Hi, @Ydee,
My intention was to take a few pictures with slightly modified drivers, showing that emulated SB IRQ assigned to is mostly wrong, but instead I ended up testing three PCI sound cards (two C-Media CMI8738-MX and LX cards plus SB Live! card) on five different motherboards, which according to @Kodi's thread have to support DDMA. For my surprise with the first board I tested (the one with VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset) all the three sound cards worked just fine, so I proceeded with couple more boards, that were at hand.
From the results I've got, I can conclude, that it is possible, that DDMA in VIA chipsets is not only SB dependent, as @Kodi claims. This is confirmed by not s0 popular VIA Apollo VPX chipset with DDMA compatible SB chip and the strange VIA chipset, which is pin compatible to i440BX and i440ZX chipsets, which also has DDMA compatible SB chip. As for i440ZX chipset, being a cost reduced cut-down version of i440BX, it may really lack DDMA.
The most compatible was VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset, which has no problems with all three sound cards tested to be initialized correctly in DOS. And for some reason i430TX was not so compatible for CMI8738 cards, but they still worked with Wolfenstein 3D game, with some glitches. Also on i430TX board CMI8738 FM synthesis works flawlessly.
Now I can say, that if SB Live! card works fine in pure DOS for particular motherboard, there's a chance, that CMI8738 card with its native DOS driver will work too on the same motherboard.
And I also found out, that there's absolutely no reason to manually set in BIOS any "legacy" IRQ or DMA settings. Auto PCI/PnP configuration mode in BIOS works fine.
And I fully agree, that these C-Media CMI9738 PCI sound cards are far from "ideal sound cards" for DOS, but they're dirt-cheap - in price range with SB PCI solutions like CT4810, but C-Media cards has better FM synthesis and sometimes they tend to work 😀
P.S. I never tried FIXEPIC patchef, which comes with CMI8738 DOS drivers. Maybe it could give a better CMI8738 compatibility with some DOS games, if applied. Seems like it is mainly intended for solving problems with games form Epic (Mega)Games. IIRC there was a patch for SB Live! PCI sound cards glitches in Build engine games published by Ken Silverman. Did someone ever tried it, if It may also help with C-Media PCI cards?
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