I've been steady working on a DOS build and I've been trying to get a 16 bit ISA sound card to work under Windows 98 DOS-Mode... which sounds simple enough but I've been running into some oddities. Probably caused by the sheer amount of cards and drivers I have circulated through the system. At this point I'm really not sure.
I started off with a Yamaha Audician32 card, that I was pretty happy with until it seemed that NFS SE didn't particularly care for the card. So I swapped that card out with an AWE64 Gold. Which was awesome, but I couldn't get any sound out of it in Lemmings. I like Lemmings. So I dropped down to a Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230)... I can't get low DMA working in any game on this card. Did a fresh install of drivers, I run Diagnose, everything passes and works fine, the software sets the lines in my autoexec and I have FM synth and all that goodness, just no sound effects.
The weird bit in regards to that CT2230 is that the drivers insists on setting the low DMA to 1. Which would be fine if it worked. I can try to force the resource settings in BIOS which seems to work for other cards, but the Sound Blaster drivers will only set DMA 1. It's just odd. I also have a CT1770 that actually has jumpers on the card itself to set resources. I tried swapping this in with DMA set to 0 and running Diagnose on that card still set DMA 1. Which again netted me no sound FX in games. So I gave up pulled the card and set the jumpers so the card would use DMA 1. Which is what the Sound Blaster drivers seemed to be so adamant I use. Guess what? Now I have sound FX. Isn't the point of Diagnose to sniff out what the settings are on the card, or what resources have been assigned to it and set the environment accordingly? It seems like this is backwards.
Anyway I was happy with this for a few moments until I found that the Adlib setting on Street Rod 2 absolutely would not make any noise that didn't sound like my PC was imploding on itself.
So now I'm back to my Audician32.
I don't know that I typed all of this looking for any help as much as I did just to walk myself back through it, but if anyone has some insight I'd appreciate it. I'm just getting back into DOS and I was pretty young last time I used it. I'm more familiar with Windows.
The rest of the settings for the card is address 220 IRQ 7 DMA 1, 5
Yamaha card takes address 220 IRQ 7 DMA 3 (no high DMA it seems)
I may just end up sticking with the Audician32 as it seems to be the card that breaks the least.
In fairness I am complicating things by running a second PCI card for Windows 98 but... I really don't think there is any conflict there. I even pulled the PCI card while I was troubleshooting. I didn't observe any change.
tl;dr
Sound cards are hard for me I guess.