Made good progress, but disaster struck. Project now postponed.

I was able to get the GUS, NXPro and MusicQuest working fully and the SB16 and PAS16 partially, and even load a mouse driver (on COM1, PS/2 gave conflicts) with a slightly modified resource setup:

NXPro: A220 I7 D1
SB16: A240 I5 D3 H7 P300
GUS: A260 I11 D6 (rec&playback)
PAS16: A384 I10 D5 (IRQ3 hung the system even though I'd disabled COM2) - and all SB & MIDI disabled
MQ: A330 I(2/9)

SB16 gave perfect OPL, but no digital audio. PAS16 worked fine in diag tools, but not in any game. The PAS16 problems might just be software - I set its AdLib to 384, but all games seem to look for 388 and fail to find it there, several outputting on the SB16 instead (!), and a lot of games assume the PAS16 SB support is active for digital audio. As for the SB16 digital audio... no idea. Possibly a dud card, as I recall these problems previously.

As I tried to figure this out, odd things started happening. The GUS was no longer detected at all and the mouse drivers weren't finding the serial mouse. Also intermittently HIMEM found errors. Removing everything except VGA and RAM the system kept misbehaving, so either the motherboard or the PSU is dying on me. No time tonight to figure out which...

Right, fortunately is was the PSU. Less fortunately that means out of four possible units, only one AT PSU here actually works, and it has *awful* coil whine 🙁

That let me progress on the rest too. Turns out there's something fundamentally wrong with my CT2950. Even with a clean install and no other cards/conflicts it still only does FM, no digital audio. Maybe a PnP issue, but for now I replaced it with a non-PnP CT2910 that does exactly what I want. I'd keep it permanently but it has OPL3 and I actually want CQM. Once I get the rest behaving as I want I might replace it with a CT3670 and try the CTCU/CTCM circus again.

But first the PAS16. It conflicts with the NXPro. Exactly what is going on is a mystery as SB emulation on the PAS16 is off, and DMA and IRQ are different. The only thing left to conflict is the AdLib I/O address 388. There I'm hitting a wall - the NXPro doesn't allow it to be changed, and even though the PAS16 has 4 'board ID' options that would somehow map onto I/O address, whatever I set the ID to, the PAS16 always comes up at 388.

Question: does anybody know how to convince a PAS16 to reside at one of the other I/O options (38C, 384, 288, 28C)?

388 is hardwired on most non PnP cards and cannot be easily changed or disabled outside physically removing parts from the card to prevent bus conflicts etc.

Tiido wrote:

388 is hardwired on most non PnP cards and cannot be easily changed or disabled outside physically removing parts from the card to prevent bus conflicts etc.

Grumble... this is very much a non-PnP card. What's the point of "Card ID" then? It doesn't seem to alter anything of import...

Oh well, if I really can't change this will have to see if I can change something on the NXPro. It's interesting that the conflict only seems to be with that card, not with the SB16. Maybe WSS is somehow getting in the way.

maybe ask batyra a thing or 2 about having multiple sound cards in one rig

dionb, well done! I praise you. Look at this: Pure DOS gaming system with 100% digital audio output Maybe it can help. By the way if your SB16 is PnP you can try to disable FM via Control Panel custom resources configurations (without 388h FM channel at all), then reinit in DOS mode and you'll see it works without FM synthesis. GUS can also disable FM emulation via its jumper. About PAS16 I don't know.

Anyway if one of your card's init lets you to change FM address you can use it because games don't apply NON-388 address.

Why not get one of those nice ATX to AT adapters with -5v added?

Then you can use whatever new power supply you want and don't have to worry about ancient and dying AT power supplies?

The guy that makes them even started making them with the spade connectors so you can re-use the power switch already in your case.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATX-EPS-24-PIN-to-AT … SA/254124137678

PARUS wrote:

dionb, well done! I praise you. Look at this: Pure DOS gaming system with 100% digital audio output Maybe it can help. By the way if your SB16 is PnP you can try to disable FM via Control Panel custom resources configurations (without 388h FM channel at all), then reinit in DOS mode and you'll see it works without FM synthesis. GUS can also disable FM emulation via its jumper. About PAS16 I don't know.

Thanks!

Strangely enough the SB16 isn't the problem. My CT2910 (non-PnP) works fine next to the PAS16 without any changes to FM I/O. It's only the Aztech NXPro that blocks it. The NXPro itself works fine, but when it's in place the PAS16 simply isn't detected at 388h (or any of the other options).

Bottom line now it that I can do two 4-card configs without conflict:
GUS Classic - SB16 CT2910 - PAS16 - MusicQuest
GUS Classic - SB16 CT2910 - NXPro - MusicQuest

Anyway if one of your card's init lets you to change FM address you can use it because games don't apply NON-388 address.

OMF2097 does, at least for the PAS16. The more I look at that game's sound options and quality, the more I love it.

A bigger problem with games is the limited resource options they allow you to set, particularly DMA. I have a few (Colonization, Master of Magic) that only allow DMA 1, 2 (!?) or 3, so not 0 or 5. That means I can do max 2 of the sound cards with digital audio on those games. A build with 5 sound cards, of which 4 use DMA, is fun to build but, simply not practical with most of the software out there.