First post, by ShovelKnight
Hi,
When trying to find why I can't get SVGA DOS apps to work with my graphics card, I somehow managed to screw up sound on my DOS/Windows 98 machine. I think it happened after I changed something in BIOS (there are many parameters related to hardware initialisation, including several options for IRQ routing).
At first the sound simply stopped working at all. In DOS games, I would get FM music, but no digital audio. The ESSCFG utility was reporting that the sound card was configured according to the command line parameters, but there was no initialisation "click" when it was loading. The games were either complaining that there was no digital audio device or just simply fail to play any digital audio. The only game that was working OK was Quake, all the others I tried (Doom, Nectaris, The Grandest Fleet, Machiavelli The Prince, Dune 2) did not play digital audio at all. In Theme Hospital, digital audio was playing but it was extremely choppy, and the game slowed to a crawl while the audio was playing. In Windows 98, any attempt to play audio would either freeze the machine or throw an exception.
After unsuccessfully trying to solve this problem for a while, I loaded BIOS defaults. Now ESSCFG says that the sound card is already configured by PNP BIOS, but there is an initialisation "click" and DOS games work fine in pure DOS - I have perfect digital audio in every DOS game/application I tried and no slowdowns in Theme Hospital. In Windows, however, the audio is extremely choppy. Even the startup sound is stuttering.
I tried playing with hardware acceleration levels in DXDIAG (this was useless because ES1869 doesn't support hardware buffers anyway), replaced Windows 98 built-in WDM drivers with OEM VXD drivers for Windows 95, but the problem still remains. There are no resource conflicts with other devices.
I tried another ES1869 card but the problem remains exactly the same.
I wonder if there's anything else I can do to solve this problem...
My PC configuration:
- AMD K6-III+ 400/ATZ overclocked to 550 MHz
- Shuttle HOT-597 motherboard (VIA MVP3)
- Nvidia GeForce 2MX PCI
- 384 MB RAM
- 32 GB IDE SSD
I would be very grateful for any help, because I think I completely exhausted my options at this point.