sirotkaslo wrote on 2023-01-26, 09:14:

Hi,
I'm having issues with installing drivers for my new vortex 2 card. It works fine in win xp with the default drivers. In win98 I tried 2041/2048 and 2050 and it always freezes when it tries to install drivers for Sound Blaster pro Emulation. Could this be an IRQ issue?

I'll try it today in another pc, as the one it's currently in only has one PCI slot (Shuttle xpc ss51g).

Could well be an IRQ issue. The way that I've dealt with these virtual devices is that I've usually disabled COM2 or LPT1 in the BIOS to free up an IRQ, and then made a reservation for ISA/Legacy or set slot IRQs from within the BIOS to leave the IRQs preferred for SoundBlaster (5 or 7) free for the emulation.

In the case of LPT or the parallel port, I've read someplace that the most compatible IRQ is 7, which the parallel port commonly takes up, so if I don't outright disable the port, I move it to IRQ5. IRQs 3/4 which are commonly used by the serial ports (COM1 and COM2) aren't necessarily automatically allocated to PCI devices on the system unless you have the option to set the allocation in the BIOS.

Also be aware that on systems with the traditional non-extended interrupts you are typically allocating them in bunches. For example, if slot 3 shares an interrupt with USB, then moving that allocation will also move the USB IRQ etc.

I already have disabled both comports + lpt + floppy. Having only one pci is a problem, if it won't work, I'll just use it without dos support.

I fixed the issue, thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I reserved IRQ5 in bios and now I have everything up and running!

More issues. It seems I have a bigger problem. When I have a3d enabled, I get a lot of hissing in half life, or "room" demo. When I disable it, everything works fine