Hi all

I hope this question is not too specific, but in fiddling again with a Windows 98 (first edition) VM in VMware version 12, I'm having some trouble with the audio driver setup. There's quite a bit of information about this around the web, but so far I've only found two types: information that was written for older versions of VMware and don't work anymore in 12.x, and people mentioning that common solutions don't work in 12.x and that they haven't figured out the fix yet. I wanted to see if someone here has figured something out in this regard.

As far as I know, VMware 12 gives the option of emulating either of two audio chipsets, the Sound Blaster 16 or the ES1371. The drivers recommended in VMware's own knowledge base for the emulated ES1371 are the ones for "Creative Ensoniq Audio PCI", and those do work in the version that is still available from Creative (epw9xup.exe), but loading MIDI wavetables is broken, and I can't activate digital CD audio. The latter of which would be important because a game I'm trying to run has a CD audio soundtrack, and I don't think it's possible to get that to work in analogue mode through VMware.

I also tried Creative's drivers for the "Sound Blaster PCI 64" (e64w9xup.exe) which uses the same chipset. Curiously, this inverts everything: MIDI works now, and I can activate the digital CD audio checkbox and actually listen to an audio CD. Frustratingly, for some reason it breaks the actual PCM audio, so all other sounds beside MIDI and CDDA don't work anymore.

Apparently, people used to be able to get the Sound Blaster PCI 128 driver to work (even though it's based on a different chipset) in earlier versions of VMware. This now leads to a bluescreen on installation.

From what I could gather, the Sound Blaster 16 doesn't even support digital CD audio, so I don't assume it could be made to work there. I still tried, changing the VMX setting to sb16 and using the driver from the Windows 98 CD, and it was the same as the Audio PCI one: sound fine, but no MIDI and no digital CD audio.

It would be great if there was a way to somehow combine the wave output functionality of the Audio PCI driver, and the MIDI and digital CD audio capability of the PCI 64 driver, because obviously the VMware chip emulation would support both. But I don't know if it would be as easy as mixing and matching files from the two driver sets, or if maybe there is some other official driver out there that can do both.

Grateful for any input 😀