Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-04-30, 07:40:

zuldan wrote on 2025-04-30, 07:09:

I set Prehistorik to Sound Blaster but then complained about "ct-voice.drv not detected" not being detected. I tried Adlib and it's working fine. Is there a trick to get Sound Blaster working or am I supposed to use Adlib?

Feel like a noob, never played this game before.

No worries, it does take some effort to get that game running.

Check the thread that I linked to and find a version of CT-VOICE.DRV that shipped with SBPro cards. It should be in one of the attachments in the first post. Then copy that file to the Prehistorik folder and it should run with Sound Blaster selected.

Ok finally got the game to work. The result is......it freezes on the first NPC so maybe when the digital sound kicks in 🙁

zuldan wrote on Today, 06:28:

Ok finally got the game to work. The result is......it freezes on the first NPC so maybe when the digital sound kicks in 🙁

That sounds similar to what I experienced.

A few older games will only run with SB-Link enabled on the Solo-1. But many others will work fine with just DDMA or TDMA.

zuldan wrote on Today, 06:28:

Ok finally got the game to work. The result is......it freezes on the first NPC so maybe when the digital sound kicks in 🙁

Please try with the attached ESSOLO.COM, it is modified to force the card into PC/PCI (SBLINK) mode. This assumes that your board has actual traces going from the onboard chip to the southbridge.

I've personally not fully tested it yet, only preliminarily.

Tried it and it initialized into DDMA mode. So no luck. But maybe I'm a special case as I cannot force SB Link mode in any way on my 440BX board.

Paar wrote on Today, 18:10:

Tried it and it initialized into DDMA mode. So no luck. But maybe I'm a special case as I cannot force SB Link mode in any way on my 440BX board.

PC-PCI/SB-Link on the Solo is as rare as hens teeth... Some people claim it works, but you can count them on one hand. Personally, I did get mine to initialize as PC/PCI, I don't remember exactly how, but it still didn't work properly. I'm sure it does in fact work, in some very specific scenarios for some people, but it's not worth the time or effort (ESFM is also a disincentive and is why I abandoned ESS cards in general). If you need PCI audio with full ISA compatibility, get a YMF724 -- it works with practically zero effort on any system I tested it on, provided it was connected to the SB-LINK.

Yeah, spent several hours trying to make it work, without success. On the other hand YMF724 card worked on the first try. But I think the ESFM sound pretty good, and is well balanced with PCM volume for games that max volume up (e.g. Wolf3D). Maybe too strong low pass filter for low quality samples but not horrible by any means.