Hi everyone,

I recently purchased a Compaq Desktop EN small form factor, it has a Pentium III 733 mhz with 512MB RAM and came with a Soundblaster PCI 128 CT4810, all the drivers were already installed for the OS and hardware, the general MIDI sounds great and works fine when testing non-BUILD FPS such as Heretic and Rise of the Triad, however an issue I have is when running any BUILD game, notably Duke3d, Shadow Warrior or Blood, it doesn't use the in-game sound volume in the menu but some arbitrary value which I can't control, for example I can set the sound volume in Duke3D's in-game menu to nothing and still get sound, however it does register if I turn it off from the menu entirely, fiddling with the volume control in Windows it's only affected by the 'Playback' value, but that also affects the volume for the music as well, the sound is moderately loud and I've compensated by cranking the music volume to full. This is the first retro machine I've purchased, my first PC was a Dell with Windows 95 back in the day which I no longer have, however that had no dedicated soundcard and we used Microsoft GS Synth for the music, I've not got any technical knowledge on configuring sound cards and such so this is a new territory for me, I know my way around computers but this has me stumped so bear with me =)

After doing some research the drivers which were installed were for Windows only (SBPCI128Setupus.exe) and (SBPCI_WebDrvsV5_12_01.exe) their are no DOS drivers installed as when loading up in real time DOS mode, Duke3d's setup file can't initialize any sound or music, their is an empty AUTOEXEC and a CONFIG.DOS in the root C:\ containing the following:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\setver.exe

I want to play DOS games under Windows for convinience and their is no good reason to use real DOS mode with the specs the system is rocking, also the system has no ISA slots for an AWE32/64 card, which I read wants to run under real DOS anyway, so I'm stuck to using PCI only soundcards.

If I bring up Multimedia it's using SB PCI Synthesizer under MIDI, in devices the audo device is 'Audio for SB PCI(WDM)', 'MIDI for SB PCI(WDM)' and 'Mixer for SB PCI(WDM)'. The soundcard is assigned to using IRQ 10 by default and Duke3D setup uses standard values for the sound:

Address: 0x220
Type: Sound blaster 16 or AWE32 (it works and does the same regardless what it's set to)
Interrupt: 5
8-Bit DMA: 1
16-bit DMA: 5

I've tried changing the soundcard IRQ assignment, installing DOS drivers but that just broke the Windows ones, messing around with config and other settings but just can't fix this, it looks like a simple configuration issue somewhere as it works fine under other FPS or am I missing something else?

A second issue I have is their is no Soundblaster emulation enabled, I can select Soundblaster but no music is produced, I've read this card also known as Creative AudioPCI 128 / Soundblaster Vibra 128 doesn't have a Yamaha3 chip for OPL and doesn't have a clone either, so it has to emulate the SB through software and it's awful, but still I'd like the option as any game which only uses Adlib/Soundblaster has no music as a result. I've looked at some documentation online for this soundcard but it doesn't mention anything specific, is their something I need to configure somewhere in order to turn the SB emulation on?