SBlive 5.1 platinum and MS-Dos

[KlaasVaak]

Hi,

I seem to be unable to get my Soundblaster 5.1 platinum to work under MS-Dos. The installation goes fine but when I load up a game, no sound. The included SBEGO.exe complains that SB16 emulation is not loaded while the SBEINIT.exe clearly states it is. After running through the pages on the internet on this subject I came to the conclusion my mobo does not support this so called NMI and it does not have an option to turn OS PnP off. It does not use IRQ5 at boot up so that's cool but useless. The mobo in question is the Asrock K7S41GX. Since the mobo has no ISA slot I am unable to insert the old CMI8330 card I have here. That is a real bummer.

I have to following questions:

1) Is it somehow possible to get the SB16 emulation working? Like through a 3rd party driver or TSR program.

2) If not, is it possible to get some kind of PCI to ISA bridge which can do the job and support full DMA access. I've been looking but the solutions I found are inadequet or way too expensive.

3) Does an old PCI sound card might do the trick where the SBlive does not? I doubt it but I thought I ask anyway. I think it all depends on the mobo in question.

4a) The current solution I am looking at is to replace the mobo. It must have legacy USB support so I can hook my USB mouse and keyboard to it. It must have an ISA slot which support IRQ5 for the Soundblaster (emulation) and it must be able to use a more recent CPU. So far, I have found only one mobo that has it all. The I-Base MB865. Perhaps you know others. Link: I-Base M865

4b) I could also get a mobo that has this NMI and enables you to turn off OS PnP as I think it's called. But which one? Anyways, I am not sure this will garantee a proper operation of my SBlive card with Dos.

The whole idea about the setup is to be able to run old dos games, like Pinball Dreams but also older Windows games like Slamtilt. And I am sure there are many more games which will run fine only on Dos or older Windows.

I do not want to get into a discussion about using emulation software like dgVoodoo, Dosbox or VDMsound. They have their place but nothing beats a genuine Dos system.

I hope you can help me,
Klaas

 

[Tug]

Just to be clear here. Are you doing a dual boot with XP and MS DOS 6.22 or what?

If I remember correctly, my old Yamaha Ymf724 PCI card worked fine in DOS and Win 3.1. You should be able to pick up one of the those + DOS drivers on the Internet.

 

[KlaasVaak]

Sorry, no, I am booting into Windows 98 SE. Old Windows games have a hard time running on XP that's why I installed Windows 98 SE.

I am not sure you can actually call it a dual boot system. I've designed it in such a way that I can start a Dos game from Windows 98 SE, just by clicking an icon. 'Start up' will change the autoexec.bat and config.sys to the needs of the Dos game then the computer reboots. The game loads and finally finishes. It automaticly restores the autoexec.bat and config.sys to Windows 98 SE defaults and reboots into Windows 98 SE. I used to have a special boot disk for Dos games but I prefer this way of starting a Dos game.

All the drivers needed for Dos are in place. Like CDrom, Mouse and whatever a specific Dos game needs. It's just the sound that is giving me issues... well the SBlive 5.1 Platinum is.

Thank you for your recommendation. I will keep an eye out for this card.

 

[jattdb]

Have you looked at DOSBox? It gives you an emulated DOS environment under Windows XP (or any of several other operating systems). It uses the host OS's sound drivers and can emulate several old sound boards (SB16, GUS, etc).

It runs most of what I've thrown at it so far, though games from the end of the DOS era tend to require a decently powerful CPU to emulate at full speed. There's a compatibility list on the site so you can check for the specific games you're trying to run.

As time goes on and PC hardware continues to evolve it'll get harder to run the games natively, so it's good to have options like this.

 

[cranbers]

First of all, I have one word for you. UPGRADE or use emulation for dos. Those cards simply weren't designed to work under dos. At least not for like 10 years.

 

[KlaasVaak]

Have you looked at DOSBox? It gives you an emulated DOS environment under Windows XP (or any of several other operating systems).

Tried it, don't care much for it. Nothing beats true Dos.
Thanks for the sugggestion though.

 

[KlaasVaak]

Oops... forgot to properly 'end' this post.

I got it to work. Never before I got my SBlive 5.1 to work in Dos (that's like 6 years on my old AMD PC). But now with this I-Base Intel motherboard it seems to work wonderful. Don't ask me exactly how I did because I changed so many settings and tried so many things that I am not sure what I did to make it work. I can tell you that I used the Dos drivers from the original installation CD. As I recall I think I made a change to the soundcard itself with one of those programs in the SBlive Dos directory. Not sure though.

As for Win98SE, I am currently using kx Project (Link).
The reason for this is to hear sound when Daemon Tools is playing audio tracks.

 

[Tug]

Glad you got it working. What version of kX are you using? For Win 98SE, personally, I find that 3534f is more stable as far as pops and clicks when recording. 3537 seemed to cause more trouble on my system. 3538M works well if you have Win2K or XP.

 

[KlaasVaak]

Glad you got it working. What version of kX are you using? For Win 98SE, personally, I find that 3534f is more stable as far as pops and clicks when recording. 3537 seemed to cause more trouble on my system. 3538M works well if you have Win2K or XP.

Mmm... I'm using 3537... :? But so far it seems to work okay. I do not do any recording with it as the entire computer is for retro gaming only. For XP I'm using the latest creative web drivers which seem to work fine.

 

[Minerva]

I still think the most stable OS MS ever released was DOS... Brilliant to see that I'm not the only one who has a proper DOS pc hanging around...
I've got a P1 200MHz laptop triple booting DOS6.22/Win95a/Win98SE.

I find that there was a lot more entertainment value in the old DOS based games, these days the only thing you get is better eye-candy - not much more IMHO...

Big ups in running the DOS pc!

 

[KlaasVaak]

I still think the most stable OS MS ever released was DOS... Brilliant to see that I'm not the only one who has a proper DOS pc hanging around...

Yep, nothing beats true Dos.

I've got a P1 200MHz laptop triple booting DOS6.22/Win95a/Win98SE.

The retro PC runs Dos, Win98SE and XP. It has a CMI8330, SBlive 5.1, nVidia 6200, Voodoo2 and an ATA133 card in it. 512MB mem, 2.53 Celeron D. So far it runs every game I through at it. Mostly pinball games and racing games. I do still have problems with the Voodoo2 card which the system does not seem to recognize very well (except in NFS2).

I find that there was a lot more entertainment value in the old DOS based games, these days the only thing you get is better eye-candy - not much more IMHO...

Yep, a lot of modern games are eye-candy only.