SoundBlaster Live, SB 16 emulator and Motherboards

[Flubber]

Hi!!

I am planning to upgrade soon and I still want to be able to play my old DOS games. I have heard the Sound Blaster Live has a Sound Blaster 16 emulator to play DOS games, I have also heard that it does not always work, depending on your Motherboard. Has anyone had problems with the Soundblaster Live with DOS and what MotherBoard do you have?

Or should I give up and stick with my Soundblaster 32.

Thanks in advance

 

[LarryJoe]

I have a Soyo6BA+IV and have it enabled with no problems. However, I do not play DOS games regularly. I do believe I fired up Wolf with the Live and it worked fine. (Great game)

LJ

 

[Raincity]

Its the Irq and Dma sharing that the SB16 emulator has at time with installed devices in your pc. Setting the SB16 to share resources with the printer port will fix this issue 99% of the time if you do have a conflict with the Sb16 and another device.

Rain

 

[Oyeve]

The only problem I have seen is that I have so much crap in my system I can only get the emulator to work with irq 9 which most old dos games do not support. Otherwise it works fine.

 

[DaddyG]

SB16 was very picky about resources. 8-bit audio used DMA channel 1 16-bit audio used DMA channel 5 and IRQ 5 was the default. Sometimes these can be changed but the defaults work best.

Update: The SB16 IRQ (5) will also have to be set to Legacy ISA to stop any sharing.

 

[smukkel]

It depends a lot on what else you put in.
I have a CUSL2 and it took me awhile to get everything working:
2 nic's
SB live
sb 16 emulator

 

[LarryJoe]

Another note, if you are doing a clean install or building a system, make the Live one of the first cards you install.

LJ