First post, by webodan
Hello,
I've recently put together a 9x era system, using a donor soltek sl-75kav motherboard that had blown capacitors in it, after replacing those shady looking ones, the motherboard has been working flawlessly. Except for the software part...
... I've got only vague memories of using Windows 98 back in 2001, and they weren't pretty. I must've had really bad VXD drivers because my computer crashed all the time and since then I only really despised 9x OSes. So I guess that's why I barely even touched those computers (as far as tinkering was concerned) that I used to have running 9x back at the time.
Here are the parts that I'm using:
- Soltek SL-75KAV with some capacitors replaced (most of them on top of the CPU next to some voltage regulators that had to be definitely bad since they were all swollen)
- Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz CPU
- 128MB PC133 RAM
- 160 WD Caviar Black hard drive
- Soundblaster Live 5.1 (I also got an audigy 2 ZS)
- Geforce4 MX 440 (it's a weird asus rebrand with 128 megs of vram, I also have an ati rage 128 and a Geforce2)
- RTL8139 PCI network card (FTPing files from my HTPC is such a joy with this!)
And now I'm gonna detail the problems that I'm having:
1) VXD & WDM soundcard issues. I've installed the WDM drivers for my soundblaster, begrudgingly, since I've watched Philscomputerlab videos stating that the VXD drivers are better, but I just couldn't get DirectSound based applications to work - with VXD drivers installed, dxdiag just acts as if no sound card was installed, C&C95 complains that it couldn't initialize the sound card. How to fix this? I've attempted 2 different versions of VXD and WDM drivers, but I have the same DirectSound issues when using VXD.
2) All this IRQ mumbo jumbo. *grumble grumble*.
I've added Philscomputerlab's SB16 Emulation Driver on my AUTOEXEC.BAT, and it appears to work fine since it finds the card and boots up all the way to Windows, but I can't for the life of me get the soundcard to work in MS-DOS mode. Running the card in Windows works fine for DOS games, but my understanding is that MS-DOS on top of Windows is flaky (playing some DOOM and DUKE3D gives me a bit of flashing text when obtaining items and the sound is a bit sttutery sometimes) so I should pursue DOS mode for better performance and compatibility...
Let me detail how I go about this to figure out if I'm just doing it wrong since I'm pretty new to setting up real hardware in DOS:
AUTOEXEC.BAT calls LIVEINIT.COM, which sets up the card like this:
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
I've checked out the readme file and if I didn't read that wrong, it means that the SB16 emulation is located in port 220, IRQ 7, 8BIT DMA 1, 16BIT DMA 5
And the port for the MIDI card is 330
So I tried those exact settings in both DOOM and DUKE3D but I only get sound when running the games in Windows. DUKE complains about some IRQ being in conflict when starting the game in DOS mode. I tried changing to a couple different IRQs but still no dice. I didnt change anything of the card's configuration files either.
3) Of all the hardware I detailed that I'm running and that I have in stock, what would be the best setup to retain as much compatibility with 90s and early 2000s games as possible? I only really care about early DirectX games as far as dx is concerned. How about one of those glide wrappers? any that you can recommend using with one of these cards?
4) My PC table is shared among a bunch of computers, all of them using a pair of USB keyboard and mouse. So you can imagine where this is going - in my motherboard, I was able to make it work by enabling usb keyboard support, but there is no such option for usb MOUSE, so games in DOS won't detect it. What could I do about this? I tried some drivers that claimed to make the mouse work (it's a Microsoft Basic 2.0 mouse) but still no dice. Should I just find an old ps/2 mouse in a thrift store and go with that? would be much nicer if I could use the same peripherals on all of these PCs.
For the new that's all I'm having. Hope I can get some help here since despite the issues I'm really enjoying retro gaming on this machine, somewhat rediscovering the OS I used to dread in my childhood now that I have a lot more technical knowledge to fix most of its stability problems - might not be nowhere near as stable, but 98SE has been so much faster and more lightweight than any modern Windows! very impressive that it would run so well on just 128 megs of RAM. We're spoiled these days.
Anyways, hope I didn't bore anyone with this tl;dr and thanks in advance for any help!