Just for your information, the purpose of the two VIA tools are the following:

- VIAUDIO is a small TSR that detects when windows is loaded, and disables Sound Blaster emulation (by setting function 5, register 48, bit 0 in the south bridge) while windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME) is running. This function might be useful even if mixer settings were done by UNISOUND, to prevent sound blaster emulation interfering with a Windows AC97 wave playback driver. The sound blaster emulation in the DOS box should be provided by windows instead of the south bridge.
- VIAFMTSR initializes the sound blaster resource configuration, sets appropriate mixer settings and installs a mediocre software FM synthesizer. It uses the south bridge to capture accesses to the FM I/O ports, but does the OPL emulation in software. Capturing the FM ports works very similar to the NMI feedback on the AWE32 to enable MPU emulation by AWEUTIL, so I expect it to fail with a lot of protected mode games.

So you need VIAUDIO *only* for improved windows compatibility. Without a decent sound card enabler (like the new UNISOUND), you need to load VIAFMTSR even if you don't need FM emulation - but it seems you can unload it and the configuration of the PCM part stays in place.

The NMI method of SB emulation usually did work with protected mode games, it was the software port trapping method (using VM86 mode) which was notoriously unreliable.

mkarcher wrote on 2020-06-09, 22:05:

Just for your information, the purpose of the two VIA tools are the following: […]
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Just for your information, the purpose of the two VIA tools are the following:

- VIAUDIO is a small TSR that detects when windows is loaded, and disables Sound Blaster emulation (by setting function 5, register 48, bit 0 in the south bridge) while windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME) is running. This function might be useful even if mixer settings were done by UNISOUND, to prevent sound blaster emulation interfering with a Windows AC97 wave playback driver. The sound blaster emulation in the DOS box should be provided by windows instead of the south bridge.
- VIAFMTSR initializes the sound blaster resource configuration, sets appropriate mixer settings and installs a mediocre software FM synthesizer. It uses the south bridge to capture accesses to the FM I/O ports, but does the OPL emulation in software. Capturing the FM ports works very similar to the NMI feedback on the AWE32 to enable MPU emulation by AWEUTIL, so I expect it to fail with a lot of protected mode games.

So you need VIAUDIO *only* for improved windows compatibility. Without a decent sound card enabler (like the new UNISOUND), you need to load VIAFMTSR even if you don't need FM emulation - but it seems you can unload it and the configuration of the PCM part stays in place.

Thanks for clarifying what VIAUDIO does, it's useful to know. UNISOUND is only for ISA sound cards, but JazeFox's VIASBCFG enabler for the southbridge does some additional configurations and mixer settings - VIASBCFG - VIA SBPro configuration tool for VIA VT8231 & VT82C686/A/B chipsets (v0.12d) without needing VIAFMTSR. It can also disable the sb emulation so can be used before loading windows if needed on machines that have the sb emulation enabled in BIOS.

Hi.

I have tried to install Windows 98 SE on a HP T5500 Thin Client with VT8231. After install the system, I have installed also some packs of drivers for the chipset, sound and graphics.
I have well installed the ATI drivers and I hear sound but, in the games only can hear the FX audio but nothing more, no music ingame.
Looking for any issue I saw on the device list a couple of devices with some kind of problem, the VIA Bus Master PCI IDE and the PCI Bridge. I can't find a driver for both after serch for many days on internet.
When I try to play some games, the system freezes if I install VIASBCFG and I think that the problem are thouse devices... maybe I have a wrong drivers pack, so anyone have a Thin Client as mine and a good drivers for chipset?.

Regards.

Is there any driver for Windows 3.x?