How to I get sound to work in all dos games through Win98 SE?

[Shawn]

I've got an old Panasonic CF45 (P2 266MHz, 128MB ram) laptop that I have been loading up with old Dos games. The only problem is the sound card (Yamaha OPL3-SA FM chip) only has windows drivers, no dos drivers, so I have to run all of the games through windows to get the sound to work. This works for about 2/3 of the games since windows emulates the sound card as a sound blaster pro. However some games, like commander keen for instance detect a sound blaster at start up but then there is no sound. Are there any workarounds? How can I adjust the emulation settings?

I know Dosbox would work, but that completely emulates a dos environment and this computer is too slow for that.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you type "SET" in a DOS box you should see the BLASTER variable and what ports & IRQ the card is watching for its emulation.

Make sure Keen has the same port / irq settings, it might be defaulting to different ones even if it detects a sound blaster.

 

[Shawn]

I don't think Keen allows them to be set. I have the IRQ set to 5 in the autoexec.bat file. I'll try changing it to 7.

 

[Shawn]

YES, that fixed it. Dunno why I didn't try that before.

 

[Shawn]

OK, wtf? Now it isn't working again.

 

[NoWhereM]

The old soundblaster compatible sound cards don't require a driver to work in DOS. They use command lines in Autoexec.bat and possibly Config.sys.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Shawn
OK, wtf? Now it isn't working again.

Check that it isn't being reset back to 5 somehow, either by the soundcard's drivers or by Windows. I vaguely recall Windows copying autoexec.sys to .bat? (or .w95 or .win to .bat??)

 

[Shawn]

It does seem to revert back to IRQ 5, although now when I manually set it to 7 before running the game it still doesn't work. So I don't know if it was just a fluke that it worked or not, but I can't repeat whatever I did.