It has High Definition Audio, which means there's no DOS support whatsoever. And DOS sound support on PCI cards is pretty spotty too from my experience (I could be totally wrong though)... On that board, if you're running Windows 98, your best bet is to use DOSBox or a virtual machine. It seems like way overkill for pure DOS if you ask me, and I don't think DOS can even take advantage of all the speed increases Windows can get from that hardware.

But man, do I wish there was a generic AC'97 and HDA driver for DOS! 😢

So... there's no "third party" custom made driver made on purpose to get audio working from the built-in sound card ? Aww 😢
The problem is that I can't even use Windows 98 properly because I simply can't find any working driver for it aswell !!! Neither motherboard nor GPU drivers and it only runs at 16 colors without sound and huge resolution, making Windows 9x games that require 256 colors, such as Montezuma's Return (the one I tried), unplayable with errors.
I tried to run the games natively from Windows XP, but they are very laggy, perhaps it "emulates" the DOS prompt and doesn't gain the full DOS potential like, otherwise, Windows 9x does.
I already do play them with DOSBox on my main modern PC, I see no point using DOSBox over there aswell, because the main point of that PC was to play all these games "as they should be played", natively ran and, while I can play most of 2D games just fine on my "modded" Olivetti M4 454 S, games like Duke Nukem 3D and Doom lag (they're still playable, but certainly not enjoyable like they are on that ASUS A8V-XE machine) 😢

If only I could find a workaround to "hack in" drivers for Windows 98... 😕

This really isn't the right platform for the mid to late 90s DOS games you want to play. For that, ideally, you're going to need a Pentium-Pentium III system, ~75-500 MHz is probably the range of hardware that would work. I have a Pentium-166 laptop with SBPro compatible sound that's coming in the mail; with that hardware you'd notice a world of difference from your 486! 😀 I know what you mean, I have a 486DX2/50 and the lag running DOOM is fairly noticeable. However, what kind of 486 do you have? Depending on your socket you could upgrade to a DX4/100 and it would run noticeably better, though not as well as a Pentium.

Well, probably the frame rate might get better if I could get a graphics card for my 486 PC.
Unfortunately, I don't really know much of the technical specs of that Olivetti M4 454 S, I only know it has an Intel 80486 CPU, but I've never taken it off to see what kind of socket it uses 😢
Also, the "base" computer was released in 1993 (by "base", I mean the actual computer without the extras I'm currently adding to it)
And it's indeed because of the lack of a graphics card that I want to play the games that lag there on that other machine with the Asus A8V-XE board, because there they don't lag at all under the MS-DOS 7.10 system... if only I can find a way to get working sound out of it, because smooth games are great, but without sounds they're quite... lame 😒

Hmm... Are you absolutely sure it's a 486? The Wikipedia article says the m4 came with a Pentium. Some hardware info programs will read a Pentium as a 486. It might be a Socket 5 machine. See if the heat sink will come off so you can see what it is.

I think I read it was an 80486 somewhere on the board near the CPU... or probably while using it... since you said that some software might read the Pentium as a 486, I'll double-check what it actually is and report you, but unfortunately I'm currently not in the house where I have it (it's in my father's home), I'll go check it out tomorrow if I can 😁

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 ?

Nope, didn't work.
As I said, I even tried to install my Sound Blaster CT3670 drivers (I have that card in my Olivetti M4 454 S machine), thus it would set blaster = a220 i5 d1 in the autoexec on its own, but, since there's no "actual" sound blaster card in that machine, it didn't even install, I tried to "set blaster = a220 i5 d1" on my own, but it didn't work either.... I guess that, as Keen Master said earlier, MS-DOS 7.10 doesn't recognize the built-in audio chipset of the ASUS A8V-XE motherboard... since that motherboard is "too modern" (I think ?), it only has PCI slots and not a single ISA one, so I can't even put my CT3670 in there to test it... I wish there's a way to make the built-in audio chipset of that motherboard work with MS-DOS 7.10... I don't want to stick with just the Olivetti M4 454 S for DOS "actual operative system", I wanted to make a dual boot MS-DOS/Windows 98 machine along with the Olivetti M4 454 S I revived...

For the ati X300 try Catalyst 6.2 or 6.3.

That version works for my X850xt pe.

And if you find 98 drivers for sound card then try duke3d in command prompt inside win98.... most 98 sound drivers have a soundblaster emulation build in.

For Example my Nforce2 chipset audio driver.

Note that this forum is for help with DOS Games, not for setting up DOS on hardware.

Sammy wrote:

For the ati X300 try Catalyst 6.2 or 6.3.

I've installed the drivers for the X300 without problems on Windows XP, although I couldn't find any compatible ones for Windows 98, are those 2 versions compatible with Windows 98 ?

Sammy wrote:

And if you find 98 drivers for sound card then try duke3d in command prompt inside win98.... most 98 sound drivers have a soundblaster emulation build in.

For Example my Nforce2 chipset audio driver.

That's the problem !!! I can't find any driver compatible with Windows 98 and that motherboard !!! 😢
That motherboard (ASUS A8V-XE)'s audio chipset is a SoundMAX, if you'd like to try to search some compatible drivers for Windows 98, I can't find any 😢

collector wrote:

Note that this forum is for help with DOS Games, not for setting up DOS on hardware.

Since the main issue is that I ain't able to hear any sound in-game, the topic got a bit extended to the hardware, I hope someone can find a workaround 😐

Moved to Marvin.

Stiletto wrote:

Moved to Marvin.

Thanks, seeing how the topic got extended from the original, simple "sound issue" to hardware-related discussion, that subforum fits much better 😁

Well if you wanna audio on DOS with pci card you should go with Diamond Monster Sound MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2)
It will work great on windows 98 and it have sound blaster emulation.

Does it also come with "actual DOS" drivers aswell other than Win9x ?

Elia1995 wrote:

Does it also come with "actual DOS" drivers aswell other than Win9x ?

I think that the card have soundblaster emulation so maybe sb drivers should work, but i'm not sure.

there are 2 versions of catalyst. one for 2000/xp and the other for 98/ME.

So You need the one for 98/Me.

If you have xp on that Machine install VDMSound for Dos-Games.

ESS Solo-1 is a PCI sound card that works in pure DOS (with drivers). Audio works in DOS games under Win 98 with standard drivers, and instructions for getting audio under pure DOS are here http://www.nadergator.com/proj15.html. You can search ES 1938 or ES 1946 if you want to buy it.