is it possible to turn off pnp and assign manually?

I'm stuck here. Any ideas?

Yes, get rid of the Vibra card. I don't get why you want to add a second card just for OPL3?

derSammler wrote:

I'm stuck here. Any ideas?

Yes, get rid of the Vibra card. I don't get why you want to add a second card just for OPL3?

Because I can....? 😜 And because I cannot stand the emulated OPL sound...

I'd hate to ditch the Vibra, as I want the best possible Sound Blaster (16) compatibility without outright spending money on an actual SB16 with genuine OPL3... Lack of money being a major reason 😜

is it possible to turn off pnp and assign manually?

Well yeah. That works for IRQs and DMAs. Not so much for I/O ports 🙁

Don't know about Vibra but on AWE64 you use CTCU

Very few cards allow you to disable the OPL port. I don't believe Creative cards are among them.

I've managed to do it.

You have to modify the CTPNP file:

1[EXCLUDE]
2Exclude_Port=288-288
3
4[SB16]
5(...)
6Port2=398

And then you run both SETUPSA.EXE (for the Yamaha card) and CTCM.EXE in your Autoexec.bat, before loading Windows.

If you set both cards' PnP options to "Set resources automatically", it will take the values set by those two programs. Works a treat! You have to use MIXERSET too if you're routing audio through the line input.

OK here's an update.

After messing around with this machine with elianda, we found out that these configuration options actually do nothing at all.

The Yamaha OPL3-SAX configuration program (SETUPSA.EXE) conciously reconfigures the SB16PnP to OPL3 port 0x398. Something the official Creative tools and drivers will not permit you to do. In fact, CTCU gets very confused and has glitchy empty list boxes when selecting the device which is now at 398. CTCM will say that it only configured "3 of 4" creative PnP devices, but the remapping worked anyway, the Creative FM synth responds to port 0x398 just fine.

Interesting interesting... Perhaps a CTCM mod is in order that permits remapping of OPL ports 😁

We checked with ISA PnP Tools 1.27:

The SB16 reports to allow the port range of 0x388h to 0x388h only for the OPL. However, since the effect from SETUPSA proves that it is possible to move it to 0x398h the test is still open to write a script for ISAPNP.EXE to try to configure the FM Synth to 0x398h regardless of the reported limitation to 0x388h.

PnP controlled ports can generally be put to anywhere in 000 to FFF range, with limitation only being the alignment value (i.e 4 means that something can be on 100, 104, 108 but not 101 or 105).

That's an unfortunate oversight on Creative's part. If the card in question has a separate EEPROM for that purpose, has anyone given any thought to programming a revised resource map? That should allow trouble-free re-location of the CQM I/O address, regardless of the operating system in use. It may even be possible to disable it altogether using that tactic.

I'm not familiar with that card, so it's unclear if it can be done in-circuit, if the EEPROM would have to be de-soldered, or if it's outright impossible based on Creative's design.

It should be possible but the way EEPROM is written is not standard, if it is done via the PnP mechanism it goes in the vendor defined registers in ISA PnP specs.

@640K!enough Give me a day or two that I can try a setup with isapnp.exe. If it ignores the port range reported, then there is no need to patch the eeprom. I mean SETUPSA accomplishes that also without a modified eeprom....

@Tiido Of course any port can be set, but it is not said that the logic on the card decodes all bits. In fact, if a resource is fixed to 0x388h one would not expect that any other decode of the adress bits can be set.

any update on this? I've got an AWE64 gold that's been laying dormant for years with terminal CQM disease that's just waiting for a cure