VOGONS


First post, by Retromangia

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Hey guys,

I honestly need some help understanding IRQ's and resource conflicts.

I have an old Toshiba 440CDT Laptop. After some blood, sweat and tears upgrading to the latest bios (it has no floppy drive, just CD-ROM). She works great now ....except for the audio.

So let me explain... I initially wanted to run Win98 SE, but when it came to sound... every time i booted up into windows, it would lock up. I tried several different drivers, IRQ settings in BIOS, but no luck. Safe Mode actually worked fine however, because there were no sound drivers loaded I'm guessing?

So I reformatted for the 20 billionth time, and now I'm having better luck with Windows 95 OSR2.5.

When i first install windows 95, everything works fine.. hell it even has sound! but in device manager, there's no mention of Yamaha OPL3 at all. Just "generic sound synth, MPU-401, and Windows Sound system". So at this point, the sound works fine with the stock windows drivers, however, there's exclamation marks next to almost everything under sound, and no mention of Yamaha OPL3.

So I start installing the latest Yamaha Win95 drivers from Toshiba's website, and things do work AT FIRST. After installing the drivers, I now have the proper devices installed it seems, listed as "SB Pro", "Windows Sound System", and "Yamaha OPL3-SAx Sound System"... and ALL sounds are working great. CD-Audio plays, Windows wave sounds, it's all PERFECT...

BUT....when you click the details in the device manager, Almost every sound device has SEVERAL resource conflicts between them. Once I start playing with IRQ's, DMA access, and I/O addresses, things start going to shit. I'm now at the point where sound doesn't work at all, so I'm reloading Win95 OSR2 once again from scratch. 😲

Last edited by Retromangia on 2019-02-24, 07:39. Edited 4 times in total.

Reply 1 of 5, by Retromangia

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ok update... just reloaded Win95 from SCRATCH, and this time its even worse. Now the only device that's listed is "Yamaha OPL3" under "other" tab. There was NO mention of Sound Blaster Pro, Windows Sound System, Gameport or MPU-401... Nadda.

So i installed the OP3L driver, rebooted, aannnd HARD LOCK. back to square one.

It has to be something in my BIOS, but I have no idea how to show what's conflicting, and what settings I need to change. 😢

"bang head here"

Reply 2 of 5, by Tiido

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Try to run SETYMF before Windows loads : http://www.tmeeco.eu/TKAYBSC
It sets up YMF71x chips completely and hopefully windows will then play along too, assuming the laptop isn't using YMF701, which is a different beast that my util is very unlikely to support.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 3 of 5, by Retromangia

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Thanks Tiido! I will take a look at the utility... great little website by the way, looks straight out of 1997 and I love it. 😀

Last edited by Retromangia on 2019-02-20, 22:27. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 5, by Retromangia

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Update...Good news folks! Out of pure masochism and partial insanity, I was FINALLY able to get this baby working.. and boy does that OPL3 pump! 🤣

The issue was with IRQ conflicts after all, between the Sound board and the onboard COM Ports (including Serial, LPT Printer, and COM ports). Even though they were all disabled in BIOS, Windows was still assigning them IRQ's. Once I disabled all 4 Port entries in device manager, the little sound icon popped right up in the system tray. At 5AM when I was just about ready to give up, I clicked on properties of "COMPUTER" at the VERY TOP of device manager. This allows you to organize your installed devices by assigned IRQ's, and sure enough there were multiple devices sharing the same IRQ's between the Sound card and onboard Ports. So make sure you disable these 4 Port entries before installing the Yamaha Drivers.

I've included screenshots of all the correct settings you'll need for the Toshiba Satellite 440CDT Laptop. From proper BIOS settings, to how everything should look in the device manager once all said and done. Before Installing Windows, make sure the BIOS is set correctly first.

For Windows 95... in order to have CD-ROM & Sound support in DOS, I also had to add the following lines to autoexec.bat and config.sys (both located in root of C:). Also make sure to place the Toshiba CD-ROM driver in the root of C: as well, "toscdrom.sys" (10x version).

CONFIG.SYS

DEVICE=C:\TOSCDROM.SYS/D:TOSCD001
===================================================
AUTOEXEC.BAT

C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE/D:TOSCD001
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T5
====================================================
**T can also be "T4"
-T4 is for Sound Blaster Pro
-T5 is for Sound Blaster Pro w/ OPL3 FM Synth
-Try both...For now I'll stick with T5

Best sound driver is the official Toshiba Win9x Yamaha installer v4.06.2343 (this is the latest driver ever made for this particular sound chip). For best video driver, use the official Toshiba driver appropriate to that version of Windows. Both can be found at Toshiba's website.

One more thing to note is that the BIOS on this particular laptop only supports bootable partitions upto 7.8GB.. I was having many false drive error's at first when I was trying to install Windows 95/98, because I had the entire 40GB drive set as the bootable partition.

Hopefully this will help someone in the future

Retro out 😎

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