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Audigy DOS Driver issues - XMS DRIVER NOT INSTALLED.

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First post, by chief

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Hi,
I'm trying to get sound working in dos 8.0 (Windows Millennium Edition). I have tried the following various things to get the sound working in DOS some of which may be likely not required for getting things working.

1) Modify ME to allow for starting in real DOS mode (fine and working).
2) Installed the drivers from the Audigy cd-rom off of vogonsdrivers, these were WDM drivers and they work so at least I know the card works (the card is a recent purchase).
3) I did try to force the VxD drivers, if I try em10k.inf the computer won't boot, if I try sb16.inf then it says the device doesn't exist and if (once it finally showed up as a choice) the Audigy VxD driver then Windows locks up.
4) I have also installed the dos device drivers available here: [audigy dos drivers], they did extract the first time - subsequent attempts to install froze Windows, but the drivers are there so less worried about freezes from the installer now.
5) Found a guide online that said to edit the registry for SB16 to work, so did that. Computer still doesn't detect any SB16 emulation, either forced manually or auto-find.
6) Found another guide that said which autoexec and config.sys edits to make (also included a zip of the dos drivers) [http://easymamecab.mameworld.info/html/snddosdr.htm].
7) Modified config.sys / autoexec.bat files to load the himem.sys and also EMM386.exe etc. as per the guide from (6). This leads to the error:

"ERROR : AN EXTENDED MEMORY MANAGER IS ALREADY INSTALLED . XMS DRIVER NOT INSTALLED"

If I remove himem.sys from booting then on entering DOS the whole computer locks up, if I leave himem.sys and remove emm386.exe then the soundblaster drivers don't work as they require it.

At the end of the day my plan was to have dos games running in dos (startup boot menu) which they do, just without sound currently. Then in Windows have EAX etc. working for the more "modern" games I'm trying out. I presume this means Windows can keep the WDM drivers, and I just need to get the dos SB16 driver working?

However I'm running out of things to try, so I wondered if anyone had any ideas? I've hunted the forums here and elsewhere but everything I've tried (probably missed stuff off the list above for all the things I've tried) have got me nowhere. I'm hoping if I can get past the memory manager error I might get somewhere with this.

I've somewhat messed round with my config.sys/autoexec.bat files but here they are as they stand after a lot of fiddling (as you can see I tried moving stuff into the windows category in the hope the memory manager didn't load 😀).

Config.sys:

[menu]
menuitem=WINDOWS, Windows ME
menuitem=DOS, DOS 8.0
menudefault=WINDOWS,5
menucolor=9

[common]

[WINDOWS]
FILES=50
DOS=HIGH,UMB
BREAK=ON
lastdrive=Z
DEVICE=c:\WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1)
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ANSI.SYS
rem Country=351,850,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\country.sys
shell=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /p /e:768


[DOS]
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS NOVCPI
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\SETVER.EXE
DEVICE=c:\cdrom\cdrom.sys /d:IDECD000

[common]

AutoExec.bat:

@ECHO OFF
SET TMP=C:\TEMP
SET TEMP=%TMP%
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330
SET CTSYN=C:\DOSDRV
C:\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM
C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE
prompt [1;37;44m$P[1;37;41m$g[0m
rem mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
rem mode con codepage select=850
rem keyb po,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys
mode con RATE=32 DELAY=1

goto %config%

:windows
win
goto end

:dos
goto end

:end
ver

Thanks,
Chief.

Reply 1 of 7, by Tiido

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EMM386 cannot be loaded in WnME, it feezes upon load. I suspect that the HIMEM.SYS inside ME's IO.SYS is to blame as the EXE is exactly same as Win98SE's with the exception of one single byte in copyright string. It is currently not possible to stop HIMEM.SYS inside IO.SYS from loading.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 2 of 7, by chinny22

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WinMe gets a lot of hate because of its somewhat crippled dos mode.
Win98SE is the better option if you want pure dos

or you can also play dos games from within windows, Audigy should have installed a legacy device within device manager that acts as a sound blaster 16

Reply 3 of 7, by chief

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Thanks for the replies.

EMM386 cannot be loaded in WnME, it feezes upon load. I suspect that the HIMEM.SYS inside ME's IO.SYS. It is currently not possible to stop HIMEM.SYS inside IO.SYS from loading.

I was afraid of this tbh with you as I had read a very short sentence on another post about himem.sys likely being the culprit, though I hadn't fully realised it was embedded in io.sys and not just loading himem.sys.

Win98SE is the better option if you want pure dos

ME retail is the only 9x OS I actually own.

or you can also play dos games from within windows, Audigy should have installed a legacy device within device manager that acts as a sound blaster 16.

It should have done, but it doesn't appear to have and all my attempts at getting it showing have failed miserably.

The trouble with running dos games within windows is that the following occurs:

1) Installations don't work - the computer freezes. I ended up using dosbox to install the games and copied them over to the computer.
2) Running dos games doesn't work either from their shortcuts or manually launching through the dos prompt - the computer will flash a blue screen at me, then the monitor signal is lost. I can use ctrl+alt+del to bring up a task manager and kill the dos prompt however.

However if I run in real dos mode, then games do work - just without any sound. This is why I figured if I could just get the SB dos driver to work then I'd be all setup.

Chief 😀

Reply 4 of 7, by chief

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As an update to this, I had completely given up and was searching for how to dual boot freedos and windows as an alternative to try.

In doing so I stumbled on a thread with a work around to the IO.Sys / HiMem.Sys issue.

The suggestion was that Win9x will load a file if it has a higher version number than the one in use, and that if you can modify the himem.sys to have a higher version number then it should load through config.sys, (which in turn I presume might allow emm386 to then load without freezing) over the top of the io.sys loaded file.

Now I have no idea if this is true or not, but maybe it's worth trying?

Downside to trying this though is that I have absolutely no idea how to modify the version number of a .sys file 😊 though I presume it's in some form of hex editor, so if anyone has an idea of how (and perhaps more importantly where in the file) to do this I figure it might be worth trying.

Chief 😀

Reply 5 of 7, by cyclone3d

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Tiido wrote:

EMM386 cannot be loaded in WnME, it feezes upon load. I suspect that the HIMEM.SYS inside ME's IO.SYS is to blame as the EXE is exactly same as Win98SE's with the exception of one single byte in copyright string. It is currently not possible to stop HIMEM.SYS inside IO.SYS from loading.

This makes no sense. WAAAAAAYYYY back in the day when ME was the newest OS I was running it and for sure was using EMM386.

I was doing the hackery to enable real DOS mode.

OP, which patch are you using for real DOS mode?
Here is one of the older ones that should just work as long as you follow the instructions.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030916232327/ht … /mfd4life_2000/

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 6 of 7, by Tiido

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This is interesting, I have never managed to get EMM386 work on ME in any way, it always freezes the macine upon load regardless of version and hardware.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 7 of 7, by chief

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I've used both Win4DOS patches (confusingly they each have the same name).

I'm sure they do the same thing, the only difference is that the non-mfd4life2000 patch also adds in some lines to the autoexec and/or config.sys files so that you get a boot menu to select between ME or DOS.

There's also LoaderDOS which rather than patches files introduces a loader.exe file which makes ME boot to dos, though I haven't tried this one.

As an aside this is a completely plain ME install, no service packs or patches whatsoever and in using either of the dos patches the outcome with emm386.exe is the same (freezes the computer).

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