dr_st wrote on 2020-09-17, 06:13:

From what I recall, even on Windows 98 SE, I originally had some resource allocation issues and had to disable some legacy IRQs in the BIOS to get he Yamaha Audician32 to work properly. Are you trying to use both cards at the same time? If so, then I would expect various conflicts and issues. In any case, quality aside, the Audician32 (if that is what you have) is SBPro-compatible, so it doesn't give you much over the existing SBPro2 (unless you have some games that explicitly use the WSS).

Yeah, dionb suggested earlier that it would be best to have both cards at the same time, with sb pro 2 on irq5 and the yamaha on irq7... but the yamaha doesn't have any jumpers, I was guessing it's a PnP card maybe, but perhaps its not and its just trying to use irq5 as well, idk... whatever the case, it worked fine when I tested it by itself some months ago, with win98se which automatically detected it and had drivers built-in so it just worked, but now on win95 osr2.0, with the sb pro 2 present, the yamaha does not show up in device manager even if I manually download and install drivers. Maybe it would work if I move the sb pro 2 to irq7 and free irq5, assuming the yamaha wants irq5.. But I think the sb pro 2 is the card supposed to be more compatible with dos games and irq5 is supposed to be better for that?

If it's indeed an SBPro-compatible Yamaha card, like the Audician32, then it should be slightly better-sounding / less noisy than the SBPro2. There is no reason to keep both in the same system - they are too similar feature-wise. The only question is - can you get the Yamaha to work at all in Win95. I would try to remove the SBPro2 and try just with the Yamaha first. In DOS it should not be hard (you run SETUPSA to initialize it and that's it).

It's supposed to be sb pro compatible indeed, but remember reading in another vogons thread the yamaha doesnt have perfect compatibility with all dos games. Hm... well, if I need it just for win95... shall I just replace it for an aureal vortex I wonder, the first one (au8820), its from 1997 so its not like it's too modern for this machine or anything. But then again, I'm aware of at least two games from this period (nfs 1 se and nfs 2 (se) ) that have garbled sound if hardware sound acceleration is enabled, which the vortex will have probably

I'll reiterate my general advice. Before you go into complicated dual-card solutions, try with one card at a time - verify what works and what doesn't. Maybe you'll hit compatibility issues, maybe you won't.

Alright, so I found the culprit. Turns out the bottom ISA slot is dead. Moved the yamaha to a higher slot and win95 detected it. Now both cards show up and seem to work. The yamaha got assigned to irq7 automatically. There seems to be a resource conflict tho, theres yellow mark on it in device manager, but cant figure out which resource it is that is conflicting, seems to use different resources than the sb pro, weird

p.s. its the yamaha game port in particular that has a resource conflict, but cant find what it conflicts with... on resources tab I only see it uses input/output range 0211-0211, the sbpro2 game port is on 0200-0207. Idk what to do, guess I'll just disable the yamaha game port, not like I need two game ports

God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-09-17, 13:06:

p.s. its the yamaha game port in particular that has a resource conflict, but cant find what it conflicts with... on resources tab I only see it uses input/output range 0211-0211, the sbpro2 game port is on 0200-0207. Idk what to do, guess I'll just disable the yamaha game port, not like I need two game ports

Possibly with the parallel/serial port. If you don't need those - disable them in the BIOS.

Well, I disabled the game port as I don't need 2 game ports. Tried listening to canyon.mid from both sound cards to confirm both work, and yeah, they do, and I'd say the yamaha sounds a bit nicer too, weird, both should have the same OPL3 fm synth. A complaint I do have tho, is the yamaha is way too loud, even with volume in windows turned almost all the way down, my ears blew up. Seems to have amplified output, not line-level

p.s. alright, by moving 2 jumpers next to the output port, looks like I disabled the onboard amp and I'm getting a pretty quiet output now. All the background noise is gone too. With that I guess the DOS build is complete. There's lots more things to upgrade and improve on it to make it better, but as it is now, I think it's already in usable condition and I can start exploring all those DOS games I missed out on. Thanks for all the help!