I've been too busy to follow up but I should be able to try what was suggested when I get home.
As I previously mentioned the bios is pretty stripped back. I can charge the IRQs for some of the on-board stuff but I'm not certain I can disable it entirely. Maybe when I get home I'll take a look but it's very cut down.
You know that I think about it I did mess with the jumper that handled the base address. I think I moved it to 240 as opposed to 220. I bet the parameters it assigned while I was setting it up defaulted to 220 because that seems to be the most common address for sound cards in my limited experience. I'm going to try this one more time with the generic sound blaster drivers it gives and I'll make double certain the address matches what it is set up on the card itself.
To be fair I've been mostly working on this after I get home from work which is around midnight and I was too tired at the time to connect the dots.
I'm going to feel really stupid if that's all it was.
jjspartan0 wrote on Yesterday, 19:56:As I previously mentioned the bios is pretty stripped back. I can charge the IRQs for some of the on-board stuff but I'm not certain I can disable it entirely. Maybe when I get home I'll take a look but it's very cut down.
What you want to do isn't change the settings for on-board stuff, it's reserve IRQs for non-PnP peripherals.
Here's an example of the kind of screen you're looking for:
If you want to set the card to A220, I5, D1 and use 330 and I2/9 for MIDI, in this example you'd want to set IRQ 5 and 9 and DMA 1 to "Legacy ISA" and leave all the rest "PCI/ISA-PnP"
Now, on your Compaq this might look different. I tried to find examples of BIOS screens for it, but wasn't able to. The best I could find was the service manual for your system:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/manual/50 … dd544755064.pdf
It gives a generic picture of the first BIOS screen and then unhelpfully says: "NOTE: The actual menu displayed on your computer may vary slightly, depending on your configuration."
One thing is clear though: that motherboard has onboard sound (an ESS Solo-1, one of the better PCI sound options). It would be wise to disable onboard sound and MIDI, at least until you have the ISA card up and running. It's perfectly possible to have two (or more) sound cards working in the system at the same time, but that requires some next-level resource management and you don't want to try to run before you can crawl.
First thing first is finding how to reserve those IRQs and that DMA in your BIOS. If there is no way to do that, you basically can't use non-PnP ISA cards like this sound/modem combo.
When I get home I'll post a picture of the bios. It nowhere near that comprehensive there's like a grand total of 20 or so options spread across 5 tabs. I wish the bios looked like that.
Yeah there's no option to reserve irqs I can definitely tell you that though. Just the option to change IRQs for integrated peripherals. As well as change the amount of RAM to use for the onboard video chip.
Yeah this is what I'm working with. Not even close to a half way comprehensive bios. Now windows can't even tell it's there. Of course just trying to install generic soundblaster pro drivers cause Windows to crash immediately.
I think it maybe damaged now. One of the capacitors I replaced may have had it's legs touching when I installed it. The capacitor didn't explode or anything but that probably doesn't help.
I think I may give up on this soundcard.
I mean it has an on-board ess sound chip but I'm not fond of how midi sounds.
*The computer has on board ess not the soundcard.
You will likely need to disable the onboard ESS (but why? ESS often has OPL3, which is a better chip than whats in the Aztech) and likely need to force the third USB controller onto IRQ12 (Assuming the keyboard/mouse is not PS/2)
The ESS chips I've used have sounded different from what I remember. I have isa slot and figured I'd use it.
It's fine I think I'm just going to put this thing on ice for now.
