First post, by dukeofurl
- Rank
- Newbie
I'm having some trouble getting a Gravis PNP soundcard (one of the popular modern reproductions) working on my 386. I've actually gotten it to work in some rare circumstances, so the card is OK, but its not regularly repeatable. I had a Gravis Ultrasound running on this same pc back in the 90s on a now-defunct HDD, so I know there should be no major incompatibility with the motherboard/bios/cpu/ram etc... Anyway, I wanted a sanity check about the installation process in case I'm missing something. Here's what I'm doing:
-Card is physically connected to the motherboard and has compatible ram chip inserted to store the samples
-I run the configuration program that comes with the gravis cd to set up the card's baseport/IRQ/DMA. It defaults to IRQ 11, but I heard many dos games are incompatible with that, so in addition to trying things with IRQ 11, I've also tried reconfiguring the settings to use IRQ 7 and 5. I've also used the options in the gravis configuration menu to disable the joystick port and cdrom to lessen the chance of conflicts. IW.INI is created.
-I run the unisound driver, which successfully recognizes the card and the baseport/IRQ/DMA settings I've established for the card
-I have run the special ultrasound software "megaem" to load the ultrasound samples into the card's ram, and enable soundblaster emulation. Alternatively, while trying different things out, I have run ultramid and SBOS instead, which are two separate programs that came with earlier versions of gravis soundcards that do the same thing. I get success messages mentioning the samples have been loaded to the card, and if I run SBOS, I hear its sampled PCM voice saying "SBOS Installed!"
Here are some examples of the results I get with games:
-Commander Keen 4-6 - does not detect a soundcard
-Skyroads - freezes on startup, black screen, before the game loads
-Duke Nukem 2 - freezes on startup, black screen, before the game loads
-Jill of the Jungle - the configuration screen searches for a sound card indefinitely, and while it is not frozen, the user cannot exit the configuration screen while that process is going on
-Stunts - game does not load, resolution of the screen changes and the pc is frozen at the dos prompt
-Tyrian - I got the game's music to play back in the setup menu when the IRQ was set to 11, but when I selected ultrasound for SFX, it played about 20 sfx back to back as a test that I could not stop before playing a harsh grinding noise and freezing. When the IRQ is set to 5, the music and SFX didn't play.
-Jazz Jackrabbit - if ultrasound is selected, the game gives me an error on startup saying to return to setup to configure the sound card. No sound is provided. If I have run SBOS, I can sometimes get sound/music working when selecting soundblaster for playback... but other times it fails to load and says the DMA buffer is too small to handle the request
Is my installation and configuration process reasonable? Am I missing a step?