Easiest would probably just be to get an add-in sound card unless you are already good with electronics repair.

Then again, it could possibly just be a broken solder connection and the game port connector may just need to be resoldered.

If you are not able to do that type of repair yourself, you can always look into local electronics repair shops that do board level repair. If anything more than just resoldering the port, it is going to be cheaper to just buy a replacement system off of eBay. I see quite a few of the same model and some with much better CPUs for $100-$150 shipped.

If it were me, I would just disable the onboard sound and joystick port in the BIOS and install a sound card and call it a day.

Hmmm seeing some indications it might need a gameport driver, which means it might not be turned on. Might be that the machine is just new enough that they didn't provide dos PnP util to flip the bit.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-14, 22:30:

Easiest would probably just be to get an add-in sound card unless you are already good with electronics repair. […]
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Easiest would probably just be to get an add-in sound card unless you are already good with electronics repair.

Then again, it could possibly just be a broken solder connection and the game port connector may just need to be resoldered.

If you are not able to do that type of repair yourself, you can always look into local electronics repair shops that do board level repair. If anything more than just resoldering the port, it is going to be cheaper to just buy a replacement system off of eBay. I see quite a few of the same model and some with much better CPUs for $100-$150 shipped.

If it were me, I would just disable the onboard sound and joystick port in the BIOS and install a sound card and call it a day.

Appreciate the speedy reply. I have a Sound Blaster Live on order now.
Will update on whether or not this fixes the issue, but yeah something is definitely shorting now that I think about what I see in games like Doom.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-07-15, 02:18:

Hmmm seeing some indications it might need a gameport driver, which means it might not be turned on. Might be that the machine is just new enough that they didn't provide dos PnP util to flip the bit.

didn't know such things existed, how would I go about finding them?

Would probably be included with the sound drivers package for whichever chip was on the board. I tried a brief search with the system model but got three different answers as to what it is.

So I have had the SBLive for a few days and done some testing using the latest experimental version of SBEMU. Multiplayer still doesn't work right. In Doom for example, it gets as far as getting in game, then it freezes. Trying to host with Quake, the desktop can't see my other PC when hosting and vice-versa.

I also tried using the SB16 emulation on the SBLive card, and it works in multiplayer, but while the sounds sound OK, the music is a little borked.
Through SB16 emulation I did get the card's gameport working and it's nice to finally use the stick that I bought years ago (Inland Pro Stick 3000).
But the only way I have been able to activate the gameport for the joystick is to also enable SB16 emulation, which would also stop me from being able to use SBEMU.

So I guess what I'm looking for now is to find a way to manually activate just the gameport on the sound card.

Side-note: I didn't clarify it well enough earlier, I think, but the first gameport is part of the motherboard's IO.
Unrelated note: I was trying to get TCP/IP networking up, too, but couldn't manage. It seems like I may need to get a dedicated network card, but does anyone know if I could just route the networking through the onboard Ethernet port? If so, how? Because I already tried some drivers and a .COM program for this but no luck.