VOGONS


First post, by naujoks

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I just got a Sound Blaster 16 Pro Plug and Play (CT2950) in, but it's not being recognised in the two PCs (one a 286, the other a 386 DX40) I tried it in.
The DOS/Win 3.11 install can't find it, neither Win 95 using hardware detection. The Creative diagnostic app also stops after it failed to find it under any of the hardware addresses (220, 230, 240etc).
I tried different ISA slots to no avail.
Externally the card is in great condition, looking like new. No broken traces, clean and shiny edge connector, no bulging caps.

Any ideas what I could do to breathe some life into this card?

Reply 2 of 6, by Gmlb256

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UNISOUND is also a good alternative for configuring PnP cards on computer that lacks PnP BIOS support, especially for that 286 computer.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 3 of 6, by naujoks

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That's awesome, thanks! I didn't really that PnP cards need to have a BIOS that supports PnP.
The Unisound driver sounds like it should work, and I'll try it out. The 286 will be fine with it, but the 386 machine has Win95 on, and the Unisound is a DOS driver.
Do we think there's a way to get sound working in Win95 as well?

Reply 4 of 6, by Gmlb256

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naujoks wrote on 2021-10-14, 19:28:

Do we think there's a way to get sound working in Win95 as well?

I believe that Windows 95 can configure that PnP sound card and you can change the resources thru the device manager.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 5 of 6, by MN_Moody

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UNISOUND should detect and configure that card on the 386/40 for sure, I've never tried it on a 286 or older computer since I prefer to rock old Aztech SB Pro clone cards in those machines where you just need to use the SET BLASTER statement to identify what resources the card is configured for.

If UNISOUND fails to see the card I'm inclined to say the hardware might actually be bad.

Reply 6 of 6, by mkarcher

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Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-10-14, 19:42:
naujoks wrote on 2021-10-14, 19:28:

Do we think there's a way to get sound working in Win95 as well?

I believe that Windows 95 can configure that PnP sound card and you can change the resources thru the device manager.

Yes, that's exactly how Windows 95 is meant to be used.

Be aware that Windows 95 configures PnP cards only when you start the GUI. If you use the start menu to run "command prompt only", you are left with unconfigured PnP cards. It's not a serious problem, because in that case, UNISOUND will work fine. If you choose to start the GUI using "win" after you already initialised the sound card using UNISOUND, this is again not a problem, because Windows 95 will happily overwrite the configuration that has been set by UNISOUND with the configuration from the device manager. So there is no problem with having the device manager set the preferred settings ("base configuration 0000"), and also runing UNISOUND - especially if both set the same settings, because in that case, you don't even need to worry about different settings of the BLASTER variable.