henris42 wrote on 2025-03-26, 03:07:

OK, so yours again say couldn't initialize music hardware

This is probably a little thing. I'm a professional Linux developer myself, no idea on how this DOS/Sierra stuff works.

Aahh sorry!! I am really rooting for you man…

Hehe no worries! The guy who make the gosierra patch, his mail now bounces.

So if anyone knows anything... 😉

But I guess I put a little bit too fast machine up - it was just the newest board I had that had an ISA slot. But anycase this should be solved.

(how in the heck you edit a post here)

Hi, lets open this a bit further.

I found from my basement a Pentium II/333 HP Vectra MB without the case, so I hacked that to a DELL case. Quite a kludge, but now I have a bit slower machine to try to debug this stuff further.

I also found an old CMS-401 MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 "clone", with real Roland chips). I disabled MPU support from CT-2770 soundblaster. This should enable support for all the "picky" games. Its now close to the setup I had back in '91, though the old SB16 is long gone (I think I sold it when I went to college).

With this, trying with Space Quest 1 VGA:
- MT-32 music works
- Adlib music works

But if I try to enable Soundblaster audio (assumably samples) , it freezes. I have in the SET BLASTER="A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6" in the environment.
I was thinking it might have something to do with those IRQ and DMA? I tried to put those setting from PnP to ISA from BIOS, to no help. But I did not see any jumpers to set DMA.

Any ideas?

pnp soundblasters usually don't work in soundblaster mode without driver initialization, have you tried unisound?

I second this.

In additon, some older games rely on IRQ 7 rather than IRQ 5.
That's because the 8-Bit Sound Blasters used IRQ 7 as a default.
Because IRQ 5 was already in use for HDD controllers in PC/XT systems.