badmojo wrote on 2020-12-07, 22:16:

The card installs and works fine, in both pure DOS and Windows 98, but most of the time (not all of the time!) the PC will hang when hitting CTL ALT DEL to do a soft reset - same thing happens if I use the 'restart' option in Win98. The PC will reboot but instead of starting to POST, the screen goes blank and the monitor goes in to 'no signal' mode. Things I've tried:

Stuff like this can happen if you get a port conflict between your sound card and an on-board device used to configure the mainboard. As you are using a socket 7 mainboard, there likely are some advanced configurable devices soldered to the board, most notably the Super I/O chip (which provides parallel, serial and floppy ports) that can be configured from BIOS setup. The BIOS needs some way to set up that chip, and while using ports like 2E/2F or 4E/4F are a common choice, other Super I/O chips are configured by ports within the 100-3FF "add-on card range". Another possible culprit is the voltage/fan monitoring solution. This can either be a directly ISA connected chip, typical I/O base would be 290, or it could be a ISA/SMBus bridge.

One thing the Super I/O configuration port and the hardware monitor have in common is that they work perfectly well after configuring them (like setting the COM port numbers or setting up the minimum fan speed), but the BIOS will interact with them during POST. So it is quite possible that a conflict between some part of the Crystal sound card gets configured by the Setup utility you run to use the card to a port that conflicts with an on-board management port. If you want to troubleshoot this in more detail, try getting a POST card that can give an indication what the BIOS tries to do when it locks up during POST.

badmojo wrote on 2020-12-07, 22:16:

Hi!

So I installed one of my favourite sound cards into one of my favourite retro PCs and of course there's a problem - damn old rigs. Motherboard: GA-586T2 (Intel based socket 7), sound card: Crystal CS4232-KQ based 'Magic S23' (ISA).

The card installs and works fine, in both pure DOS and Windows 98, but most of the time (not all of the time!) the PC will hang when hitting CTL ALT DEL to do a soft reset - same thing happens if I use the 'restart' option in Win98. The PC will reboot but instead of starting to POST, the screen goes blank and the monitor goes in to 'no signal' mode. Things I've tried:

mkarcher is probably correct in a resource conflict. Does the same black screen happen when you hit the reset button from DOS ?

Yes thankyou mkarcher for the detailed reply I think you're right, but if the conflict kicks in before my BIOS settings take effect then I'm in struggle town. I have all of the non essential onboard stuff turned off so I'm not sure what more I can do with regards to resolving a conflict.

And @Horun the reset button works fine, it's only the "soft" reset that's impacted, so I guess the sound card will have its resources assigned by that point by the TSR or Win98. Actually that's a point, maybe I could try using different resources for WSS and see if that helps - all other sound cards I've tried work fine in this system and they don't have WSS resources assigned.