You can try setting the 388 address to something else if possible and then setting the game appropriately as well

You can also try and go to control panel-multimedia-midi, here you can usually set what windows does with midi output- usually there is midi out, wavetable (or software wt), and FM midi. If you select FM here any midi played by windows will come out as FM and I THINK that additionally if you do this, and select "general midi" and its address as usual in the game - it should come out as FM. Possibly this could be a workaround if it works.

In the least you can try and set it to FM here and play back some midi files and see if you get FM audio

pixel_workbench wrote on Yesterday, 00:17:

So I have the complete opposite problem with this card as everyone else on this forum and random youtubers - I can get digital s […]
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So I have the complete opposite problem with this card as everyone else on this forum and random youtubers - I can get digital sound working in pure DOS and in a Win98 DOS session no problem, but the card refuses to play FM music no matter what.

I tried it on several systems - a 440bx board and a socket 370 board with a Via 686a south bridge. I tried various different VXD drivers - 1088, 1091b, 1096. I tried different versions of the Dos program that initializes the card from Autoexec.bat. In device manager I have the Audio Legacy Device that runs the card for DOS compatibility in Windows, and it has IO address range 0388-038F in use, besides 0220 and 0330, with DMA 1 and 5. I tried forcing the card to IRQ5, as well as letting it sit on IRQ9 by default. Still, whenever a DOS program is supposed to play FM music, there is no FM music at all.

How the heck is everyone else getting their "random cheap Chinese card" to play FM sound?

I have a photo of my card attached here, and my autoexec.bat.

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i also had the same problem with FM on my cards, i mainly use it on later boards so i dont have working sfx in pure dos only FM/Adlib, but in windows98 everything works perfectly.

At first i was using the latest drivers which didnt install FM/OPL3, i ended up downloading every driver/cd i could find on the internet/archive, eventually i found two that got FM synth/Adlib OPL3 working.

Version 2.73a
https://archive.org/details/8738lite-2.37v

Version 2.73
https://archive.org/details/C-Media-PCI-Audio-Drivers-2.73

BTW, if anyones signed up with vogons driver library, please upload these two drivers, even though i had these files and the file names it still took me a while to find them again. they seem to be the only 2 good working drivers for getting everything installed, the later driver version 2.81 doesnt install FM synth.

one thing to note is some drivers only seem to support the MX/LX versions while the SX has a different driver, though some drivers support all three.
both my cards are MX and LX. so cant confirm if they work with SX cards.

the markings on the chips give no indication to the chip revision but if i remember right they use the driver for the 032/033 revisions, yours is an 037D so theres no guarantee your SX card will be supported by these drivers. the MX card i have is pretty identical to yours, so it may even use the same driver.

another couple of things to bear in mind that might cause issues, if you install 3 or 4 different driver versions, uninstalling the driver doesnt remove the cards settings from your autoexec.bat, if you end up with 3 or 4 lots of settings i found windows 98 wouldnt boot, i had to go into safe mode to delete the entries. Also installing too many different drivers can cause problems, i did it recently and now the midi softsynth doesnt work, re-installing the driver hasnt fixed it so ill have to do a fresh 98 install.

if the driver has installed ok, theres a couple of ways to check if FM synth OPL2/OPL3 Synthesis is installed.

for driver 2.37 go to control panel open up multimedia properties and check the midi tab, there you should see "C-Media OPL2/OPL3 Synthesis" shown below.

with the 2.73 driver "C-Media OPL2/OPL3 Synthesis" is not present in the midi tab but it will be installed so there is another way to check, open up the cmedia audio rack, on the general midi section, click settings (hammer icon), this will bring up the output settings, in the drop down list, it should show "C-Media OPL2/OPL3 Synthesis". shown below.

if after this it still doesnt work it might be worth picking up an MX/LX card.

also both my cards use IRQ5 by default with 1/5 for dma, on my socket 7 system it was assigned to IRQ11 which was useless for dos games, i never got round to sorting it but IRQ5 would have been preferable.

There is some evidence that some of the SX variant chips do not have working FM, for instance this post on trying (and failing) to get it working in DOS. Interestingly that was a Hercules Gamesurround Muse LT while the Retroweb entry for the SC-3000 notes the Hercules Gamesurround Muse 5.1 DVD as a variant and also states that the cards use CMI8738LX/MX. Perhaps there's yet another variant of the SC-3000 that uses SX chips.

Another post shows Linux not loading the FM driver on an SX (identified as model 37) whereas it does on an LX and an MX (both model 55). You could try running live media for a Linux distribution to verify this though on a 32-bit system that means something like Tiny Core Linux.

I think the idea that the SX is a binned chip with FM disabled so it can still be sold is a solid one

ive also heard about people having problems with the 037D, but pretty sure i've heard others say they are good models, ive also heard about FM being disabled on some cards which doesnt make sense since they were sold at a time when dos game would still have been sold.

its possible it may just be a driver issue, i had to go through a bunch before i got FM synth working, at first i wasnt sure if my cards were models with the FM disabled, there are a lot of models from different manufacturers that look pretty identical apart from the placement of certain components, im not sure how the differences in component placement affect the functionality of the card, if you play spot the difference you'll see what i mean.

as for the differences between SX/LX/MX. the SX cards are 4 channel (4 jacks), the LX chips are labeled 6ch (5 jacks), MX chips also 6ch (5 jacks) but usually have the header for optical add-on. this may be the only major difference between the variants.

the LX and MX cards i have function and sound just the same. its possible the SX cards will as well with the correct driver. i dont have an SX card so someone will have to try the drivers above to confirm.

The Linux driver tries to enable the FM registers in thePCI port range first (for models >= 39) then the legacy port range. Then it tries to create the OPL3 device, which allocates the port I/O ranges then tries to detect it. In the case of that post on the SX, it probably logged something in the kernel logs about failure to detect the OPL3.

That assumes the Linux driver is correct. I only have the LX variant of the chip (on a PCIe card via the ASM1083 bridge chip) and FM works on Linux (won't work on DOS unless you can redirect the legacy port range to the PCI ones).