mistermister wrote on 2021-04-14, 14:53:

I am attempting to set up one of my PCs with 2 ISA soundcards in DOS; a Soundscape VIVO90 and a Soundblaster 16 Value. My intention is to use the SB16 for Soundblaster compatiblity and OPL3 and the Vivo for external midi and Soundscape digital audio. I am having trouble figuring out how to disable Soundblaster support on the Vivo card. The only manuals I find online are for the older Soundscape cards, they reference using SSINIT with an onscreen interface. With my Vivo card SSINIT just reports that the driver is installed, there does not seem to be an option to make changes. There is a file SSCONFIG.INI but I can find no documentation for the settings. I tried changing SBMode to false in thr INI file, but the card still complains if I do not set its Blaster environment variable. When I add the SB16 it requires its own Blaster variable, things seem to be conflicting. If anyone has a manual for the Vivo card or has knowledge of how to do what I am attempting, I would really appreciate the help. Thanks in advance.

I have never owned a Soundscape Vivo 90, so I cannot help with how to disable its SB emulation .

However, I believe there is a workaround scenario where you might not need to disable anything. You would just need to set the Blaster variable to different resource values before initializing each card . This would give you two sound blasters in the system with the ability to choose the one you want to use by setting its corresponding blaster variable . I have been using this method successfully to have both an SB Pro compatible and an SB16 compatible in the same system for a long time .

I've used the VIVO but I don't remember what its SSINIT does. With the previous Soundscape cards it does have a GUI mode for config.

My idea is to disable the SB emulation in device manager in Windows. That sometimes affects the pure DOS configuration as well.

I have made positive progress on this. There was a setting in the Windows (Win95) Vivo driver to disable Soundblaster emulation on the Vivo card. It appears that the only SB address available for the Vivo card is 220 which I wanted to use for the DB16, so I disabled it via the Windows switch. I was then able to get the SB16 working (digital audio and OPL3) using only the SET BLASTER variable (using different resources than the VIVO) and DIAGNOSE.EXE /S in AUTOEXEC.BAT. I did not load the drivers in CONFIG.SYS, some references online were saying they are not needed, and I was getting errors during boot with them. There are a few odd behaviors such as the SB16 wants to keeps its MPU on 330 even though I have the jumper and BLASTER variable on 300. External MIDI still is working using the Vivo on address 330. Also the Adlib music option is very quiet in Duke3D Setup testing, it is plenty loud in the SB16 test mode of the DIAGNOSE program. I will try to play with the mixer. Windows is still using the Vivo without any apparent problems, but with no SB emulation which I guess could be useful for running DOS games in Windows. Not a big deal to me as I run DOS games by rebooting into DOS. My CT2770 SB16 is not installed in Windows. Next step I think is to load some games and do real testing.

Thanks for your help on this.