I’ve been testing some games and that’s what I have:

Duke3d, Blood, Prince of Persia, Death Rally, Wrath of Earth, Dune 2, Descent. They all worked properly. There maybe issues on longplay, but first minuted didn’t bring into open anything wrong. Even Doom works with default DOS4GW, no issues so far.

But! Prince of Persia 2 freeze on first digital sound, Jazz Jackrabbit crash with Runtime error 200 with sound enabled, and Ecstatica sounds awful Ecstatica works okay.

Looks like adlib is not working with this dos emulation… usually sound blaster = adlib but in this case sb works and adlib not.

Tested Commander Keen and it’s not getting sound and music other then pcspeaker

Bought a dead n600c to take some parts for my sample, 8$. To my surprise it was fully working! This model do nothing if there is no HDD inside, but after I installed one it started working.

Moreover, looks like I’ll keep second unit and sell first one. This 8$ dude has better screen, no ageing yellow tint, 32mb m6 compared to my 16mb and cpu is p3-1200 while my has 1000mhz. And that’s not mentioning I’ve got some cracks and had to fix ac port on my fist unit.

A horible discovery was made. This laptop can’t handle three simultaneously pressed keys. Like you walk forward+left and try jumping. That’s sad.

I also faced strange behaviour of volume buttons, never saw such earlier.

When I press vol down it works properly, but if then press vol up it will go just one step higher and do nothing. But after ~10 sec it will go up. Also whil this stuck happens vol down will enable disable mute, not change vol down.

Okay, looks like vol up needs cleaning, it’s stuck somehow I think.

vorob wrote on 2020-07-26, 07:43:

Can anyone explain what’s going on here? I’ve got n600c and n400c. Both with win 98, default wdm sound driver and Microsoft midi […]
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Can anyone explain what’s going on here? I’ve got n600c and n400c. Both with win 98, default wdm sound driver and Microsoft midi thing:

8D91C820-1C7F-4B0B-B797-329FE6D12471.jpeg

But they sound differently. N600c sounds horribly primitive.

https://youtu.be/lSAZHFs0cKo

Hey, did the problem gone after you update the driver? I'm going to get a n600c but I'm not sure how the ESS allegro sounds. I don't expect it to be the same as OPL3 in every detail, but at least it should be similar.
I got a old Pentium 2 Presario with ESS 18xx last year and the sound is good. Hope n600c's sound is OK, otherwise it will be a piece of crap to me... 🤣

vorob wrote on 2022-03-30, 18:39:

I’ve been testing some games and that’s what I have:

Duke3d, Blood, Prince of Persia, Death Rally, Wrath of Earth, Dune 2, Descent. They all worked properly. There maybe issues on longplay, but first minuted didn’t bring into open anything wrong. Even Doom works with default DOS4GW, no issues so far.

But! Prince of Persia 2 freeze on first digital sound, Jazz Jackrabbit crash with Runtime error 200 with sound enabled, and Ecstatica sounds awful Ecstatica works okay.

The freeze of Prince of Persia 2 is pretty much like what I got with YMF7x4, but in real dos it is OK. You may try to change the IRQ of the legacy audio device, I don't remember the details (maybe IRQ conflicts that win98 fails to report) but after I change the IRQ the freeze problem is gone.

EDIT:
OK, I tested my N600C which was bought recently and Prince of Persia freezes even in DOS. need more tests to see what happens.

I finally get one n600c and the driver works, but with only FM music, no audio. I'm using PCPCI (ESSAUDIO.COM by Kamerat), and IRQ7 (files from OP, *.*7 renamed as *.ini/bat).
Without essaudio.sys, Miles Sound cannot detect SB digital audio; while essaudio.sys installed, Miles Sound can detect SB digital audio but game still don't have it. I will test it with some more games.

BTW as others said when I searched before in the forum, the FM is more like Ensoniq card with software wavetable emulation, sounds awful compared with OPL.🤣 Allegro and Maestro both. Only Solo-1 is as good as OPL2/3. Solo-1 is the last ess chip with hardware FM.

It's a good laptop for win98 gaming (P3 Tualatin + AMD Radeon), but I won't recommend it for DOS because of the sound card.

UPDATE:
The digital audio is not missing for my laptop, but its volume is too low that it is almost nothing. I now use VXD driver in win98se and the master volume can affect both the audio and FM music. When the master volume is turned to maximum, I can hear slightly sound from Skyroads or some other OPL3 games using Miles Sound. There's no separate switches. "synthesizer" volume seems control windows midi, not legacy FM; "wave" volume controls both audio & FM music too. I think changing the volume via SB interface might work, but it involves a little bit more (programming) work. here's a ref that can change the SB mixer volume: https://wiki.osdev.org/Sound_Blaster_16
I might try it if I have time. the coding would be rather simple but I'm not sure if it will work.
-EDIT: tried the sb mixer, but no luck. I think all games will reset sb to initial state including mixer volume.

BTW some game like doom (DOS/4GW. DOS32A not tested) will freeze the win98 system. prince of persia 2 will freeze but can be switched out to desktop.

The VXD driver I used can be found here: https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=88343, it doesn't need force install and will recognize the sound card directly.
Before installation, Try to the following to resolve IRQ & DMA conflict:

Disable ECP printer port (LPT1) in device manager.
Disable COM1
Disable SMC IrCC Infrared
I also disable the floppy controller, but don't remember whether it's mandatory or not.

After disabling those devices, the Allegro driver will install with default setting: IRQ5, DMA1 Address 220h.
skyroads & warcraft2 will have audio but after exit, the mouse cursor is moving slow, but will return to normal if some "click" sound played (backspace / double click a folder). I guess there's still some compatibility issues. The driver will use IRQ5 for both PCI audio and legacy SB, it might be OK in DOS, but I wonder if it has compatibility issues

BTW there's other Win98 drivers for N600C: http://hpnotebookdrivers.com/compaq-evo-n600c … ows-98-drivers/
I installed the 830M mobo driver and Speedstep driver, and the ATI graphics. the Speedstep driver may help with the heating. There's also an NIC (network) drivers for n600c but I don't bother to install it.

My last resort: I tried DOSBox, official build(current version 0.74-3 win32) as this thread indicates that it can run on win98: Can you run DOSBox in Windows 98 (NOT run Win98 in DOSbox!)
it's running but even early dos games are a little bit slow, All you need is to change "cycles" option and then everything goes fine, including late 90s dos games, running fluent, It's a 1G Hz Pentium3 Tualatin anyway just with enough power to handle DOSBox emulation. And the OPL2 quality is better than the native ESS Allegro emulation (OPL3 in allegro is already crap). the drawbacks is that the laptop is kinda more heated. and the screen is tearing, I don't know if any vsync options available in DOSBox. another way is change ATI graphics settings to force vsync, it may help but as I can see some games still have tearing.
Steps to change the cycles:
1. Open "DOSBox0.74-3 Options.bat" in the DOSBox folder, it will open the default config file with notepad.
2. Find "cycles=auto" and change it into "cycles=max" and it's done.
To turn on VSync: right click desktop and "Properties=>Settings tab=>Advanced button", in both OpenGL and Direct3D tabs, there are "wait for vsync" checkbox

Tips on DOSBox: you may need to goto to the [autoexec] section at the end of the config file and mount the local folder as drive C.
if any option is not suitable for a specific game, just create/saveas another config file in the target game folder and use a DOSBox shortcut with "-conf" command line option to use it properly. or use any frontend. (TLDR; off topic).

BTW I really really prefer real hardware to DOSBox but it seems hopeless on the n600c case.