First post, by quicknick
- Rank
- Oldbie
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?