Do you have mscdex loaded in autoexec.bat ?

No. This is only needed in 95 AFAIK?

IIRC, the sound cards needs to have WDM drivers for digital playback to be permitted. Emphasis on the "IIRC" part, it's been a while since I looked at that side of things.

Hmm... that does seem plausible.

I could try WDM drivers on Live! to see if that enables it. A3D in headphone mode on the Vortex2 I'm using is useless anyway unfortunately. As a last resort there is the internal S/PDIF route too if WDM drivers don't cut it. Live! does have the connector for that.

OK I set up my Live! now. The driver update from their site didn't work as it demanded files from an installation CD. I tried the Liveware 3 CD and the card is installed with VxD drivers now (no control panel). Digital CD playback still isn't available. Which driver package or CD am I supposed to use to get the WDM drivers?

The reason I'm doing this is to compare A3D and EAX in Half-Life btw. EAX actually works somewhat convincingly at times in this game. I'm surprised. Would be interesting to see if it still works properly with WDM drivers.

These WDM drivers maybe?
How to get Sound Blaster Emulation in Win9X/ME via live!5.1 with newer-current mobo's (no nmi-ddma)

I really have not messed around much with 98SE digital CD audio.

Can't download that file directly without paying.

d1stortion wrote:

Can't download that file directly without paying.

*cough* DriverGuide.com’s Not-so-surprising Scammy Tactics

Though as Jorpho said in that thread:

Jorpho wrote:

Surely these drivers are already somewhere in one of the many different driver threads on this board

I installed these drivers now. Again it demanded a bunch of VxD files which aren't even on the Liveware 3 disc this time around. It wants the "Creative WDM Audio Driver Disk". While the Live! is shown as installed with WDM drivers in device manager, the game port has an exclamation mark and the card isn't selectable as an output device. There is also a weird glitchy blank entry next to the Live! card in device manager.

What is the point of these web driver releases if they don't even work on their own...?

Another approach to this digital CD audio thing is to just make some CUE/BIN images and mount them with Daemon Tools.

Some folks around here don't like that kind of talk you know 😉

But yeah, I'm aware of that solution, images are a bit cumbersome when using CF cards though. At this point I'm really more interested in getting these WDM drivers going to check if it does change anything about EAX.

Not sure what card you're using but these WDM drivers for Live! located here: http://download.driverguide.com/driver/CT4780 … abs/d77216.html give me the digital cd audio option checkbox in 98SE (though I haven't actually used it). They're dated 2001 (I think 09-2001). Also, these are the definitive drivers IMO for those that can't get native DOS SBPro emulation under realmode DOS (SBpro works under 98SE dos boxes); unless there's a newer one that preserves SBpro emulation under 98SE/ME that I don't know about.

Not sure about the Vortex2 but if I get a chance I might double check (currently installing my favorite OS Windows ME. Destroyed file structures using via4in1 drivers on a AMD SB950 chipset in 98SE. Strongly advise not to do this ever haha 😈. I've lost all my 98SE stuff)...

Card's a CT4760 from '99. An original Live! card I believe. I haven't noticed that the drivers are actually for CT4780. That is probably some sort of Live! 5.1 from 2000. Could be why those drivers don't work...

So this has become a real 9x driver nightmare. For some reason it has this 2001 WDM version saved as the newest version and it doesn't seem to accept any older driver versions anymore. When I go to uninstall that driver and install the Liveware 3 CD it still tries to install the WDM driver (which doesn't work due to that missing disk). When I try updating the driver manually to a 1999 version from the Windows inf folder it still complains about missing files from a CD, like soundfonts etc. The driver doesn't work without those files.

How can I just install that Liveware CD again? I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows because of this nonsense...

Did you clean Creative out of c:\windows\inf\other ?

Maybe get Driver Cleaner and run that too.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/drive … ofessional.html

Ha there is a reason I always avoid the Live!

I will test this CD Audio playback option when I'm done with the Socket 7 Voodoo 2 benchmarking. Currently I don't have a Sound Card installed.

That is the tool I always use. Doesn't help much here apparently. I did clean out that folder, but it still doesn't work... after installing the Liveware 3 CD it asks for a whole bunch of files from a Creative CD (non-WDM). 2gmgsmt.sf2, a3d.dll, ac3api.dll, cifman.crl, cifman.dll just to name the first few 😒

Seems like there must be another INF somewhere....