isa card...

Reply 1 of 10, by 5u3

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keropi wrote:

I run ctcm on startup (creative pnp manager) it initializes 2of3 creative cards?

Could you list the last line of the CTCM output here? It usually says something like "BLASTER environment set at ....."

The AWEUTIL MPU401 emulation is not very good, that's true, but it shouldn't crash with _every_ game. Do you have the latest version of AWEUTIL? I believe there is an extra driver update only for AWEUTIL on the Creative website.

Reply 2 of 10, by keropi

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ok, CTCM version1.08 says:

Found Creative Plug and Play card : Creative SB AWE64 PnP
Successfully configured 2 of 3 Creative Plug and Play devices.

and aweutil is version: 1.35

I just found that if I do not load my mouse driver the pc does not crash in GM emulation... wow.. perhaps I must get an older driver, as the FreeDOS one maybe is too new!

Reply 3 of 10, by 5u3

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keropi wrote:

I just found that if I do not load my mouse driver the pc does not crash in GM emulation... wow.. perhaps I must get an older driver, as the FreeDOS one maybe is too new!

Strange... I also use the FreeDOS CuteMouse driver (it's the best one I found), but don't have this particular problem. Maybe the CuteMouse autodetection routine plays havoc with the MIDI emulation. Try calling the mouse driver before AWEUTIL or turn autodetection off by declaring the mouse port and interrupt when loading CTMOUSE.

Reply 4 of 10, by keropi

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nope, the ctmouse is not to blame...
it was a mistake of me to blame that...
there is something fishy with my m/b, it is a Diamond Micronics c400 BX440 based one... never tested it when it was new with an isa card, I had a yamaha waveforce back then... I tested on it an als1000+ pnp card, a galland sc-3000 and the awe64, they all displayed instabillities.... perhaps the isa bus is somewhat broken on that mobo.... or its isa-pnp ...
I will switch tommorow to a ECS p6bat-a+ via apollo based mobo...

Reply 7 of 10, by keropi

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at clock??? where is that?
I never had to change these settings even when isa was in use, 🤣....
I will exchange the m/b either way, the via one has udma66, sblink, monitoring hardware... 😁

Reply 8 of 10, by keropi

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update:
I chaged m/b, and on setting: PNP OS Installed: I put NO, so now the ISA card appears on boot time (ISA PnP Device Listing) and aweutil now configures 3 of 3 Creative devices! perhaps all will be well now! 😁

Reply 9 of 10, by nogmog

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keropi wrote:

update:
I chaged m/b, and on setting: PNP OS Installed: I put NO, so now the ISA card appears on boot time (ISA PnP Device Listing) and aweutil now configures 3 of 3 Creative devices! perhaps all will be well now! 😁

Wow - I seem to be having a very similar issue. Curious if you resolved it and how?

Reply 10 of 10, by collector

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Best to start your own thread and ask it in the Marvin subforum since it involves old hardware. This subforum is for DOS games on modern systems.

Marvin, the Paranoid Android

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