you could try the choice command in autoexec.bat
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_(command)

@ECHO off
@CHOICE /C:123
ECHO press 1 for soundcard 1 press 2 for soundcard 2
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 GOTO two
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO one
GOTO end
:one
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
GOTO end
:two
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\AUDIOAPP
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
GOTO end
:end
@PAUSE

obviously ive just made up the settings you need to change them for the correct ones

borgie83 wrote:

Out of the above, what would you guys recommend?

Are you actually planning to play specific games that are known to have mutually incompatible sound card requirements? If so, which games?

I use a Live! and a CT2230 + DB50XG in my Windows 98 machine and am very happy with it. The CT2230 is good because it isn't PnP, so Windows 98 does see it, and it's just a great card.

I use a dual boot, one for Windows and one for a DOS 7 boot. The CT2230 is initialiased (via diagnose.exe, etc) in the DOS boot only. Obviously the Live! is not initialiased in DOS unless you go out of your way to setup the DOS drivers for it, but there's no need with a real SB16 in there.

Depends which games you want to play, but out of those the CT2230 + DB50XG and either the GUS or SB with CMS seems a good bet.

My CT2230 was one of my last resorts as it doesn't have the DSP in the socket like my CT1740 and CT1750. I've also heard that I'd suffer the daughterboard bug with some of the later sound blaster like the CT2230.

Is there a way to check the DSP version eg: 4.05 just by looking at the card itself? Apparently the CT1740 doesn't suffer from the daughterboard bug although I haven't tested this myself yet.

In regards to using the sound blaster with the DB50XG and also using another card like the CT1350B with CMS or the CT1600, what settings would I have to use in AUTOEXEC.BAT to load both sound cards without needing to go down the "choice" path as mentioned above? If I could load both cards, could I just use the appropriate IRQ and Address game sound settings to activate whichever card? Also, in regards to setting the appropriate jumpers, could I set the first card to IRQ 5 and Address 220 and the other card to IRQ 7 and Address 240 whilst leaving the DMA jumpers the same on both cards or would I have to jumper the DMA's differently for both cards?

Jorpho, I've heard I wont be able to get stereo sound from older games, just mono sound. That's why I am looking to use an older card like the CT1350B or CT1600 with something newer like the SB16,AWE32 or AWE64. Don't really want to use the AWE64 though as it doesn't have a waveblaster header to connect up my DB50XG. In terms of the games that I'll be playing, I'm looking to play late 80`s to early 90`s games. Mainly adventure titles like the old Sierra games as well as stuff like Day of the Tentacle, Sam n Max, Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Discworld and the Legend of Kyrandia series. The later Dos games that I'll be playing are stuff like Doom, Blood, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Hexen and MechWarrior 2.

Oh and obviously Voodoo enabled games like Need for Speed, Quake, Unreal and Decent. That's why I threw the Voodoo 2's in there 😀

borgie83 wrote:

In regards to using the sound blaster with the DB50XG and also using another card like the CT1350B with CMS or the CT1600, what settings would I have to use in AUTOEXEC.BAT to load both sound cards without needing to go down the "choice" path as mentioned above? If I could load both cards, could I just use the appropriate IRQ and Address game sound settings to activate whichever card?

Mr. Davros's example already consists entirely of SET statements. There is not necessarily anything that must be "loaded". If you do not use "the 'choice' path" you will just have to write separate batch files to set the environment variables. Of course, it all depends on which cards you use, specifically.

I've heard I wont be able to get stereo sound from older games, just mono sound.

That's news to me.

Jorpho wrote:

I've heard I wont be able to get stereo sound from older games, just mono sound.

That's news to me.

I think he is talking about the SB16 not being able to play back stereo when used as a SBPro.

Having two cards sharing one DMA channel might work as long as both cards have separate I/O and IRQ, but chances are that one card may get "confused" by that. You might want to set the SBPro to A220 I5 D1 and the SB16/AWE32 to A240 I7 D0 H5.
I also use a DB50XG but I have put it into an external casing to use it as an external MIDI device. I do not need a card with a daughterboard connector that way.
You can get SBro compatibility in DOS from your PCI card as well, but PCI soundcards usually do not work very well with DOS games.

Yes Pyrogx, that's exactly what I was talking about. Sorry Jorpho, I should've been more clear.

I'll take your advice Pyrogx and jumper the DMA's differently as I can see this possibly causing a conflict like you said. In regards to PCI based sound cards, they are pretty much useless in Dos unfortunately unless you have a PC/PCI connector cable from the sound card to the motherboard. The SBLive and Diamond MX300 don't offer such connectors. Tried so hard to get my Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card on my Pentium 4 PC to work in Dos with no luck at all. I do have a Diamond Monster MX300 Sound Card though which has SBPro dos support but I haven't tried that out in Dos yet.

Jorpho, I was really hoping to not have to write different batch files for each game. I'm mainly looking for a solution where I can just turn on the PC, select the appropriate sound settings to suit whatever card I want to use for that particular game and then play away.

I know I can use 2 sound cards (PCI and ISA), 1 for windows and 1 for Dos, as that's very simple to setup. Dos though is a whole new ball game.

And once again, the Stereo myth lives on...

This issue ONLY affects digital speech. NOT FM. There aren't many games that do NOT support SB16 AND have Stereo speech on a Sound Blaster Pro.

It's a non issue...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

This issue ONLY affects digital speech. NOT FM. There aren't many games that do NOT support SB16 AND have Stereo speech on a Sound Blaster Pro.

It's a non issue...

Yes, you're right, I should've been more precise (If I think of SB16 vs SBPro, I always imply it's all about digital speech, FM is always more or less the same for me on both cards...I even don't care whether it is an original OPL3 or some sort of clone...). I personally don't think that it is necessary to have a SB16 *and* a SBPro in the same system, but if it is that what the OP would like to have, I won't ask any questions 😉
PCI soundcards: They can work in DOS even without the PC/PCI connector, but the odds that they do so are determined by many different things such as mainboard chipset, the specific card model, the software/game itself,... All in all, PCI soundcards in DOS are a hit-and-miss matter and most of the time not worth the trouble.

borgie83 wrote:

Jorpho, I was really hoping to not have to write different batch files for each game. I'm mainly looking for a solution where I can just turn on the PC, select the appropriate sound settings to suit whatever card I want to use for that particular game and then play away.

Uh, isn't that exactly like using Choice in autoexec.bat?

I wasn't thinking of batch files for each game, just batch files for each sound card. While some games store their sound card settings in their own special way, many games rely on the BLASTER environment variable, which will inevitably have to be set differently to trigger the use of a different card.

Of course, if you don't care about any game that might not store its own sound card settings, then this is a non-issue and you can stop worrying about it.

My choice would be AWE32 CT3900 + DB50XG and the GUS.

You then get the following choices from just two isa slots at the same time:
Adlib
SB
SB16
AWE32
MPU401/ General MIDI via the DB50XG
Ultrasound

That's pretty much the widest range of choices you're likely to get. It's pretty simple to get them all running at the same time, just make sure you set your GUS to use a different base address, dma and irq to the AWE32 and disable any cd interfaces on either card. Leave the midi port as 330 on the AWE32 and anything you set as MPU401 should use the Yamaha without tweaking. Don't load megaem or anything other than ultrinit (or ultramid when needed) for the GUS.

I'd reccomend investing in an external stereo mixer for the outputs, rather than a complicated series of outputs looped into inputs.

Jorpho, reading into the choice command option again, I'm starting to understand it a bit better. I initially thought it would load through Autoexec.bat and so only initialise the sound card of choice. Then I would have to reset the computer in order to select the 2nd sound card if needed. But now when I look at it, I could use the choice command to initialise whichever card on the fly depending on what game I'm going to play. Sorry for my misunderstanding. I've learnt a lot from this thread already 😀

Megatron, the AWE 32 + DB50XG would be my ultimate card to use but as I said, it won't fit in my case 🙁 mainly due to the removeable hard drive cage getting in the way. Actually, I may be able to remove the cage altogether and use brackets to mount my hard drive in without the need for the cage. That way it may fit nicely. Will have to measure the width of the case though as the coolermaster haf combat is much wider than most mid tower cases so the hard drive brackets may not work. I never really thought about using the GUS with the sound blaster. With the AWE 32 + GUS combination, will I still get good Sound Blaster 1/Pro compatibility? I thought people mainly used the GUS for their awesome midi? Wouldn't the DB50XG provide me with better midi than the GUS? I mainly bought it for collecting purposes so it's never been used before. Although that may change soon.

borgie83 wrote:

Megatron, the AWE 32 + DB50XG would be my ultimate card to use but as I said, it won't fit in my case 🙁 mainly due to the removeable hard drive cage getting in the way. Actually, I may be able to remove the cage altogether and use brackets to mount my hard drive in without the need for the cage. That way it may fit nicely. Will have to measure the width of the case though as the coolermaster haf combat is much wider than most mid tower cases so the hard drive brackets may not work.

Sorry, missed that bit.

I never really thought about using the GUS with the sound blaster. With the AWE 32 + GUS combination, will I still get good Sound Blaster 1/Pro compatibility? I thought people mainly used the GUS for their awesome midi? Wouldn't the DB50XG provide me with better midi than the GUS? I mainly bought it for collecting purposes so it's never been used before. Although that may change soon.

Yes, if you have the AWE32 installed, then you've got your driverless Adlib, SB / SB Pro and SB16 setup sorted (with the stereo limitations for SB Pro as detailed earlier). I wouldn't use the SB or MPU401 emulation features of the GUS. Stick with it's own native support, or ultramid at a pinch. The AWE32 and DB50XG round out your music capabilities - about the only thing you're missing is a Roland LA synth or Creative CMS support. The Roland MT you can resolve with a gameport to midi cable, now that the software driver is available, but the CMS capability means compromising elsewhere.

You should be able to get the best music options for virtually the entire range of Dos games with that setup.

megatron-uk wrote:

Yes, if you have the AWE32 installed, then you've got your driverless Adlib, SB / SB Pro and SB16 setup sorted (with the stereo limitations for SB Pro as detailed earlier).

I thought the AWE32 required AWEUTIL.

AWEUTIL is for enabling General MIDI MPU-401 emulation on AWE32. Games which support AWE32 natively do not need any AWEUTIL to work.

Just AWEUTIL/S which initialises the card 😀

borgie83 wrote:

I've also heard that I'd suffer the daughterboard bug with some of the later sound blaster like the CT2230.

The funny thing is that people who don't own the card keep reporting this, but several users (including myself) here on Vogons have not been able to get any hanging notes on this card/version. Badmojo can confirm.