I have three 3 sound cards in my main retro machine, one of these cards is an AWE64 set to base address 280h . Doom 1 and Doom 2 (purchased from GOG) do not allow setting the AWE32 music device to 280h, but do allow setting a 280h base address for the Sound Blaster effects .

I tried changing the base address for the music device to 640 decimal (280h), but still got no music .

Just to be sure it was not an issue due to my Ipox IP-3ETI23 ITE8888 bridged ISA bus, I tried it on an Asus P3B-F and can confirm that when the AWE64 is set to base address to 220h, setting the AWE32 music base address to 220h in Doom does give me AWE32 wavetable music, but setting the base address to 280h does not produce music even if I edit default.cfg to the correct setting .

My guess, is that rather than calculate the offset from the base address to the EMU8000 address (+400h), a lookup table is used to the determine which EMU8000 address to use and since 280h is not offered as an option, it is not in that table, and setting the value manually in the config file does not work . I imagine checking the source code would confirm or infirm that hypothesis, but I am not a programmer .

I still find it strange that 280h is not offered as an option for music, but is offered for the wave out . Does anybody why this is ? Are there any patches for this ?

EDIT: I am aware that there ways around this issue, like running from Windows and redirecting the MPU-401 to the EMU8000 synth or using aweutil's MPU-401 redirection (if the motherboard has working NMI) .

EDIT2: so Doom uses the DMX library and that isn't open source, oh well.