Hi all.

Just a little tip for those who are so inclined to tinker -- I was having an issue with my AWE32 + ES1868F setup in my K6/2 Windows 95 PC. I've had both soundcards working in windows for some time -- and never really noticed any problems with the setup; however, tonight I fired up FF7 on this PC and was dismayed to find that I couldn't get the game to auto load its soundfont. I know that I could manually load the soundfont in awecontrol, but I really wanted to sort the issue out.

After lots of testing, I discovered that either FF7's implementation or the AWE32 itself requires the Adlib port (388) to work correctly. My system had correctly configured itself by shutting down the adlib on the SB16, so that I had:

Creative on IRQ 5, DMA 1/5, SB220, MIDI300, AWE620, ADLIB Disabled
ESS on IRQ 7, DMA 0/3, SB240, MIDI330, ADLIB 388

My first instinct was to change the ADLIB port on the ESS card to something else, but it isn't possible with device manager -- "this resource cannot be changed." Same goes for the creative card. I knew that unisound was capable of changing the adlib port -- but what good would that do me in windows?

SO, I got to tinkering. Since the creative drivers always change the SET BLASTER in autoexec.bat on reboot, I created a C:\DRIVERS\SOUND.BAT batch file as the first thing called in my autoexec.bat file. I used UNISOUND /CL to find that the creative card is #1 and the ESS card is #2 -- and got to setting up unisound in my SOUND.BAT:

SET BLASTER=A240 I5 D1 H5 P300 E640 T6J200 F398
UNISOUND.COM /C1
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D0 H3 P330 J208 F388
UNISOUND.COM /C2

Finally, I deleted the sound cards from device manager (all of them), and rebooted. When windows was finished reinstalling the drivers, I found that the creative card now said "The resources this device is using do not match any of its known configurations" -- and it had the exact settings that unisound had initialized it with, in windows! This may not be helpful for many -- or even at all, but it seemed to fix my problem and provided me a way to force windows to respect my device configuration. FF7 was able to load the soundfont on its own and I could get back to another night of gaming thanks to UNISOUND.