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Alone in the dark in dos freezes with audigy 2 zs

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First post, by hus1337

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Hello!

I use the audigy 2 zs drivers for windows 98 which posted here. Its working in windows, but in dos, my favorite game, aline in the dark cant load at all no matter what i try.
The symphtom:
1. Audigy12 ran
2. Start alone from pure dos
3. The setup menu appears, but if i choose:
A) config: it freezes on the next screen, some french text appears which i believe states that its checking the configuration.
B)start teh game: i can only see a flashing _ and thats it.

If i REM out creative related stuff from autoexec, the game starts just fine with buzzer.

Can this be solved?
Or should i get a sound blaster 16 for dos games? (Pci)

My rig: abit st6 / piii-s 1.4ghz (tried disabling caches, nothing happened), gf 2mx400, audigy 2 zs (not dell)

Reply 1 of 6, by wbahnassi

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I remember Alone in The Dark is one of those games that required A220, IRQ7 and DMA1. Ensure your DOS SB init is using those values rather than IRQ5.

Second, the game has a speed sensitive bug that prevents you from running when you double-tap the forward key. If you are on a Pentium 1 CPU or higher, you get this bug. You can fix it by slowing down the machine with disabled caches.. or find the patch that fixes it.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 2 of 6, by hus1337

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wbahnassi wrote on 2025-12-24, 01:48:

I remember Alone in The Dark is one of those games that required A220, IRQ7 and DMA1. Ensure your DOS SB init is using those values rather than IRQ5.

Second, the game has a speed sensitive bug that prevents you from running when you double-tap the forward key. If you are on a Pentium 1 CPU or higher, you get this bug. You can fix it by slowing down the machine with disabled caches.. or find the patch that fixes it.

thanks for the help!
i changed the irq in autoexec (SET BLASTER), but in CTSYN.INI. it was already I7.
despite this, when dos is booting, it says IRQ5.
do you happen to know what did i miss?
thanks in advance!

Reply 3 of 6, by wbahnassi

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Which DOS driver files are you using to init the SB? Also it might be that your IRQ7 is already reserved for something else? Check in the BIOS if you can allocate IRQ7 to ISA rather than PCI, and disable the printer port for good measure.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 5 of 6, by hus1337

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I checked it, if irq7 is used for “multimedia device”, in pure dos the driver does not load. “Sb irq conflicting with pci irq”. If not, sb irq gets the same irq as multimedia device (e.g 5), driver loads, but alone freezes.

Reply 6 of 6, by NeoG_

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SB PCI card ("multimedia device") and emulation need two separate IRQs, they can’t be the same.

E.G. PCI card on IRQ10 and SB16 emulation on IRQ7.

To guarantee that no other device occupies your desired SB16 emulation IRQ/DMA before the driver loads, set the IRQ and DMA in the BIOS to Legacy ISA

Also make sure that inside windows, the SB16 emulation device has also been forced to use the desired IRQ/DMA the same as you want in DOS.

By default the DOS drivers will follow the windows resource allocation by updating CTSYN.INI on every windows load

98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6850, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer

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