First post, by lemonlime
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi All,
Is anyone using one of the PC MIDI clone cards with a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 by chance?
Both cards work together fine, but only sometimes. There appears to be about a 50/50 chance that the PC MIDI card is functional once I boot up and get to the command prompt. In the situations where it doesn’t work, MQDIAG.EXE doesn’t find the PC MIDI card at IRQ2/port 330. It’s as if the card just isn’t there. If I do a soft reboot (CTRL+ALT+DEL), it remains in the broken state. If I power the system off and power it back up, there is a 50/50 chance it’ll work again. When it works, it seems to work great until I restart the system again.
I suspect it has something to do with a conflict of the onboard MPU on the PAS16. There is no jumper to disable it via hardware and it has to be done during MVSOUND.SYS driver initialization in config.sys. It is correctly disabled (m:0) via software, but I’m not sure what’s happening behind the scenes before this during boot-up. Does the PAS16’s MPU default to enabled with IRQ2/330 until the driver tells it otherwise? Considering how random it is, I’m thinking the two cards are fighting over IRQ 2/330 during startup, and whichever gets it first is the winner. Or do software configured cards like this not consume any resources on the system at all until initialized? I'm not very knowledgable in this area, unfortunately.
This problem happens on two different systems I've tried, including the 486 its in now. I don’t seem to have this problem when using a SB16 with its onboard MPU disabled via jumper, but will need more reboots to confirm 😀
Any suggestions for troubleshooting?
Thanks!
Also known as vswitchzero. Check out my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/vswitchzero