VOGONS


First post, by quicknick

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Working on a build these days (EpoX P55-TX2, K6-2/400, more details here, and for the sound I decided to use one of the more interesting pieces in my collection, the Aztech Sound Galaxy Waverider 32+.

Used the DOS-based config.exe to reset the card's settings to default, went in the BIOS and reserved IRQ5 to Legacy ISA then booted Win 98se. Here I think I made a mistake, because I went against the install guide and let Windows search and install the card automatically. It detected it as a Washington 16 and it started working right away (minus the wavetable); I was surprised at how quiet it is compared to other cards of that era (and even some a few years newer).

Went to device manager to change to the official Win95 driver, but windows wouldn't let me do that, so instead I removed the Washington from device manager and followed the install guide (don't let Windows search, manually add "Sound, video and game Controllers", Have disk...). Well, instant blue screen when pointing Windows to the driver folder. Searched around the 'net and found what looked to be other versions of the Win95 drivers, tried them all, same outcome (not so surprising, as they all have the same size so I think not really different versions).

At this point it was like shooting in the dark, lost track of the things I tried... and out of nowhere I managed to get it installed as a generic AZT2316 or something. Started working again but was noticeably noisier than before, and also the Wavetide synth got installed (I have no idea if Win98 has knowledge about the WT synth, or it was because I previously installed the contents of the Wavetide folder from the driver package. Because after countless blue screens and restarts I lost my patience and installed everything, including the Win3.1 software suite...). However, after listening to some MIDI files for a few minutes to have an idea about the wavetable on this board, all sound stopped and Windows started spewing errors. Not BSODs, but something like "Studio has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down". I don't know what "Studio" means in this context, I was using Winamp to listen to the MIDs.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier to run the diagnose.exe in DOS. Did this after all of the above, and the FM test/demo sounded like a horrible garbled mess. At this point I remembered that the default config has the MPU401 on IRQ2, and this IRQ cannot be routed to Legacy ISA in the BIOS. So I changed the MPU401 to IRQ7 and assigned this one to Legacy, after disabling the COM and LPT ports. As expected, because (I think) FM music has nothing to do with the MPU401, it sounded the same garbled mess. As a last try I disabled the L1 cache in BIOS, lo and behold FM music started sounding right.

Thinking I'm onto something I booted up Windows to try and install that official driver. All the process was painfully slow due to the disabled cache, but the BSOD was very quick to appear when I selected which driver to install. Pulled the card out and called it a day, I have plenty other stuff to solve with this build.

At this point, is it even worth bothering with this card, seeing as (probably) FM won't work in DOS with CPU cache enabled? Are there any tips&tricks or maybe obvious steps that i'm overlooking in getting that pesky Win95 driver to work in 98SE?

Reply 1 of 3, by Oetker

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I had the same issue with demofm.exe (the FM test from Diagnose) with my azt2316 card. It seems its OPL is speed sensitive for some applications. However, games like Doom work fine.

Why exactly do you want to use the Win95 driver? I don't think it'll perform better than the Win98 driver(s). Win98 comes with two sets of azt2316 drivers: the Washington 16 driver (VXD) and the generic driver (WDM). With the Washington driver I had issues with sounds such as clicking around in Explorer being noisy - the WDM driver fixes that, but you won't have any DOS compatibility. I'd install the WDM drivers + drivers for the wavetable and run DOS games in pure dos.

Don't know if it's the card itself, the Win98 drivers, or (remnants of) the Win98 drivers that's causing your bluescreens.

Reply 2 of 3, by quicknick

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Thank you for all the info!
Well, turned out that my NEC USB2.0 card was the culprit. Besides the bluescreens when attempting to install the official driver for the Aztech card, it also caused hard lockups followed by auto-reset upon starting the NFS games with 3dfx renderer selected, and a significant loss in overall system performance. Dropped that card and I'll use theUSB1.1 or whatever's onboard - already figured out the peculiar header.

Having briefly played with the Aztech drivers, I didn't notice any noise when clicking in Explorer, but I'll focus on that tomorrow. Gone from the MIDI devices listing is the Microsoft GS synth, is this because of the VXD drivers? Guess I'll test that tomorrow too. I'll probably keep them as I'd very much like to have DOS compatibility inside Windows.

Also I had no time to test any game in pure DOS; I think I can live with the garbled sound if it manifests only in the demofm.exe and not in games.

Reply 3 of 3, by Oetker

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quicknick wrote on 2020-04-01, 22:45:

Having briefly played with the Aztech drivers, I didn't notice any noise when clicking in Explorer, but I'll focus on that tomorrow. Gone from the MIDI devices listing is the Microsoft GS synth, is this because of the VXD drivers? Guess I'll test that tomorrow too. I'll probably keep them as I'd very much like to have DOS compatibility inside Windows.

Yes that's because of the VXD drivers, good point.

I had the following issues with the card: demofm garbled, Duke Nukem 2 sometimes no digital sound effects, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure no adlib music most of the time, needed to start Doom 1/2 twice to hear digital sfx.
Recently I switched to a AZT2320 based card and it only had the Cosmo issue (which, I think, my SB16 didn't have, but that has the integrated OPL3 so maybe that's less speed sensitive that the real thing?).

Unfortunately it's difficult to say what exactly causes the issues. Demofm.exe was definitely fixed by slowing down my CPU, but the others also worked (sometimes) without slowing down, yet slowing down seemed to increase the chances of success (apart from Doom). The Doom issue might just be a problem with my specific motherboard, even though it's 440BX based. Still, my hunch is that, contrary to other info, the 2316 is still speed sensitive and the 2320 less so.