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Compaq Premier Sound ES1869 ISA - Genius Sound Maker SM32 PCI - conflicting in Windows98SE?

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First post, by andre_6

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Hello everyone,

I recently got a Compaq Premier Sound ESS AudioDrive 1869 ISA card to complete a build made out of extra hardware that I had around. I also had a Genius Sound Maker SM32 PCI that I wanted to try out as it has a Crystal CS4280 and I was curious to see how it would perform. Plus they're both from 1998 so it would be cool to have both in Win98SE.

Windows 98SE installed the ESS ISA card by itself and it's working, but despite the Genius Sound Maker SM32 installing as well by default, and me defining the latter as the "do it all" card except for MIDI in Multimedia - Control Panel I still can't get the PCI card to output any sound.

Winamp plays the track with the PCI card as the assigned one to playback everything but MIDI, but I get no sound with it. On the other hand, if I assign the ESS ISA card to all playback, it outputs sound immediately. It automatically installed WDM drivers for it despite me thinking that ISA cards only had .vxd drivers. Would this be the cause of the problem?

There are three items in device manager for the PCI Genius Sound Maker SM32 and two for the ISA ES1869:
++ES1869 Control Interface (WDM)
++ES1869 Plug and Play AudioDrive (WDM)

**Genius Sound Maker (SM)32 Game Device
**Genius Sound Maker (SM)32 Joystick
**Genius Sound Maker (SM)32 PCI Audio Accelerator

The "Game Device" one had an exclamation point signalling to a conflicting IRQ, and indicating that I had to remove an item for it. I chose the ECP Printer Port to be disabled, but it had the ESS ISA card on the list too. On DOS while booting Windows claimed once that the Genius PCI card couldn't initialize in DOS. But I can't find anywhere where I can tell it not to initialize in DOS, or to uninstall any DOS driver that it may have installed by itself...

So am I dealing with some kind of conflict here? I thought that all I had to do was install the cards normally in Windows, go to Control Panel - Multimedia, assign the PCI card to everything but MIDI, ISA card to MIDI, connect a cable from the ISA card's output to PCI card's input, and from it output to the speakers. And in DOS games just point them to the ISA card.

This is all new to me, could anyone please help me out with this? Thanks a lot in advance for your help and replies

Reply 1 of 2, by Horun

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Wish I could help but know next to nothing about running 2 sound cards at same time and not sure why any one would unless they are dedicating one to a Roland midi device, sorry am tired and brain ain't working ;p

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 2, by andre_6

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Horun wrote on 2023-08-30, 03:23:

Wish I could help but know next to nothing about running 2 sound cards at same time and not sure why any one would unless they are dedicating one to a Roland midi device, sorry am tired and brain ain't working ;p

Hi Horun, thanks for the reply.

I was under the impression that PCI cards are better for Windows 9x with less output noise, and ISA cards were better for real non emulated sound in DOS. As I've seen many people around here using PCI+ISA soundcards on Win98 I didn't think it would be considered unusual to ask about it...

It is an ISA card from 1998, sure, but for Windows wouldn't a PCI card be better, saving the former for DOS games, assuming I
could somehow make it work?

Edit: just fyi, I've also been particularly tired, if you were being sarcastic by any chance then it absolutely went over my head! 🙂

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