Greetings,

In my quest to get this nostalgia-PC up and running, a new issue ALWAYS crops up when I solve a previous issue. I acquired an external Sound Canvas and run it alongside my MT-32. I spend a few days trying to use 32GB+ CF cards and SD-CF-Adapter cards working by trying multiple pieces of DDO software before giving up and settling on 8GB and 4GB cards which my fickle motherboard (Tomato 4DPS) seems to like. I got everything installed inside the case and installed MS-DOS 7.1 onto the FAT32 formatted 8GB card. I installed my AWE32 drivers and tweaked my memory settings until I was satisfied with 624k without SMARTDRV, and 609k with it. I installed Strahd's Possession and Shattered Lands to test the Sound Canvas and to ensure that my AWE32 was working properly (CT2760.) The music and sound effects played as they are supposed to, and I declared the DOS set up to be complete.

I then went to install Windows 3.11. I attempted to use the patch from the OSR2Fix.exe since I used to need it to run Windows 3.11 from a FAT32 drive. However, the patch failed, and I was able to start and exit Windows multiple times, seemingly without error - except for getting File Not Found in the windows directory which goes away if you CD.. out and the CD\ back in. I then installed AWE32 drivers and apps for Windows 3.x. I started Windows and it updated the AWE32 group and icons, but I heard nothing. I opened up the AWE323 mixer and cranked everything up while turning up the volume on my speakers so that I could hear the hissing. If I slid the balance slider either to the left or the right, I could hear the hiss change speakers. However, no system sounds can be heard when I click the test button, and wave files play, but no sound comes through the speakers.

This is driving me to madness, at this point. The number of issues are unrealistic and it doesn't make sense for the AWE32 to be detected, but for Windows 3.x to not play the sounds through the speakers, especially since the hissing test proves that the system sees the card and is sending "something" to the speakers, but somehow Windows isn't sending sound file data or whatever it is that is happening... I have no idea where to look or what to try. I built an almost identical system in 86box (same motherboard, same sound card, same family of graphics card) and installed DOS 7.1 and Windows 3.11 on a FAT32 virtual drive and used the same OS install files and the same driver files and the sound works. I reinstalled everything on a 4gb card - which worked fine in the previous iteration of this PC with my previous 4DPS (same bios,) same AWE32, and a similar Mach64 card. The only difference was the CF-to-IDE drive I used.

Any help will be greatly appreciated! I am almost done with this and I hope to be able to simply use the PC in both DOS and Windows without issues.