PCI cards support under DOS

[max1172]

Hello everybody,

does anyone know if SiS or VIA-based
motherboards are capable of recognizing
PCI cards (like the SB Live!) under DOS?
I know for sure that nForce2-based
mainboards are not, since my Asus A7N8X
does not "see" the SB PCI card when
I boot under DOS, while my previous
mainboard, Abit BE6-II (BX chipset) did.

I would like to keep on playing my old,
favorite DOS games with their sound!

Thanx a lot

Max

 

[grafixmonkey]

FYI, there are some utilities on sourceforge.net that provide a legacy Sound Blaster emulation layer to DOS boxes in windows 2000 / XP. I think one of them is called VDMS, but there's another I don't remember the name of. I think to play your old Dos games you can use Windows 95/98 just as easily as Dos, but that may or may not work for all games. Many older (like SB Live) sound cards provided legacy sound support for DOS boxes in their drivers.

I myself have kept an old Sound Blaster AWE32 around, and will soon be building a DOS game station out of my parents' old computer when they (finally!!!) upgrade their P-Pro 266 this year. How they put up with that computer I have no idea, it takes four minutes to load a user in WinXP. (they had to have XP for the Welcome screen - they can't remember usernames, even if they're one letter with no password.)

 

[Crashman]

Are you sure you have SB16 emulation enabled?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[max1172]

You're right, Grafix, I've already tried out VDMS and it does work, however the quality of the sound that comes out is not too satisfactory, at least is not as good as it was with my previous mobo. The Abit BE6-II (Intel BX chipset) had no problems at all with the SB Live! card under DOS, Win98 ot whatever, so I prepared a small Win98SE partition where I could play Full Throttle, Doom or all the old DOS games.
The problem with the brand new Asus A7N8X mobo, and, AFAIK, with all the nForce2 mobos is the IRQ assignment. With the old mainboards you could choose whether to assign the IRQs at the BIOS level or leave it to the OS (via the "PnP OS aware" switch in the BIOS), whereas with the recent nForce2 motherboards this is no longer possible (and, actually, that switch has disappeared from the BIOS options).
This is why I posted here, I wanted to know if someone else had my problem and how mainboards based on different chipsets behave about IRQ assignments.
And, Crashman, of course SB16 emulation is not enabled, or, better, I try to enable it with Sbeinit, and it seems to load, but as soon as I launch Sbego it complains about the fact the emulation is NOT active...

Thank you, guys, for the time it took for reading this

Max