Do you have any options to lower the isa bus speed. Anecdotally the gf1 gueses have exhibited some errors like skipping sound playback on machines related to the bus speed. If your bus speed is faster than normal maybe it's related to your issue.

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-11-13, 00:34:

Do you have any options to lower the isa bus speed. Anecdotally the gf1 gueses have exhibited some errors like skipping sound playback on machines related to the bus speed. If your bus speed is faster than normal maybe it's related to your issue.

Not in the BIOS. I thought about this, tried running with FSB at 66, but that didn't help. I'll look if maybe there's a hidden option in the BIOS with modbin or something.

Then again the datasheet for the clock chip doesn't mention ISA at all, so maybe it gets the clock separately.

Just curious, why not use the gus pnp in this PC if it works? The gf1 gets you different sounding sbos, which I think I'm one of the few people who considers that a great perk, but the actual gus mode playback in games and demos ought to be about the same with the pnp?

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-11-13, 03:53:

Just curious, why not use the gus pnp in this PC if it works? The gf1 gets you different sounding sbos, which I think I'm one of the few people who considers that a great perk, but the actual gus mode playback in games and demos ought to be about the same with the pnp?

Tbh even though I had the PnP for years, I always used the GF1 cards, so this is kinda foreign to me. I'm very used to setting up those cards, but with PnP right now I have MIDI playing, I have demos working, but for some reason can't get the DOS games in Win95 or DOS mode to work (Doom doesn't work in both GUS and MIDI modes). GF1 just worked for me.

do you have a regular dos 6.22 install you could swap in and play with to see if it's an os issue? I've heard of people being unable to get gf1 gus to work in Windows 98... Though I think windows 95 is ok, pretty sure official drivers/installation guidance existed for win95, and really, the conventional install ought to still work in dos. And for what its worth, I've gotten picogus, which emulates a gf1 gus, to work in Windows 98 dos mode with no problem.

Does the diagnostic program that is installed with the gf1 gus disks/CD recognize that the gus is plugged in?

Is this card known to work recently in other machines?

So quick update: I read the datasheet for the south bridge (SiS 5595), and it does have a register that defines the ISA clock. It was set to PCI/4 (so around 8.25), tried setting it to 00 (7.159MHz) with WPCREDIT, the card still doesn't get detected by Windows or the drivers.

Is this card known to work recently in other machines?

Yes, the card worked in other systems, and I've actually tried two different GF1 cards here (a Primax Soundstorm aka CD3 and a Max), same story.

Okay, nearly a year later I gave it another go, and after two days of troubleshooting, solved it. It just might be a bit bigger than this particular motherboard, so posting this in case someone faces a similar problem.

1) turns out the card worked, it just couldn't get detected.

Manually installed the Ultrasound DOS drivers via the restore option, wrote the autoexec lines by hand, successfully launched the Second Reality demo.

2) detection seems to rely on DMA1

Seems like the problem was with the fact that the motherboard has onboard ESS Solo-1 that works via SiS's DDMA implementation. Doesn't matter if you set DMA 1 to "ISA" in BIOS settings, the moment ESSSOLO.COM loads, it will probe SIS DDMA which will occupy DMA1

So the way to fix this is to use something to manipulate chipset registers. I used PCIEDIT. Just add to your AUTOEXEC.BAT:

PCIEDIT.EXE 1039 0008 80:00 84:00

Or you can probably use WPCRSET to set bits 80 and 84 to 00 on the ISA bridge device.

3) this needs to happen after ESSSOLO.com loads

ESS driver will re-enable those bits, so you should zero them after esssolo.com. If you load Windows and the DOS part of the ESS card has a yellow mark in device manager - you did everything correctly.

Now you can install Ultrasound drivers properly.

After that you can restore DDMA (remove the PCIEDIT line), GUS will work after this.

So it might happen on other DDMA implementations (I think VIA also had one?) or with a card/onboard chip that uses sblink.