Hello.
Registered here with the main purpose of simply saying "thanks"!
This mixer is just what the doctor ordered and i really wish something like this existed in the old days!

Using an audigy1, external mt32-pi for midi and internal ymf715 for mpu out and opl3.
SB16-emulation from the audigy, it is "good enough" for my purposes.

One small question/suggestion though. Would it be possible to add an option for manually setting a register?
(I read that you lost contact with the programmer, I can figure it out myself but it would help if you could find the part in the source code that accesses the card and sends commands)

There are gobs of weird settings internal to the card to mess with, presumably only crazy people would bother but i do have a use case,
in that I would try to get i2s working with external non-creative things.
Supposedly the audigy has an improvement compared to the older live series, it SHOULD be possible to change from master to slave mode.
But I need to send direct commands to the card to test it.

/bofr

PARUS wrote on 2020-12-20, 11:05:

Yesterday I've run 0.49 version on my old Pentium-2 i440. The EMS volume was 8192-32768 and no problems, no decreases. Later I will recheck it on "hub" chipsets. What config do you using?

Namrok wrote on 2020-12-13, 23:47:

In fact, running emm386 with just NOEMS caused my computer to reboot as well. Which is a new one to me.

It is abnormally. NOEMS is one of regular usual modes for EMM386. What config do you using?

Following up on this old issue, as lately I've spent some time messing around with the machine again.

Running EK1M only reduces my EMS memory to 2MB if it's ran after SBEINIT.COM is run for the SBLive. Running SBLive after I've run EK1M doesn't get me much since it undoes whatever EK1M set. Not really seeking a solution, as my use case still doesn't need EK1M and SBLive drivers at the same time. But it was an extra data point I thought I'd throw out there.

hi parus,
I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freezes instantly (440bx board).
I have no issues with Audigy + Orpheus or SB Live without Orpheus, the mixer works great in that case.

Your mixer is the only reason I use SB Live, I want to use it in DOS to output audio on 5.1 channels, using the Orpheus card as source. It works great with Audigy, but not with SB Live.

any idea what to do to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

mihai wrote on 2021-08-10, 22:32:

hi parus, I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freeze […]
Show full quote

hi parus,
I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freezes instantly (440bx board).
I have no issues with Audigy + Orpheus or SB Live without Orpheus, the mixer works great in that case.

Your mixer is the only reason I use SB Live, I want to use it in DOS to output audio on 5.1 channels, using the Orpheus card as source. It works great with Audigy, but not with SB Live.

any idea what to do to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

I have this issue as well, usually when rebooting from dos. The problem goes away if i boot into windows 95 and then reboot to dos.
I on the otherhand am using it with a CMI8330 card and an AWE32

theominousmrv wrote on 2023-01-13, 05:27:

mihai wrote on 2021-08-10, 22:32:

hi parus, I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freeze […]
Show full quote

hi parus,
I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freezes instantly (440bx board).
I have no issues with Audigy + Orpheus or SB Live without Orpheus, the mixer works great in that case.

Your mixer is the only reason I use SB Live, I want to use it in DOS to output audio on 5.1 channels, using the Orpheus card as source. It works great with Audigy, but not with SB Live.

any idea what to do to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

I have this issue as well, usually when rebooting from dos. The problem goes away if i boot into windows 95 and then reboot to dos.
I on the otherhand am using it with a CMI8330 card and an AWE32

Current solution ive found is launching SBEINIT in your autoexec before ekm049. Seems to keep the freeze away.

theominousmrv wrote on 2023-01-14, 05:34:

theominousmrv wrote on 2023-01-13, 05:27:

mihai wrote on 2021-08-10, 22:32:

hi parus, I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freeze […]
Show full quote

hi parus,
I am using the mixer with a SB Live (0100 or 0220) + an Orpheus card. Once I initialize the SB Live, the system freezes instantly (440bx board).
I have no issues with Audigy + Orpheus or SB Live without Orpheus, the mixer works great in that case.

Your mixer is the only reason I use SB Live, I want to use it in DOS to output audio on 5.1 channels, using the Orpheus card as source. It works great with Audigy, but not with SB Live.

any idea what to do to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

I have this issue as well, usually when rebooting from dos. The problem goes away if i boot into windows 95 and then reboot to dos.
I on the otherhand am using it with a CMI8330 card and an AWE32

Current solution ive found is launching SBEINIT in your autoexec before ekm049. Seems to keep the freeze away.

The EK1M mixer is quite buggy (and unlikely to be fixed 🙁) when attempting to initialize it after just powering on the computer. See here for a better workaround that doesn't require SBEINIT: Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

Apparently running any DOS program that has "native" support for the SBLive! prior using the mixer mitigates the issues.

This is a life saver! I found another use case for it: connecting the motherboard's internal speaker to a SB LIVE.

Because I wanted to have the internal speaker sound (mono) output on both speakers, I had to use the TAD connector that does just that... Going through any other "in" connectors would have used only one speaker to output sounds from INT_SPK. The default sbemixer does not control TAD volume level and leaves it on mute. But with "-ai tad ##" it totally works!!

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-01-15, 20:28:

theominousmrv wrote on 2023-01-14, 05:34:

theominousmrv wrote on 2023-01-13, 05:27:

I have this issue as well, usually when rebooting from dos. The problem goes away if i boot into windows 95 and then reboot to dos.
I on the otherhand am using it with a CMI8330 card and an AWE32

Current solution ive found is launching SBEINIT in your autoexec before ekm049. Seems to keep the freeze away.

The EK1M mixer is quite buggy (and unlikely to be fixed 🙁) when attempting to initialize it after just powering on the computer. See here for a better workaround that doesn't require SBEINIT: Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

Apparently running any DOS program that has "native" support for the SBLive! prior using the mixer mitigates the issues.

I tried this and it seems to work (my issue was more the lack of EMS, not freezing), but the problem for me is that I'm trying to use my Live! for General MIDI to bypass the hanging-note bug that my SB16 model has, and with the MPXPLAY solution, the Live!'s MIDI synth (or MIDI Out) isn't initialized. I'm mostly trying to get it set up where I can play something like Blackthorne in DOS mode with my SBLive! providing GM while my SB16 provides SFX. Is there another solution that I can try that will mitigate this problem?

I feel like if EK1M wasn't so memory-hungry this wouldn't be a problem, but we don't have the source code to the project and I don't know how active PARUS is anymore, so I'm kind of just stuck at the moment with my DOS-mode configuration.

OpenRift wrote on 2024-04-22, 04:21:

I tried this and it seems to work (my issue was more the lack of EMS, not freezing), but the problem for me is that I'm trying to use my Live! for General MIDI to bypass the hanging-note bug that my SB16 model has, and with the MPXPLAY solution, the Live!'s MIDI synth (or MIDI Out) isn't initialized. I'm mostly trying to get it set up where I can play something like Blackthorne in DOS mode with my SBLive! providing GM while my SB16 provides SFX. Is there another solution that I can try that will mitigate this problem?

I feel like if EK1M wasn't so memory-hungry this wouldn't be a problem, but we don't have the source code to the project and I don't know how active PARUS is anymore, so I'm kind of just stuck at the moment with my DOS-mode configuration.

Since you're using the DOS drivers for the SBLive!, using an external mixer is a solution to this problem. I have been using a passive one (like this) and it does the job for me, avoiding having to run EK1M.

BTW, Blackthorne requires slowing down the CPU as the music playback won't work properly regardless of which MIDI device is used. 😉

Gmlb256 wrote on 2024-04-26, 00:04:

OpenRift wrote on 2024-04-22, 04:21:

I tried this and it seems to work (my issue was more the lack of EMS, not freezing), but the problem for me is that I'm trying to use my Live! for General MIDI to bypass the hanging-note bug that my SB16 model has, and with the MPXPLAY solution, the Live!'s MIDI synth (or MIDI Out) isn't initialized. I'm mostly trying to get it set up where I can play something like Blackthorne in DOS mode with my SBLive! providing GM while my SB16 provides SFX. Is there another solution that I can try that will mitigate this problem?

I feel like if EK1M wasn't so memory-hungry this wouldn't be a problem, but we don't have the source code to the project and I don't know how active PARUS is anymore, so I'm kind of just stuck at the moment with my DOS-mode configuration.

Since you're using the DOS drivers for the SBLive!, using an external mixer is a solution to this problem. I have been using a passive one (like this) and it does the job for me, avoiding having to run EK1M.

BTW, Blackthorne requires slowing down the CPU as the music playback won't work properly regardless of which MIDI device is used. 😉

That does sound like a good idea, tho I think I'd need one with multiple outputs; one that goes to speakers, and the other that goes to my main computer.

As for Blackthorne, I thought the music thing was mostly just a problem when running the game in Windows. When I tried it in DOS it seemed to work okay iirc, but I'll have to check again.

I'm having some success with the mixer program (great program, btw!), but not quite getting to the full solution I'm hoping to achieve. Hoping y'all can point me to where I'm going wrong.

I have SB LIVE! installed along side PicoGUS. Attached is my autoexec.bat.

I am wanting to use the SB LIVE! for sound effects and PicoGUS for music, first testing with DOOM configuration.

In DOOM, I have the PicoGUS set for music and Sound Effects set to IRQ 2, DMA 3.

If I load autoexec.bat as shown in the attached, I get the PicoGUS music playing through the SB LIVE!, to the SB LIVE! output. However, I get no sound effects.

If I reverse the order in autoexec.bat, with EK1M loading first followed by SB initialization, I get sound effects but no music. I can take the output cable from the SB LIVE! and plug it into the PicoGUS, and get music from the PicoGUS.

Is there some additional configuraiton of EK1M that I can do, to also get sound effects "mixing" to the AC 97 output. Sorry if this is something super simple that I'm simply overlooking, but it's not immediately obvious to me how to do this, reading through the EK1M readme.

Of course, I can simply use the PicoGUS for music and effects, but where's the fun in that? 😀

(...assuming this works the same for SB Live as on Audigy I tested EK2M with...)

After EK2M -boot, the Wave volume defaults to 0. You need to set the Wave volume to be able to hear the sound effects.

Not knowing which output line you are using, this line will turn Wave on for all of them:

EK2M -io wave 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

You can see the volume levels with EK2M -c

To bootstrap is more practical to create a custom EK2M.cfg and load it in one go with EK2M -b -f EK2M.cfg, where you only set the volumes needed.

If you later plan to use MegaEM or SBOS to enable a MPU port for the GUS, you will need to configure them without NMI, since SBEINIT already uses NMI.

SBEINIT resets the mixer, so you need to run EK2M after.

Hope this helps!

Ohhh this is good.. I had my CD drive analog connected to an ESS 1868F card because the SBLive! card is silent in DOS without the SB16 emulation loaded (which I don't want) but the ESS card has lower quality output. Now I can use the better quality CD input on the SBLive! in windows and DOS. Nice.

Thanks PARUS!

Thanks for the Audigy mixer @PARUS.

Will you release the source code of it for the community to add the support of the Audigy 2 ZS ?

Because it's technically possible to support all features of your mixer on the Audigy 2 ZS.

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-02-02, 08:48:

Thanks for the Audigy mixer @PARUS.

Will you release the source code of it for the community to add the support of the Audigy 2 ZS ?

Because it's technically possible to support all features of your mixer on the Audigy 2 ZS.

My understanding is PARUS was getting the software built from someone else and they disappeared before providing the source code

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-02, 08:50:

My understanding is PARUS was getting the software built from someone else and they disappeared before providing the source code

Ah that's unfortunate, probably we can still make a new program to restore muted outputs of the Audigy 2 ZS.
Because the SBEMU code already does that and restore CD-Audio out and SPDIF under PureDOS on the Audigy 2 ZS.
In others words, it restore all muted inputs/outputs that this mixer does too in pure dos.

The SBEMU code is based on the unofficial Audigy 2 Linux drivers and is able to restore all muted ouputs (CDAudio, Digital CDAudio, Line-In, Output Out, SPDIF...).
Only the MPU401 nobody found yet how to enable it.

Or maybe even easier, port thoses changes on the Audigy12 patch from PDSoft.

I saw people "downgrading" to Audigy 1 who is a non-sense, as the Audigy 2 ZS is capable of doing same things in pure dos. The only limitations is code-writing yet to do.

I’m struggling to understand how to use this. I was under the impression that using

1ek1m.exe -b

should initialize and boot the mixer so I can skip sbeinit.com. I don’t want the full driver loaded because I don’t want the SBLive to get picked up over my YMF719 as the default sound card for games. I only want to use it for line in monitoring.

When running

1ek1m.exe -b -v

, it says applying commands, done, mixer enabled. Great. Trying any command after this, says “Hardware is not initialized and mixer is not loaded. Use the -boot command first.”

Running sbeinit.com before ek1m seems to make the mixer work. But of course now I have loaded the driver, defeating the purpose.

Am I missing something? Is the “hardware is not initialized” a bug or am I doing something wrong?

hitherescotty wrote on 2026-02-06, 10:37:

Am I missing something? Is the “hardware is not initialized” a bug or am I doing something wrong?

The best way to use ek1m is to use a config file

ek1m.exe -b
ek1m.exe -c > mixer.cfg

Edit mixer.cfg to have the right settings that you need (ac97 source, mix matrix)
Then to load ek1m on every boot

ek1m.exe -f mixer.cfg

Also it's worth noting that the application is not perfect - If you are using ek1m from a cold boot (As opposed to exiting to DOS from windows) it will not work properly until another application has first initialised the DSP. As you noticed SBEINIT can do that, but the alternative is to use MPXPLAY to play a blank wav file to the card using it's built in Live/Audigy driver before loading ek1m.

Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-06, 11:16:

Also it's worth noting that the application is not perfect - If you are using ek1m from a cold boot (As opposed to exiting to DOS from windows) it will not work properly until another application has first initialised the DSP.

Yes I guess this is what I’m experiencing. I’ll try your suggestion tomorrow. Thanks.

Even with SB16 emulation turned OFF, the PCI IRQ is set to 9 when it’s initialized with SBEINIT and some games pick up the Soundblaster for sound effects. Music isn’t a problem. I just cannot seem to get both cards initialized and still have the YMF719 play both music and audio. I’ll try your suggestion instead of SBEINIT and also try some IRQ Tetris.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-02-06, 11:16:

..
Also it's worth noting that the application is not perfect - If you are using ek1m from a cold boot (As opposed to exiting to DOS from windows) it will not work properly until another application has first initialised the DSP. As you noticed SBEINIT can do that, but the alternative is to use MPXPLAY to play a blank wav file to the card using it's built in Live/Audigy driver before loading ek1m.

Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

I cannot confirm such general problem. For me the mixer initialization works from autoexec.bat without running other 'DSP initialization' or SBEINIT.COM after a cold boot.
On my system I have a SB Live! 5.1 and an ISA ES1868. The ES1868 card's output is connected to SB Live!'s line in and speakers are connected to SB LIve!'s output.
After autoexec.bat finished running everything works perfectly (I can hear the ESS card's output through SB Live!).
I initialize the mixer with the following command:

C:\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV\ek1m.exe -b -ai line 91 -v
...
C:\ES1868\ESSCFG.EXE /V:1 /I:5 /D:1 /E:0 /A:220 /B:330 /J:D
C:\Es1868\ESSVOL.EXE /v:12 /l:0 /w:12 /m:0 /c:0 /s:8 /a:14 /p:0
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T4