Paladin PIP wrote on 2025-05-17, 03:48:

I have this card working great in Dos 6.22 and 7 independant of windows. Forced it to work on win95, I opened up win3.1 to finish my work and achieve glory but, what the heck how can this be done, I am seriously stumped. Would I use earlier sb16 drivers, would this card care ? What era or date of drivers would or should I use ?
And Yes, it was pure hell getting it to work on win95.

There are no Sound Blaster Blaster Live! drivers for Windows 3.1 and the card is only compatible with SB16 software thanks an emulation driver under DOS.

One potential hope is to load that emulation driver under DOS (SBEINIT) and then start Windows 3.1 and try to get it to talk to the card as if it was a Sound Blaster or Sound Blaster 16 (i.e.). The odds of this working are not high.

There are other Sound Blaster emulation solutions for DOS being worked on : SBEMU and a fork of it, VSBHDA. Maybe running one of these and then trying to load Windows 3.1 and use a Sound Blaster 16 or Sound Blaster driver might work. Again not all that likely to work.

Another option, the best one IMHO, would be to get another card that has Windows 3.1 drivers. There are PCI sound cards that do. Running with 2 sound cards in a system is possible, if you want to keep the Live! for Windows 95.

How does it operate in dos 6.22 , and win 3.1 can't see it , does Dos access the hardware directly but win 3.1 needs a middle man ?

Well thankyou, you are very wise, I had no idea you could run 2 sound cards at once, but since win31 is its own protected world, I can use sb for dos and crystal for win, the only drawback is 2 speaker systems are needed. I would never have tried that in a million years, win just moved the base card address to 550 someting, truly awesome,

Paladin PIP wrote on 2025-05-17, 04:35:

How does it operate in dos 6.22 , and win 3.1 can't see it , does Dos access the hardware directly but win 3.1 needs a middle man ?

DOS software needs a middleman too when specifically dealing with most PCI sound cards such as a Sound Blaster Live! That middleman is the emulation functionality provided by SBEINIT, for example.

DOS games and software mostly support specific sound cards by talking directly to the hardware connected to the ISA bus. This support is hardware specific. For example, a DOS game that supports the original ISA 8-bit Sound Blaster will normally work with cards that are hardware compatible with this card (including newer
compatible ISA Sound Blaster cards or third party clones).

The problem with the Sound Blaster Live! (and most PCI sound cards) is that it is not Sound Blaster compatible (not with any of of the 8-bit ISA variants, nor with the ISA bus Sound Blaster 16) on the hardware level in the sense that DOS software would need it to be. That is why the SBEINIT emulation layer is needed as a middleman to allow DOS games to use the card as if it was an ISA Sound Blaster 16 (or mostly so). So, a game would talk to an emulated Sound Blaster 16, withe SBEINIT doing the emulation and actually talking to the Live! hardware.

Windows operating systems need an OS specific driver to talk to a sound card. That driver is designed to talk directly to the hardware. In this case, there exists no such driver for the Live! cards and Windows 3.1 . The only hope would be to use a Sound Blaster driver for an older Sound Blaster card (like the Sound Blaster 16), for which there is a Windows 3.1 driver and try to get that driver to talk SBEINIT . That is unfortunately unlikely to work based on prior experiences of others. SBEINIT was not meant to be used in such a way, but might still work. Same for SBEMU and VSBHDA.

I hope that clarifies things a bit.

Yes, Thankyou , and I got the first white screen of death (Dived by zero!) trying the sb16 drivers in win3.1 , that must have been the great grand daddy of the blue screen of death. I will hunt for an actual Sb isa card on ebay

Hi, is running Windows 3.1x important on that PC or more of an extra?
I'm asking, because if it's just an extra then Standard-Mode (WIN /2) and the Sound Blaster 1.0 and 1.5 drivers might do.

Standard-Mode doesn't rely on V86, I think and doesn't use VXDs.:
Thus, maybe ordinary DRV drivers will still work with the SB16 emulation good enough - not sure, though.

With exception of Win32s and WinG many software runs fine in Standard-Mode already.

PS: Some early revision SB16 drivers are 286 compatible.
These can run in Standard-Mode, obviously.
The SB16 drivers shipped with Tandy's OEM version of Windows 3.0 MME are such a thing, I think.
Trying Windows 3.0 MME might work for testing, maybe.

just to run win31 era programs in their natural environment, I have 12 computers to run twelve different eras, you learn a lot doing it this way, and who knows maybe when I die they will be donated to the smithsonian