If I set Duke Nukem to General Midi Port 330, it says "Could Not detect MPU-401. Descent says "Detection System Failed t Find Hardware"

Did you have a chance to run similar tests with the Aztech?

That's next. 😀 I've been looking at jumpers on the CT2800. There's no MPUEN jumper. 😒

The joys of Creative and their subrevisions of revisions of cards. The jumper you'd be looking for is MSEL, but I have never seen a CT2800 board shot with that jumper installed. It's likely fixed at 0x330. Does yours have the two IO base jumpers (to set 0x220, 0x240, etc)?

Yeah: IOS0 and IOS1, both closed for 0x220.

There's also jumpers for the IDE interface (disabled)

A jumper called IOCHRDY (open). Not sure what that does.

A bank of jumpers for IDE IRQ (15 is closed).

A jumper labeld RSPK_EN which is closed

A row of 4 jumpers labeled AUDIO_pwb (2-3 are closed).

Three unlabeled jumpers behind LINE IN. All open.

Okay. With the Aztech card in Duke Nukem, if I set music to General MIDI 0x330, it acts as if it's playing (with no sound coming from speakers). It says "You shuld hear the Duke Nukem Theme Song. Press any key to end testing" That makes me think the issue is with the CT2800. Could the daughterboard header be a dummy?

Does the Aztech have a MIDI device?

The MPU401 port at 330 still needs something connected to it you know.

Like a wavetable board, or external MIDI module through the game port.

But it's good news so far. The game is talking to the MPU. And it doesn't hang, right? You can exit it afterwards?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Does the Aztech have a MIDI device? […]
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Does the Aztech have a MIDI device?

The MPU401 port at 330 still needs something connected to it you know.

Like a wavetable board, or external MIDI module through the game port.

But it's good news so far. The game is talking to the MPU. And it doesn't hang, right? You can exit it afterwards?

I don't know. I'm guessing yes? The whole reason I got the CT2800 was for the daughterboard header (the Aztech does not have one). I have a DreamBlaster S1 on order.

Can you put the card on a Windows system and have it detect the card? It should at least tell you if the MPU401 interface is working.

clueless: I agree. Not sure what exactly is wrong. Check for damage on the card, but I doubt it's the pin header.

phil: Nothing connected, so no sound is not surprising. The part we were hoping for is that the MPU is successfully configured by HWSET and checks out in practice. Doesn't sound like we have a hidden Adaptec card somewhere.

I can see no damage to the card. Here are front/back photos if anyone else wants to take a look.

Maybe this is why the price was so good. 😉

Just to give a bit more info, CTMMSYS.SYS is Creative's own driver, intended to simplify the programming of the card. 99.9% of games don't use it, and talk to the hardware directly. If you don't load this driver, you won't be able to use Creative's own PLAY.EXE utility to play digitised audio (.wav and .voc files) but beyond that you won't lose anything. I think I have seen one or two games out there that make use of this driver, but I can't remember what they were - all I can remember is they weren't very good. So you won't miss out on much by leaving out this driver.

I haven't seen VIBRA16.SYS before, but looking at it in a hex editor, it provides a CTSOUND driver interface. My old Sound Blaster 2 had a CTSB2.SYS which also provided a CTSOUND interface, and this was used by the CTMMSYS.SYS driver, so I'm guessing CTMMSYS.SYS is a device-independent driver, and the other .SYS files provide the hardware-specific code that CTMMSYS then makes use of. So again, you only lose the ability to run some of Creative's own programs if you leave out these drivers. You also get an error if you try to use a program that requires these drivers, so you'll know if you ever run something that needs them.

I'm not sure whether this is a PnP card, as opposed to a software-configurable card. Given that you aren't running any PnP config managers, it is probably software-configurable. This means most of the settings (apart from the base I/O address) are set by running DIAGNOSE/S. To control the settings used, you put the IRQ/DMA/etc. you want in the BLASTER environment variable then run DIAGNOSE/S which applies those settings to the hardware. Only the base I/O address cannot be set this way, and is controlled via the IOSEL jumpers on the card.

You could try changing the MPU401 address from 330 to 300 in the BLASTER variable then rerunning DIAGNOSE/S to see if that works. Have a look at the BLASTER variable after you have run DIAGNOSE/S (run "SET") to make sure it hasn't changed - apparently DIAGNOSE/S may change it to reflect the hardware (in the case of PnP devices, DIAGNOSE/S does not change any settings and merely updates BLASTER to match the current state of the card, as configured by the PnP manager.)

Malvineous wrote:

Just to give a bit more info, CTMMSYS.SYS is Creative's own driver, intended to simplify the programming of the card. 99.9% of games don't use it, and talk to the hardware directly. If you don't load this driver, you won't be able to use Creative's own PLAY.EXE utility to play digitised audio (.wav and .voc files) but beyond that you won't lose anything. I think I have seen one or two games out there that make use of this driver, but I can't remember what they were - all I can remember is they weren't very good. So you won't miss out on much by leaving out this driver.

I was just about to ask what that driver is for. Thanks!!

clueless1 wrote:

I can see no damage to the card. Here are front/back photos if anyone else wants to take a look.

That's a CT2800. Good card. Real OPL, and should work with only the SET BLASTER and DIAGNOSE lines in your autoexec. I've never used VIBRA16.SYS or CTMMSYS with it.

Bugger that it's not working though. Best of luck.

Malvineous,

thank you for your post. Very informative. I'm pretty confident now leaving those drivers out of config.sys. I also tried your suggestion of changing the address from 330 to 300 but unfortunately it didn't change anything. Incidentally, whatever Blaster variable I SET, running diagnose /s does not return any error. If I run "SET" after diagnose /s, it shows the correct variable. It's only when I run diagnose (without /s) that it errors out at the MPU-401 configuration.

Squalstrife--the works fine, other than the MPU-401 interface. OPL3 music and sound effects sound very nice When the DreamBlaster S1 arrives, I will plug it in and see if anything changes. My hopes are not high.

What were the sell conditions? Tested and working?

gdjacobs wrote:

What were the sell conditions? Tested and working?

"Creative Labs CT2800 Multimedia Sound Game Card

Working pull in good condition

Has ports for:
Line In
Mic In
Line Out
Speaker Out
Joystick"

Might be worth bringing up with seller and even pointing him to this thread.

That's what I was thinking.

Any chance you can try the card in a different PC? That should remove any question about a conflict with the MPU401 and some other device in the system.

I do have two other boards with ISA slots but I'd have to assemble them into a system. I should be able to do that in the next few days. Probably not this weekend. 😒

For the purpose of the test, you can run it bench top if you like.