Getting sound to work properly in Dos games on Win98?

[Shawn]

So I got a P3 500Mhz laptop to replace my son's P2 266Mhz laptop which he uses for old Dos and Win9x games. His old laptop was wearing out I wanted to replace it with something cheap that could still play the old dos games without issue.

I have been having issues getting the sound in dos games to work properly with the new laptop however. The sound card is a ESS Maestro-2E which has no native dos support. That shouldn't be a problem though as this was the case with my previous laptop but sound worked fine through 98 using the dos legacy mode the drivers provided.

With this laptop I can only get the music in games to work, but not the sound effects. I believe it's supposed to emulate a sound blaster pro. I've got the following in the autoexec.bat file:

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

The settings in the device manager agree but still no sound effects. I tried changing them both to IRQ 7 but no change. Music will still work though.

I don't get what the issue is.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Does it work in DOSBox?

 

[Ross Ridge]

I have been having issues getting the sound in dos games to work properly with the new laptop however. The sound card is a ESS Maestro-2E which has no native dos support. That shouldn't be a problem though as this was the case with my previous laptop but sound worked fine through 98 using the dos legacy mode the drivers provided.

Well if you're using Windows 98 with a sound card that doesn't have hardware SoundBlaster emulation that means you're either using Windows' built-in crappy WDM-based emulator, or the sound card driver's own VxD-based emulator. The built in Windows emulator is pretty much useless, so if you've got WDM drivers installed try removing them installing the VxD ones instead. It's possible though that VxD drivers don't provide any sort of emulation.

I'd recommend not explicitly setting the BLASTER environment variable in your AUTOEXEC.BAT. This variable should be automatically set by the driver to the correct values when you open an MS-DOS window under Windows. I'd also recommand playing around with the auto-detect function and test functions that many game setup utilities have. I find it's the quickest way to resolve these problems. In particular I like using the setup utility from Descent, it's does a good job of auto-detection and test can both music and sound effects. It shouldn't be hard to find the shareware demo release of Descent online for free.

 

[Shawn]

These are VxD drivers with emulation. The software added the set blaster in the autoexec.bat. I changed it to IRQ 7 to see if I could fix the problem myself.

I am dual booting with Win2k and I can get some of the dos games to work under win2k with vdmsound, but a lot of the games hang or don't run well.


BTW, I think I have Descent on CD somewhere...

 

[Shawn]

Tried to auto detect settings with the decent install program but it says "Error getting device settings. Please enter sound card values manually."

 

[Ross Ridge]

If you notebook BIOS supports it, see if it has a setting to reserve interrupt 5 (or 7) for ISA/Non-PnP or something like that. The problem may be that other devices are taking the interrupts normally used by SoundBlaster cards. You can also try disabling any parallel port the laptop may have, if the BIOS gives you that option.

You can also check the device manager settings and see if there's a specific entry for the SoundBlaster emulator. If so it should list the interrupt, port number and DMA number used by the emulator and maybe give the option of changing them.

I was going to sugggest VDMSound on Windows XP, as I've had pretty good results with that. Unless you're playing really old games DOSBox is probably way too slow.

 

[sigurros81]

What's a Win98 and more importantly, what's a DOS?!

 

[MrWizzard]

What's a Win98 and more importantly, what's a DOS?!

One day you will learn what "THE SEX" is too!

 

[Shawn]

I finally got it working for the most part. I found some newer drivers which seemed to fix the problem. Instead of using the set blaster command it had it's own program which runs in the autoexec.bat in order to assign the resources.

However it was assigning the IRQ to 10 and the DMA to 3 which caused problems with older games. I did have to disable the LPT port in the bios to free up IRQ 5 so I could use it. Once I changed it to IRQ 5 and DMA 1, I got most all of my games to work, even the really old ones which only supported the original Sound Blaster.

I am still having trouble with a few games though. I cannot get Jazz Jackrabbit to work with sound no matter what I try. And a few old ID/Softdisc games like Rescue Rover 2 and Commander Keen 6 won't detect the sound card. Strangely, Commander Keen 5 detects it fine.

Commander Keen is being a pain though as both 5 and 6 have choppy video. They also won't work at all in Win2k's dos box. Grrr..