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First post, by red_avatar

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I consider myself a veteran when it comes to getting old games running, but this one has me stumped:

A week ago I bought an old IBM Aptiva 166 with 64Mb RAM and 2.0Gb HDD. I put inside my own old (ISA) AWE64 Gold and a DVD drive. The AWE64 gave me some problems at first because of conflicts with the ethernet card that was in there so I removed it. Win98 had no problem detecting the soundcard, and installation of the drivers went fine. Music and sound would play withotu a hitch under Windows.

BUT. Like I said, I consider myself a veteran. It's commonly known that just using drivers in DOS for your soundcard will often result in sound being too quiet. Since AWE64 didn't come with nearly as many DOS utilities than the older Creative soundcards, I took the liberty of using the older SB16 utilities that work fine - in specific SB16set.exe which lets me set volume on any aspect of the soundcard and quadriple the soundoutput.

Let me get to the problem: nearly half of the games, usually the pre 1995 ones, give me problems with digital sound. Music works fine, no problem. But digital sound won't work - nor under DOS nor under Windows. Weird, because in other games it works just fine. The games where it won't work (among others) are:
Doom
Legend of Kyrandia 1&2&3
Worms
Theme Park (it says "using 8bit sound" at the start, yet the starting movie had sound at first)
...

Games where it does work:
Little Big Adventure
Lands of Lore 2
Command & Conquer
...

I suspect that no older Westwood games (Dune 2, Lands of Lore) will work with digital sound (which is annoying since I have speech versions of all these games).

What could be the problem ? I set all the settings as they should :
config.sys and autoexec.bat have the right lines - 220 I5 D1 H5

Now, the older SB16 utilities also have a diagnostic program which I tried. Oddly enough, it would detect the address, IRQ but not the low DMA. (which is set at 1).

Now I began thinking - despite it saying the soundcard is detected - could it be that somehow DMA 1 is not available ? Music doesn't need Low DMA, and the more recent games use High DMA for digital soundI believe ? Windows does too. So can it be that old games that use low DMA won't have digital sound ?

If that is true, what should I do ? BIOS says that DMA 0,1,2 is free, so what could be taken it ? Is there a way to check ? I really want this to work - I bought this computer just for these old games, and having no sound would be really awful after all the trouble I went through.

Reply 1 of 11, by Harekiet

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Isn't there some setup tool you have to run at startup that sets up your awe64 to run on a specific address/irq/hi-lo dma since those can be changed at runtime in sound blaster 16+ cards.

Reply 3 of 11, by red_avatar

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Forget about awe - that's for midi emulation and has no effect on digital sound. The soundcard is basically a SB16 with upgraded parts and will work using the old SB16 drivers if need be. The problem is not software. This card has ALWAYS worked perfectly in another computer with the SAME settings and software. It has to be a hardware problem or a problem with setting them up.

And you don't have to run that setup tool - if ctcm is what you mean. CTCM detects the "true" settings of your card, which are set in Win9X - but despite it saying it detects it, it won't change a thing.

Reply 5 of 11, by red_avatar

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Yeah I know - CTCM is loaded if I want to - but it's not needed for some reason. If I boot under DOS, just by setting the blaster lines in config.sys and autoexec.bat, I can get sound in most games. It's weird - I doubt if CTCM changes anything about it. It seems to just "borrow" the settings from Win9X (which is what the readme said - it checks Win9X for the right settings and then initialises the card).

Hmmm .... I'm going to true pure DOS drivers I downloaded.

Reply 6 of 11, by red_avatar

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Okay that didn't work and I'm running out of ideas. The pure DOS drivers won't install since it's Win95 🙁 even when running in true DOS. And if I make a DOS 6.0 bootdisk it won't read my FAT32 HDD.

Reply 7 of 11, by teamster1975

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Since you are savvy with the SB and DOS I'm not sure whether this would be of help, but just in case ...
awe64 midi troubles
CTCM never seemed to do anything worthwhile; I removed it from config.sys and everything seemed to work fine without it; this being with a sb16 pnp, awe32 and awe64.

Reply 8 of 11, by red_avatar

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Thanks but I cant' use that - I already discovered what the problem is - but I will need help fixing it.

Basically, Low DMA is unavailable in Windows and DOS. Low DMA is usually 0,1,2 or 3 and is used for 8bit sound (which older games use). As a result, newer games play digital sound without a problem because they use 16 bit and thus High DMA which is usually 5,6,7,8,9 etc.

SO what I need to find out is why low DMA is not available and that's where I'm stuck. I tried different drivers, but as you might expect, it won't be so easy. I tried changing the Low DMA to another address - instead of 1, 0 or 3 but none are available the diagnostics program says. Weird. Yet BIOS says they're all free. I'm out of ideas here.

Reply 9 of 11, by MiniMax

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Hi Red - what MS OS'es do you have? Have you tried MSD.EXE or HWDIAG.EXE from Win95 to see what is using the low DMA's?

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Reply 11 of 11, by Hellworm

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Here are the settings from my PC with an AWE64 Gold card.
(PII 333Mhz, 64 megs RAM, 15 Gig HD)
I have a dual partition (Pure DOS 6.2 & Windows 98SE), so I have the settings for both environments.

Pure DOS settings

Autoexec.bat

SET SOUND=C:\AWE64
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:G MODE:0
SET CTCM=C:\CTCM
LH C:\AWE64\DIAGNOSE /S
LH C:\AWE64\MIXERSET /P
LH C:\AWE64\AWEUTIL /EM:GM /R:90 /C:90

Config.sys

DEVICE=C:\CTCM\CTCM.EXE

Windows 98 Settings

Autoexec.bat

SET SOUND=C:\AWE64
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0

Windows 98 Dosstart.bat (Run when you Restart in DOS mode)

C:\Windows\CTCM

There is a file called CTPNP.CFG in the same folder as CTCM.EXE.
This contains the setting information for the sound card using CTCM.

The settings in here need to match Blaster environment settings.

CTPNP.CFG

[PNP]
Readport=277

[SB16]
Csn=1
LogDev=0
CardId=CTL009E
Serial=0E5C2121
Port0=220
Port1=330
Port2=388
Irq0=5
Dma0=1
Dma1=5

[AWE]
Csn=1
LogDev=2
CardId=CTL009E
Serial=0E5C2121
Port0=620
Port1=A20
Port2=E20

[GAMEPORT]
Csn=1
LogDev=1
CardId=CTL009e
Serial=0e5c2121
Port0=200

If these settings do not match, CTCM will not configure the soundcard configuration properly.

There is a configuration tool called CTCU.EXE

For Windows 9.x you can download a package called 95dosapp.exe from Creative Labs website that contains all of the necessary drivers for Windows 9.x Dos prompt.

Hope this helps, as this setup works perfect for my system.
Let me know if you need anything clarified.

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