Really nobody knows?

Does that board have no L2 cache at all? If it has a COAST slot, populate it ASAP. as without it the performance drops quite a bit.
Also, try something like Duke Nukem 3D, Contructor, ROTT or any other games with an elaborate sound setup that allows testing, and see if you can get music going at all.
Btw, be sure nothing related to MIDI or Synth or Music is muted in the mixer

It is exactly this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/586-SOCKET-7-MOTHER … =p2047675.l2557 board. Unfortunately, it does not have the COAST slot. I have all SIMM memory populated with 8Mb sticks (=>32Mb), if that does matter.
I will try Duke Nukem 3D (actually have that somewhere).

That board seems to have onboard cache soldered on. Search the BIOS setup for anything concerning L2 cache.

In BIOS FEATURES SETUP there is CPU Internal Cache: Enabled and External Cache: Enabled. It has Award BIOS.
Also, I was unable to set up soundcard in Duke3D, maybe I am doing something wrong. It keeps telling me "Playback failed, possibly due to an invalid or conflicting IRQ. But I have no idea how to set up the IRQ. I was checking that and found that soundcard is sitting on IRQ 5 (Avance Wave Audio Device (WDM)) and 11 (Avance MPU401 Device (WDM))

OK, I now look like I have the same intelligence as my avatar. Of course, when I finally realised, that IRQ means Interrupt Request, I found out that I need 5, not 7. So, sound in Duke Nukem 3D works flawlessly. But how to set it up in other games so i can listen to the awesome music of Commander Keen etc.?

(I am hopefully not that stupid, it is just that english is not my first language.. 😁)

Oh god... this is an issue I've seen multiple times, sorry it took me so long to realize it.
Basically, you are using WDM drivers. WDM drivers do not expose the sound hardware to DOS apps in any way, but rather uses Windows' built in emulation. AFAIK there is NO OPL3 emulation in Windows 98/ME, and as WDM drivers do not expose the OPL3-compatible hardware to the games, you get nothing but silence when trying to use OPL2/3 music (which is why Commander Keen is silent).
If you want to get OPL going, then the only option is to install VxD drivers. Just look for Windows 95 drivers and install them (and read the README files, as sometimes you need to pass a switch to the setup program so it won't default to WDM drivers when it detects Windows 98). That way you should get OPL and SFX working.

Thanks really much, I had to go home from my workshop, but right tomorrow I will try that, already found the drivers, which should work, so I am hoping for the best!

I don't know, what I am doing wrong, but that PC is like NOPE! You ain't installing that! You want? Your bad. I said NO! and installs WDM drivers. When I actually managed to install OPL3 driver, it went BSOD.

krivulak wrote:

Hello, you can remember me, I was posting here about that weird 486 PC that had really bad times working with mouse and soundcard. Well, I put that PC in storage and forgot about that before I go nuts. Also, I got "new" AMD K6 PC from dump next to school. At home I noticed that it is PC which I worked with something like eleven years ago, so it is really nostalgic to me. I wanted to put there some games, but guess what? Yes, you are right, sound is derping again!
What is really going on? Well, I put few games there, like Hercules, works brilliantly. But then I tried Commander Keen (no sound from speakers at all) and Wolfenstein 3D (only digitized sound works, no music, no standard sounds). Also, I noticed, that sound is sometimes lagging a lot, can lag and die too. Also when Wolfenstein is playing sound, the game gets noticeably slower.
I really don't want to write the specification here. Luckily, it is running Widnows 98, so Everest to the rescue. Thanks for any advise!

First of all, you really made me lmao! 😁

The .rar you attached to this post, I can't open it (it says it's corrupt).

It would help if you did post the complete specs and possibly some pictures of the innards of your computer.

Also, did you do a fresh install of Windows 98? I've noticed that most of the old installs I found were noticeably slow and full of...well...I decided i'd just better wipe the drive and start over, it makes things so much simpler in the long run (and a lot faster too! 😁 ).
And if you do reinstall, please see if you can find 98SE instead of the older 98 variant. 98SE was released in 1999 and the other version (aka 98FE) was released a year earlier.
I wouldn't install ME on that system as 32MB is a bit tight for ME and for ME to run well, you'd need to do a little bit of tweaking (and personally I prefer to run ME with no less then 128MB, but this is also a bit of a personal preference).

Anyway, about the specs: Most important are the CPU (speed and type), amount of RAM which you already mentioned, the type of graphics card you're using and perhaps the harddrive as well, though that's not as critical unless you're using some old 500meg harddrive or something 😜

And if you post some pics, then perhaps our hawkeyes may be able to spot something that you missed 😀

If you are REALLY desperate and needs a sure way to get things working (and have no need for USB hardware), you can just try Windows 95. It doesn't even support WDM drivers so that is a non-issue.
Btw, Windows 98 should allow you to override whatever driver it wants to use. Are you picking the choice that lets you pick the driver manually (instead of just specifying the path)?

Tetrium wrote:

First of all, you really made me lmao! 😁

The .rar you attached to this post, I can't open it (it sais it's corrupt).

It would help if you did post the complete specs and possibly some pictures of the innards of your computer.

It opened just fine here. The full specs are in the HTML inside the RAR file. I am opening that in my main PC with what I believe is a recent version of WinRAR

Well, I updated the .rar to .zip, hope it will help. But if not, it is Matsonic MS-5120 with AMD-K6 @166MHz, S3 Trio64V2-DX/GX @50MHz (2Mb), 4*8Mb SIMM 72, Seagate ST31277A 1275Mb, 40x TEAC CD-540E, Samsung SFD-321B 1.44 Mb Floppy disk drive (the only I had to fix - not enough lube and too much dust).
This PC was made in 1997, stored in big hall until 2004, when headmaster in school decided he need to spend money on some computers. He bought few of them for really cheap and gave them to every teacher. But in that time they were using central Pentium IV, so nobody wanted them. Few months passed, four or five documents were written on this PC, three or four educational programs were installed and at the end of year 2004 they were finally moved to humongous obsolete computing stuff room. And now in year 2015 they are cleaning the room, so this computer is brand new. So I only removed that educational stuff and it is clean installation of official Windows 98SE with official Microsoft Office 2000 once again.

There you have few pictures, if you need any details, just tell me, no problem.

God, I love the black inside of older cases... 😁

When I tried to install custom drivers, it just didn't let me, it was installing software by Windows, when I tried to do that through Add new hardware, it found it as Plug&play device and installed these drivers again, didn't even let me to change anything.

Go to the device manager, find the device, right click it and select "Properties". In the "Driver" tab, click the "Update Driver" button. A screen will popup asking you if you want Windows to look for the drivers or specify the location yourself: choose the second one. Then on the screen that shows up DO NOT input the drivers path, select the item that says that you want to pick the driver manually and then click next. In this next screen click the button saying you have a disk, THEN point it to the drivers you downloaded.

I do hope you're not running the system without a CPU HSF though 😜

And VX Pro...that's PC Chips, right?

Tetrium wrote:

I do hope you're not running the system without a CPU HSF though 😜

And VX Pro...that's PC Chips, right?

You can see that heatsink is on on overview of the case. And mobo is Matsonic MS5120, first time I saw it here: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Matsonic was a customer of Hsing Tech of which PC Chips is a subsidiary.

OK, good to know! 😀