First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
Suppose you had two Sound Blaster cards, one 8-bit (Sound Blaster Pro 2.0) and one 16-bit (Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) in the same system, would they work correctly?
Here are the resources used by the 8-bit card:
I/O 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1
Here are the resources used by the 16-bit card:
I/O 240, I/O 330, IRQ 5, DMA 3, HDMA 5
I use the 16-bit device at some non-default settlings because most later games allow you to change the settings, many earlier games expect the default settings. But this is not the end of the story, because both cards use I/O 388/389 (Adlib support) and I/O 201 (Gameport).
I don't think that a serious bus conflict will result in a read to the Adlib port. Even though many 16-bit Sound Blasters do not have a true Adlib, they must still seem to function identically, so a read should send identical data from both cards. Whichever card wins, the processor will receive the right data. You can simply mute the card whose output you didn't want to hear.
Now the Gameport would present a more serious problem, because a read from the port would cause a bus conflict unless you had the same device hooked up to both ports. Otherwise one gameport will send valid data, while the other will be on an open bus or different data. Fortunately, the early Sound Blasters have a Joystick Enable jumper which should take care of the problem. [/b]
