My understanding is that what you want to do would require being able to re-assign IO ports and IRQs dynamically, so you could switch settings between cards as needed to run a given game .This would require cards that can be soft-configured (as opposed to using jumpers), which you do not have .

The only way around this that I see could be called "hacky", at best : using cables like these https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01M1IEUAF to extend the jumper blocks for card configuration outside of the PC and into an external jumper board. Then, you could reconfigure the cards externally, even to the point of switching between pre-defined preset configurations with a switch if you want to make it fancy .

Points to consider :
a) You would to turn off the PC BEFORE changing configs.
b) Extending the jumper blocks in this way may not work well because of noise and/or impedance constraints
c) Replacing your cards with soft configurable ones (no jumpers) may be easier .

I think your current setup is fine. It's mostly older games which suffer from the single-cycle DMA bug and they often expect the sound card at the standard settings, which your Aztech currently uses. Newer games usually let you select the address, IRQ and DMA values in setup, so you should have no problems with configuring those to use the SB16.

If the BLASTER variable is your only issue, simply set up two batch files e.g. SB16.BAT and SBPRO.BAT and run whichever you need to set the relevant values before starting a game.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-05-27, 15:44:

I think your current setup is fine. It's mostly older games which suffer from the single-cycle DMA bug and they often expect the sound card at the standard settings, which your Aztech currently uses. Newer games usually let you select the address, IRQ and DMA values in setup, so you should have no problems with configuring those to use the SB16.

If the BLASTER variable is your only issue, simply set up two batch files e.g. SB16.BAT and SBPRO.BAT and run whichever you need to set the relevant values before starting a game.

That would indeed be much simpler, if it covers all the OP's use cases .

However, it does not address some potential use cases such as , for example, having two different games that are both hard coded to a given set of IRQ/DMA/IO settings (likely IRQ 7, DMA 1 and , 220H) but that OP would like to use on different cards . On second thought, I would guess that this is scenario unlikely, and I am probably just over-analyzing the problem .

darry wrote on 2021-05-27, 15:55:

[...]

That would indeed be much simpler, if it covers all the OP's use cases .

However, it does not address some potential use cases such as , for example, having two different games that are both hard coded to a given set of IRQ/DMA/IO settings (likely IRQ 7, DMA 1 and , 220H) but that OP would like to use on different cards . On second thought, I would guess that this is scenario unlikely, and I am probably just over-analyzing the problem .

Unlikely but possible, particularly from early 1990s when hard coding was common and XT (220/7/1) and AT (220/5/1) defaults both were still used.

But the question shouldn't be an abstract "Can it happen?" (yes it can), but "Will it happen with the games a, b, c, d and e that I intend to play?"

I also spent too much time overthinking this until I realized I didn't have a single game I actually played that suffered from hard coding...