stamasd wrote on 2024-09-24, 13:41:

Well, I thank you for the guide. Even if I only get sound in Windows only, Windows games are my main goal for that system and it is achieved.

Cheers, and I hope everything works out well.

In case anyone's wondering, the serial number differences for OEM cards used to be listed in Creative's knowledge base, but that page seem to be down now. It was previously here: https://support.creative.com/kb/showarticle.aspx?sid=10846

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-24, 13:43:

stamasd wrote on 2024-09-24, 13:41:

Well, I thank you for the guide. Even if I only get sound in Windows only, Windows games are my main goal for that system and it is achieved.

Cheers, and I hope everything works out well.

In case anyone's wondering, the serial number differences for OEM cards used to be listed in Creative's knowledge base, but that page seem to be down now. It was previously here: https://support.creative.com/kb/showarticle.aspx?sid=10846

It is up for me, and it shows that SB0353 is also a Dell OEM. Mystery solved. It is actually listed as "Audigy 2 Dell OEM" not Audigy2 ZS. So this is probably not a ZS, and that explains why I got that error and I should treat it as a SB0240 instead.

Attaching here for reference

stamasd wrote on 2024-09-24, 13:47:

It is up for me, and it shows that SB0353 is also a Dell OEM. Mystery solved. It is actually listed as "Audigy 2 Dell OEM" not Audigy2 ZS. So this is probably not a ZS, and that explains why I got that error and I should treat it as a SB0240 instead.

Yeah, I managed to load it in a different browser as well. Safari couldn't open it for some reason, but Chrome did.

I'm thinking maybe I should back up the contents of that page on the Vogons Wiki. It's been a while since I visited it, and there are apparently some other OEM variations of Audigy cards.

I tested the SB0353 in plain DOS and it's a hit/miss situation. Some games do get sound, some don't. In some I can get only sound effects, but not music. And in some, the emulated SB is found at address 0x240, despite being set as 0x220 by the driver (0x240 works in games, ox220 doesn't). All DOS games work with sound under Win98 in a DOS box, so at least that's something.
(edit) for instance, the sound setup program that comes with Frontier First Encounters when used in autodetect mode, finds it as an AWE32 at address 0x240; with the card set like that, sound effects work but music doesn't. If I manually set music to anything else like MPU-401, MT32, SB16 etc I still don't get any music, and in some cases even an error "couldn't initialize sound"
That is of course after running audigy12.exe after entering DOS.

stamasd wrote on 2024-09-24, 20:29:

I tested the SB0353 in plain DOS and it's a hit/miss situation. Some games do get sound, some don't. In some I can get only sound effects, but not music. And in some, the emulated SB is found at address 0x240, despite being set as 0x220 by the driver (0x240 works in games, ox220 doesn't). All DOS games work with sound under Win98 in a DOS box, so at least that's something.

There have been some reports (on this forum and elsewhere) that OEM Audigy cards behave differently from their retail counterparts in certain aspects. It's good to know that at least the Win9x DOS prompt offers better game compatibility on the SB0353.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Creative's SB16 emulation isn't perfect, so some (mostly older) DOS games won't work properly even on retail Audigy/SBLive cards

Yeah, I haven't found any problems with getting sound in DOS prompt under Win98SE. All games I've tested sound good. It's not a very extensive list though. In some cases there is some weirdness, such as Quake giving a message when starting that it hasn't found a sound card and the game would start without sound support, and yet it runs with sound.

Another weirdness found with this procedure. This time more an annoyance than a showstopper. Installing an Audigy 1 (SB090) on a P4 motherboard with i848 chipset in Win98SE.
All went well until step 5.3-5.4. First reboot after installing the DOS emulation, boot process stops with the message "EMM386 not installed - unable to set page frame address. Press any key when ready" and pauses there. If I press a key the boot process continues; if I don't - it stays there for about a minute then continues anyway. After it's fully booted, SB emulation works as expected.
But now, that message and pause happens at every single boot. I mean - sound works, but it's annoying to either have to press a key or to wait until it pulls itself out of the ditch.

stamasd wrote on 2024-09-29, 19:21:

All went well until step 5.3-5.4. First reboot after installing the DOS emulation, boot process stops with the message "EMM386 not installed - unable to set page frame address. Press any key when ready" and pauses there. If I press a key the boot process continues; if I don't - it stays there for about a minute then continues anyway. After it's fully booted, SB emulation works as expected.

In my experience, this sometimes occurs when there isn't enough contiguous page frame space to set up EMS. It can happen on "newer" motherboards (2002 and up) which have a lot of integrated devices like on-board network cards, USB 2.0, SATA/RAID controllers and such. These can make it difficult to free up a decent amount of conventional memory. See here for more details. You might be able bypass this by using the NOEMS switch in CONFIG.SYS like so:

1DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

BTW, that error isn't specific to this guide. The same thing would have happened if you had used the stock Audigy 1 drivers from the original installation CD.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-29, 19:42:

In my experience, this sometimes occurs when there isn't enough contiguous page frame space to set up EMS. It can happen on "new […]
Show full quote

In my experience, this sometimes occurs when there isn't enough contiguous page frame space to set up EMS. It can happen on "newer" motherboards (2002 and up) which have a lot of integrated devices like on-board network cards, USB 2.0, SATA/RAID controllers and such. These can make it difficult to free up a decent amount of conventional memory. See here for more details. You might be able bypass this by using the NOEMS switch in CONFIG.SYS like so:

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1DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

BTW, that error isn't specific to this guide. The same thing would have happened if you had used the stock Audigy 1 drivers from the original installation CD.

True. I don't deal with P4 chipsets often, so I'm not used with them not providing UMBs. 🙁 On this particular motherboard, all I get is 32kB UMBs which is not enough for a frame page. And unfortunately as a side effect that means that any DOS games that require expanded memory will not work 🙁 But I got rid of that error by disabling emm386's page frame like you mentioned.

You should be able to reclaim UMBs on these modern chipsets with UMBPCI. Check it out.

https://www.uwe-sieber.de/umbpci_e.html

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-09-30, 11:18:

You should be able to reclaim UMBs on these modern chipsets with UMBPCI. Check it out.

https://www.uwe-sieber.de/umbpci_e.html

True, I forgot about UMBPCI. I have used it before. 😀 Will have to test. Chipset 848 however is a variant of 865 (difference being it has only 1 channel RAM instead of 2) and 865 is listed as untested.
(edit) another complication may be that I'm using a Geforce card in this system, and those use extra memory in the UMB space IIRC - they have a larger vbios than other cards.

And the answer is no. With chipset 848, even UMBPCI cannot get more than 32k UMB. The only memory it can use is d800-dfff.

That is of course with all shadowing turned off in BIOS. And in fact enabling shadowing of the BIOS and VGA ROM doesn't change at all what UMBPCI sees (they would be outside the usable range anyway).

A lot of memory gets gobbled up by USB 2.0 devices; this can't be helped. The only alternative is to try turning things off in the BIOS. If you can tolerate using only a few USB 1.1 ports, maybe with a hub, that might free up enough resources for you.

USB 2.0 in Windows 98 can be very unstable anyways. By contrast, USB 1.1 has been rock solid, in my experience.

Well on this motherboard I have to disable both USB2 and USB1 to get back any memory at all. With all USB disabled I get enough for a frame page and EMS. And my games that require EMS (notably Frontier) run, with sound. Between the 2 choices of sound I get (MPU401/MIDI and AdLib) frankly both sound bad, with the emulated AdLib being slightly more tolerable. 😀

The best Adlib sound you can get strictly from a PCI card would be with anl Yamaha XG (genuine Adlib) or ESS-Solo1 (ESSFM). Everything else is pretty bad.

I'm aware of that. 😀 Too bad the MIDI emulation on this Audigy is so horrible, I was hoping it'd be up to snuff.

stamasd wrote on 2024-10-02, 09:29:

I'm aware of that. 😀 Too bad the MIDI emulation on this Audigy is so horrible, I was hoping it'd be up to snuff.

I think General MIDI emulation is mostly fine on SBLive/Audigy cards, especially if you're using a decent soundfont and playing DOS games from within the Win9x command prompt. In pure DOS, you're unfortunately stuck with ECW sets, which sound a bit bland, but aren't that bad either.

But if you mean FM synth emulation, then yes, that is indeed pretty crappy on those cards.

No, actually to my ears it was the other way around. FM emulation was passable, but MIDI (at least in the games I've tried) frankly sucked. Very tinny, like all of the music was played on cymbals and bells only. 😀 But it worked, so that's a plus. 😜
If only there was a way to generate better quality .ecw sets and replace the default ones...

(edit) try it; there is a download of Frontier Elite 2 shareware at https://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Files/files.html - sound options at the beginning are: Roland/LAPCI (essentially MIDI through MPU401), Soundblaster/AdLib (FM sound), none, and PC speaker 😀 Needs at least 768k of expanded memory or else it won't start.

stamasd wrote on 2024-10-02, 09:55:

No, actually to my ears it was the other way around. FM emulation was passable, but MIDI (at least in the games I've tried) frankly sucked. Very tinny, like all of the music was played on cymbals and bells only. 😀 But it worked, so that's a plus. 😜
If only there was a way to generate better quality .ecw sets and replace the default ones...

From what I gather, some attempts to reverse engineer the ECW format were made in the past, but there have been no major breakthroughs as of yet.

Personally, if I'm playing DOS games which support General MIDI on a SBLive/Audigy card, I do it from within Win9x if possible. That way, I can choose whichever soundfont I like best for a particular game. Of course, some DOS games can't run from Win9x, so that's not always an option. But usually, it works fine for later titles like Doom, Duke3D, Descent and such.

stamasd wrote on 2024-10-02, 09:55:

(edit) try it; there is a download of Frontier Elite 2 shareware at https://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Files/files.html - sound options at the beginning are: Roland/LAPCI (essentially MIDI through MPU401), Soundblaster/AdLib (FM sound), none, and PC speaker 😀 Needs at least 768k of expanded memory or else it won't start.

I'm sure you know that LAPC is not compatible with General MIDI. As for the MT-32 emulation on SBLive/Audigy cards, that's limited to the few games which don't use custom instruments.