VOGONS


First post, by AppleSauce

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I've had a bit of an issue for a while now with my pentium dos gaming setup.

Heres the deets :

CPU Pentium 233mmx
MOBO MSI 5148 Motherboard with 430 TX chipset
RAM 32MB of ram

The rig has about 7 cards in it (3 pci , 4 isa)

PCI
S3 Trio 64 V2/DX with 4MB or ram
3dfx Voodoo with 4mb of ram
NEC Pcx1 PowerVR card with 4mb of ram

ISA
AWE64 Gold with SIMMCON addon
Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 with socketed ASP enabled
Primax Soundstorm M16C Gravis ultrasound clone
Roland MIF IPC MPU401 BOB interface card

DRIVES
I've also got a NEC CDR 273 4x cd drive
Two 7200 rpm WD caviars : one for win95 , one for dos 6.22 and windows 3.1
1.2mb 5.25 floppy drive
1.44mb 3.5 floppy drive

So its pretty well fully laden.
Which I know doesn't really do me any favors.
But mostly everything works , except for the Sound blaster 16.
I have disabled the awe64 in DOS via the utilities.

The attachment 20221017_170808.jpg is no longer available

I usually get this error , but its quite inconsistent , I've tried changing irqs and dmas etc
sometimes you can play the test sound in duke3ds setup like 10ish times before it gives the playback failed error.
Other configurations would let me run the test sound 3 times consecutively before the error.

Descent 2 will run with the sb16 and cd music in software mode , only ingame though , in the setup it refuses to play cd audio.
But if you try to disable the cd audio in game the music will keep playing anyways which is quite odd.

If you try to run Descent 2 in 3dfx mode with the cd music then the game locks up.
Ditto with tombraider.
TFX gets stuck on the second audio track.

I'm not super sure what exact conflict is causing it
the sound blaster 16 is set to 220 , 5, 1, 5
the gravis ultrasound is set to 240 7,7,7,7
awe64 is disabled
roland mif is 330H ,2/9

I've seen 8 bit i/o recovery time mentioned in posts is that something that would help?

Reply 2 of 7, by AppleSauce

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rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-22, 18:33:

have you tried taking out awe and testing again?

I can give it a shot , though I'm fairly certain I had these issues before I ever installed the awe64.

Reply 3 of 7, by Horun

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Could be the Creative 16 midi post on occasion messing with the Roland port ?
Do you have P300 in the set blaster line ? otherwise it could possibly float to 330 (the other possible creative port) ....
or is it fully disabled on the Creative SB16 card just curious..

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 7, by AppleSauce

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Horun wrote on 2022-10-22, 19:27:

Could be the Creative 16 midi post on occasion messing with the Roland port ?
Do you have P300 in the set blaster line ? otherwise it could possibly float to 330 (the other possible creative port) ....
or is it fully disabled on the Creative SB16 card just curious..

I disabled the mpu port on the sb16 when I got it to avoid a conflict and did change the jumpers recently setting it to P300 just in case that wasn't enough
but I might have forgotten to change the setblaster line.
So I'll need to check if changing that does anything.

Reply 5 of 7, by AppleSauce

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Horun wrote on 2022-10-22, 19:27:

Could be the Creative 16 midi post on occasion messing with the Roland port ?
Do you have P300 in the set blaster line ? otherwise it could possibly float to 330 (the other possible creative port) ....
or is it fully disabled on the Creative SB16 card just curious..

Well I tried that but no dice.

Reply 6 of 7, by Horun

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Ok was just a thought.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 7 of 7, by AppleSauce

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Horun wrote on 2022-10-23, 15:26:

Ok was just a thought.

I mean its something worth checking out so thanks for the suggestion. I do appreciate it.