elianda wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:49:

Do you hear sound from the card in plain DOS?

Running maxinit.exe or volume.exefrom the DOSMAXI folder in pure DOS gets me a "Maxi Sound 64 not found" error message, even after running setup.exe.

If I run it from a Windos 98 command prompt window instead, they seem to work fine, except after listing a bunch of stuff, maxinit.exe lastly asks "no card?". I have no idea how, but one time I had it tell me "Cannot go into UART mode"instead of the "no card?" question. No sound in games.

Attached some pictures.

Edit: I could have sworn I had already done this, but PnP OS in BIOS was set to yes.
I set it to no, and now the card behaves in rebooted to DOS mode just as it does in W98 SE DOS command window mode: no more "maxi 64 not found" error.

However, maxinit.exe (and subsequently autoexec.bat) now leads to a cursor that seemingly blinks forever. Believing this might be due to the sheer size of my 10MGMGS sound bank, I let it load a 1MBank instead, but to no avail. The only way out is to CRTL+ALT+DEL into a restart.

I looked at the card again, found no obvious damage, but a 4M/16M jumper for the memory. Since I had already inserted a 16 meg stick, but the jumper was still at 4M, I figured that might be the cause for the blinking cursor of death, but changing it to the correct setting did not work either.
I gave the card a good scrubbing with isopropylene just because, but that apparently hasn't helped either.

Next thing I tried: removing the 16 MB 60ns 72 pin SIMM, putting the jumper for 4 or 16 MB SIMM in a neutral position. Still no sound in Windows, still blinking cursor of death when I attempt to initialize in pure DOS.