First post, by swaaye
So, I ventured forth to eBay to get a CT1740 (an original SB16) so I could be free of PnP and hopefully the stuck note flaw of later SB16s and AWE32s. I got it installed last night and gave it a whirl. All seemed peachy perfect and I had 3 sound cards successfully going at once!!! That was a beautiful thing: Monster Sound MX300, SB16 + SCD15, Ensoniq Soundscape Elite! (I dont use the MX300 DOS driver tho. It's only for Win9x.)
Until I tried Dark Forces. It freezes right up while it's starting from plain DOS. The install program works fine, with music and sound from the SB16 and DB, but the game itself just won't load! If I disable the General MIDI music in the installer, the game works fine. I've never seen DF give a problem like this. The game worked fine with the SCD15 on my Vortex 2 PCI card and it runs fine with my Ensoniq Soundscape. It worked fine with my newer SB16, aside from skipping and off-key notes being played.
I've tried port 300 and 330 for MIDI. Nada. Nothing should be conflicting. I pulled all sound cards but the SB16. I tried loading with nothing but HIMEM.SYS (no SB utils). Other games work fine with it (Cybermage is actually the only other MIDI I've tested). Digital audio works fine in everything.
I found a TSR called SBMPU401.EXE which supposedly fixes SB16 MIDI port issues, but it was no help. I think that may just be for getting old games with just straight Roland MPU-401 support working with a SB16 MPU-401.
Did some Google Groups-ing and found that the DF Demo didn't work with SB16 + DBs because of some incompatibility. It was claimed that this would be fixed in the final game. I can't tell if that's the case, but there isn't much other talk of it on newsgroups. That's where I found the post about the SBMPU401.exe TSR because it apparently fixed one guy's problems with the game freezing.
Ahhrrrggghhh!!!!!!!!! Anyone else see this happen?
relevant GGroups posts:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?ie=UTF … ces&qt_s=Search
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?ie=UTF … ces&qt_s=Search
ASUS P5A Super 7 mobo
K6-III+ @ 600 MHz (100x6)
256MB PC133 @ 100 MHz
Ultra133 PCI card
Intel NIC
(attached the SB MPU401 fix for those interested. I never knew this existed until now)