First post, by Stainlesscat
This is a patched version of C-media's 8738 dos driver tool which should improve sound blaster compatibility abit.
it'll only properly work with the cmi8738 "LX" or "MX " chip revisions as the pci config registers are different compared with the original and "SX" versions. I'm still trying to find the proper bits to get the old revisions to work with SB16...
Other mainboard chipsets are untested... Any volunteers?
Make sure the PCI Interrupt of this card is on either 5 7 or 9 or it will resort to using an unstable IRQ emulation method in which the driver stays resident in memory. Sometimes the driver will fail to outright initialize the emulation if the conditions aren't satisfied.
i was able to get some games like turrican 2 and quake running flawlessly on my a-trend ATC7460M i810 chipset motherboard, as they didn't work at all with the non patched driver. "i'm so fricken happy T2 works abeit in a odd faster sample rate"😁
SOME NOTES: Important!
This card seems to have trouble with highspeed dma modes in some games as they crash after running normally for awhile with sound effects.
examples:descent 1+2, epic pinball, jazz jackrabbit and pretty much all Epic Megagames titles. "in at least in my tests"
most games that use a different dma mode programming for digital sound effects should work properly
although this is not guaranteed.
Also if a game has specific settings for a "Sound Blaster Pro" or "Sound Blaster Clone" option, i find that some problematic games that loop sfx actually work with the aforementioned settings.
Credits go to an unnamed forum member that is not on this site, which he figured out first to why these cards didn't work so well.