Do you see any error messages when your sound drivers load in DOS mode? Many Pentium 4 motherboards lack the necessary features to enable DOS support for PCI Sound Blaster cards. (It would be surprising that the joystick works in that case, though.)

Have you tried running the game from the command prompt while Windows is running instead of rebooting to MS-DOS mode?

If you just want to run the game, may I suggest https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ ?

Nope, no errors. The drivers and the card actually work great. It works and runs with games in MS DOS mode w/ the Joystick port operational, but specifically not Descent. I'm sure there are others that don't work, too, but I only tried a handful of games.

I've not yet tried it in Win 98 mode with command prompt. I'm having some issues there with anything running in command prompt with an out of memory error. I've limited the memory in the system.ini to 512 as I've read to try to remove that error to no avail yet.

I think the port is great! But I am trying to get this specific orientation to work for nostalgia reasons and just pure bullheadedness.

goo3r wrote on 2021-02-09, 17:11:

Nope, no errors. The drivers and the card actually work great.

How can you say it "works great" when you can't get sound effects working in a bunch of games..? I am saying that it is quite likely you will never get sound effects working in those games, at least in MS-DOS mode.

I've not yet tried it in Win 98 mode with command prompt. I'm having some issues there with anything running in command prompt with an out of memory error. I've limited the memory in the system.ini to 512 as I've read to try to remove that error to no avail yet.

If I'm not mistaken, merely editing system.ini is not always an adequate fix to memory problems in Win9x. It is also easy to imagine that Descent might also have trouble with extremely large amounts of RAM.

Perhaps you should post the rest of your system specs.

Does it work when ran through from within Windows? I'm not a fan of the SBLive in pure DOS. But it seems to work well from within Windows.

Were DOS drivers that support soundfonts under pure DOS ever found? If not that another huge reason to stick with running from within Windows.

I should be more exact in my language. You are correct, sound effects don't work so I can't claim it's flawless.
I just meant that other games load and use it and it's joystick port, but it does have issues which I haven't addressed.

I do probably need to look more into the Win 98 memory issues. I skipped that and went to DOS because I wanted to get that working if I could.

The system specs are:
Shuttle SB75S (http://global.shuttle.com/products/productsSp … c?productId=511)
Pentium 4 3.2 GHz
2 GB DDR RAM
Intel 875P/ICH5-R Chipset
Radeon 9600 256MB AGP
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100 PCI
IDE DVD ROM
250 GB SATA SSD, but the chipset makes it look like an IDE device to OSes in its current config.

I may have to bite the bullet and just try to get WIN 98 working w/ DOS applications and try that.

I continue to appreciate people looking at this.

How is the RAM configured? I think Pentium 4s can do dual channel, but maybe try dropping it down to 1GB or less on a single stick if necessary. If that works you could always get two 512MB sticks.

SScorpio wrote on 2021-02-10, 13:52:

How is the RAM configured? I think Pentium 4s can do dual channel, but maybe try dropping it down to 1GB or less on a single stick if necessary. If that works you could always get two 512MB sticks.

I'm almost positive it's dual channel. I am doing to try it with one stick and maybe see if I can dig up some 512 sticks. Thanks for the suggestion!

If your use case is just gaming, 1GB or more shouldn't give you anything. Games of that era didn't use much memory.

Additional memory bandwidth can improve things, but it depends on the games you're running. I've found games that hit a P4 hard can usually be ran on WinXP and that will give you access to Core2 Duo and Core i series processors along with a much more powerful GPUs.

SScorpio wrote on 2021-02-11, 16:45:

If your use case is just gaming, 1GB or more shouldn't give you anything. Games of that era didn't use much memory.

Perhaps you are not aware, but it is well-known that Win9x encounters serious problems on systems with more than 512 MB of RAM, and various other games have similar problems when confronted with more RAM than the programmers ever anticipated.

The precise nature of the Win9x problem is a little murky – some systems seem to handle it better than others for some reason – but "out of memory" errors when running DOS programs is one common symptom. Software solutions to the Win9x problem include rloew's patch and using HIMEMX in config.sys to limit the RAM at startup.

Jorpho wrote on 2021-02-11, 18:20:

SScorpio wrote on 2021-02-11, 16:45:

If your use case is just gaming, 1GB or more shouldn't give you anything. Games of that era didn't use much memory.

Perhaps you are not aware, but it is well-known that Win9x encounters serious problems on systems with more than 512 MB of RAM, and various other games have similar problems when confronted with more RAM than the programmers ever anticipated.

The precise nature of the Win9x problem is a little murky – some systems seem to handle it better than others for some reason – but "out of memory" errors when running DOS programs is one common symptom. Software solutions to the Win9x problem include rloew's patch and using HIMEMX in config.sys to limit the RAM at startup.

That patch seemed to solve my memory issues within Win 98SE. DOS Prompt opens now, and with that Descent opens, too. With sound card and joystick working. Thank you for this! Incredible.