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Sound Blaster Live! Dos Drivers and FreeDOS

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First post, by Omniverse

Posted on 
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I managed to find the DOS driver files for my Sound Blaster Live! sound card, but if I try to load them in FreeDOS I get an error indicating that a memory manager like EMM386 needs to be running in order to load the sblive drivers.

I've tried using both FreeDOS's EMM386.EXE and UMBPCI.SYS and the drivers complain with either.

I actually found a copy of the old EMM386.exe from an old version of DOS (I think. It didn't come from an incredibly reputable source). If I load it, the sblive drivers load, but the PC completely locks up (CTRL-ALT-DEL won't even work) if I try to load any programs that use sound.

I've tried adding both the NOEMS and NOVCPI options to EMM386.EXE (both the freedos and ms-dos versions) and still no go. I'm at a loss as far as what to do next.

Reply 1 of 1, by gidierre

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Not sure if this is really relevant, but I remember having such sb Live dos drivers problems.
That was when trying to setup "real" msdos sound capability from within a Win98FE partition.
As far as "dos in WinXP" is concerned, it's clear emulation via SoundFX 2000 or VDMSound (or if viable in your case DosBox or ScummVM ) is far better imho.

Anyway, talking about msdos, I found the WinME emergency floopy boot disk unfit for sb Live setup anyhow, precisely for a fatal emm386.exe issue, while the Win98 EBD was good enough (drop the whole ramdrive thing !).
Btw the dos drivers for Live I used are in one sblive2sb16.zip file.

Another issue is : I found no total lockup like you, but the drivers were after all unable to load because of a PCI IRQ conflict that I had no way to fix not even in the bios setup,
until I read in sbeset.txt there that the optional tweak :
sbeset.com -I10 -w0 [ i.e. IRQ=10 and ignore current Win config]
followed by the regular commands :
sbeset -c [check it out]
sbeinit.com [initialize]
sbemixer [set mixer up]
could make the trick, and it did 😀

Did this help a bit ?

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