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(for those who own any) Creative Sound Blaster cards


dhruba.bandopadhyay

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I've been toying with soundcards lately and I found the YAMAHA YMF724 chipset cards work real good and they are dirt cheap.

It's got dos support too.

I couldn't even get 98se to recognise my SB Live5.1

Also some SB cards have a adjustment GUI that you can boot into, but it is quite complicated.

PCI or ISA? And is it 100% Sound Blaster compatible?

Could you test to see if you can run those PC demos above?

That would be PCI and I'm not sure but it has them and is a very reliable and great quality, look here

The 724 is quite a good card for me.

FWIW, I've used SB Live! Value (CT4830) as well as other SB Live! cards: SB0060 and SB0100. I'm not sure what product names corespond to these part names. These are all PCI cards and work natively under DOS, and they all work about the same.

Unfortunately, the drivers require EMM386 which isn't compatible with some games (e.g. Ultima 8).

Furthermore, SB Live! Value works really badly with Tyrian 2000 (no sound effects or crashing) even after applying the SB Live patch to Tyrian 2000. Windows doesn't help solve these problems.

I think SB0200 (Live! 5.1?) and later won't work under DOS.

I cant get SB0100 to work on 98se, the installer wont even see the card and that sucks, seems SB is not 9x friendly as of late.

Did you get it to funtion on 98 with the drivers from Creative?

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Ah! You've run into a rampant problem that happens with many Creative cards and their software. If you searched the Creative forums you'd find many have encountered this.

Some have gotten the software installer to actually recognize that they did indeed have "SoundBlaster hardware installed" by first extracting the driver/software package and then running CTZAPP.EXE. This installs the basic driver. Then after restarting Windows 2x and the drivers running fine, they could run the normal setup and the installer would then work and everything could be installed.

Just directing Device Manager to the driver folder will also get drivers installed, but this doesn't fix the setup for everything else. You need to use the Creative driver installer (CTZAPP) to get the software setup to recognize the card.

This usually doesn't happen on a fresh Windows installation, but often does if there has been any other audio card installed, Creative or otherwise. CTZAPP somehow fixes this. But not always.

The CTZAPP installer is not always called CTZAPP as Creative made different versions. But it always is something like that, or driversetup.exe, and is located in the Audio\Drivers folder of the extracted files.

If you're going from cd then there's nothing to extract. The file is usually in that Audio\Drivers folder.

The SB0100 will not be recognized by older cd's made for the original SBLive 5.1 like the SB0060. But most packages made since 2002 will recognize it. The setup file just sometimes needs to be coaxed. I have no idea why Creative setup files have this problem but the CTZAPP workaround works most of the time.

Finally, you may need to clean uninstall any Creative software and drivers then use driverheaven.net DriverCleaner in safe mode. Then shut down and physically remove the card and startup with no soundcard. Reboot a couple of times like that, maybe running DriverCleaner again in normal mode. Then install the card and see if the Creative setup will run correctly.

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Like I said, the best way to run DOS games is MS-DOS itself, a.k.a. native/pure/true DOS mode.

And best MS-DOS is 7.10, the one bundled with Windows 98 SE.

That's because any emulation software, like VMware or DOSBox or VDMSound etc, only slows down any DOS software because it is running in a VM [Virtual Machine], not in real-mode.

Real mode DOS allows all hardware resources [unlike M$ Windows or VMWare emulation] to be accessed instantaneously [in real time], and that include video + audio.

Some DOS games won't even start from within Windows DOS boxes [PIF shortcuts] or VMWare or DOSBox.

That's because they were designed to take over exclusively hardware resources, which is impossible from within Windows/emulation.

And other DOS games will just slow down to a crawl, because of similar reasons.

All you need is to boot to native MS-DOS 7.10, and use customized config.sys and autoexec.bat files to play your DOS games.

Example:

if a game requires EMS [Expanded Memory], you need to put EMM386.EXE with the RAM switch enabled in your config.sys [generic example]:

SWITCHES=/F

DOS=HIGH,UMB,AUTO

DEVICE=C:\MAX\HIMEM.SYS /NUMHANDLES=128 /TESTMEM:OFF /Q

DEVICE=C:\MAX\EMM386.EXE I=B000-B7FF RAM M9 A=64 H=120 D=256 AUTO NOTR

DEVICEHIGH=C:\MAX\IFSHLP.SYS

DEVICEHIGH=C:\MAX\CDROM\QCDROM.SYS /D:DVD-G /D:CDRW-I

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\CDROM\MSCDEX.EXE /D:DVD-G /D:CDRW-I /M:8 /E

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\SMARTDRV.EXE 12288 16 A- B- C+ D+ E+ F+ G+ H+ I+ /N /Q

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\CTMOUSE.EXE /P /R44

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\NOOFF.COM

BUFFERS=11,0

FILES=70

FCBS=1,0

LASTDRIVE=J

STACKS=0,0

SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /E:2048 /P /F

ACCDATE=C- D- E- F-

And autoexec.bat should look like this [generic example]:

@ECHO OFF

C:\3D\FASTVID.EXE 111 -128 C0000000

C:\MAX\EMM386.EXE AUTO

IF EXIST C:\SB16\CTCM.EXE C:\SB16\CTCM.EXE /B

IF EXIST C:\SB16\AWEUTIL.COM C:\SB16\AWEUTIL.COM /S /EM:GM /R:0 /C:0

IF EXIST C:\SB16\MIXERSET.EXE C:\SB16\MIXERSET.EXE /P /Q

IF EXIST C:\CTPNP.CFG DEL C:\CTPNP.CFG

IF EXIST C:\MAX\MODE.COM C:\MAX\MODE.COM CON: RATE=32 DELAY=1

SET TEMP=D:\TEMP

SET TMP=D:\TEMP

SET PKTMP=D:\TEMP

SET DOS16M=2

SET CLASSPATH="%winbootdir%\SYSTEM\QTJAVA.ZIP"

SET QTJAVA="%winbootdir%\SYSTEM\QTJAVA.ZIP"

SET MOUSE=C:\MAX

SET COPYCMD=/Y

SET DIRCMD=/A/O:GEN/P/V

SET FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH=1

SET TZ=MST7MDT

SET OANOCACHE=1

SET SST_FT_CLK_DEL=0x4

SET SST_TF0_CLK_DEL=0x6

SET SST_TF1_CLK_DEL=0x6

SET SST_VIN_CLKDEL=0x1

SET SST_VOUT_CLKDEL=0x0

SET SST_TMUMEM_SIZE=2

SET CTCM=C:\SB16

SET SOUND=C:\SB16

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6

SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0

Or if a DOS game requires only XMS [Extended Memory], you need this config.sys, autoexec.bat above can be the same [generic example]:

SWITCHES=/F

DOS=HIGH,UMB,AUTO

DEVICE=C:\MAX\UMBPCI.SYS /S

DEVICE=C:\MAX\HIRAM.EXE

DEVICE=C:\MAX\HIMEM.SYS /NUMHANDLES=128 /TESTMEM:OFF /Q

DEVICEHIGH=C:\MAX\IFSHLP.SYS

DEVICEHIGH=C:\MAX\CDROM\QCDROM.SYS /D:DVD-G /D:CDRW-I

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\CDROM\MSCDEX.EXE /D:DVD-G /D:CDRW-I /M:8 /E

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\SMARTDRV.EXE 12288 16 A- B- C+ D+ E+ F+ G+ H+ I+ /N /Q

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\CTMOUSE.EXE /P /R44

INSTALLHIGH=C:\MAX\NOOFF.COM

BUFFERS=11,0

FILES=70

FCBS=1,0

LASTDRIVE=J

STACKS=0,0

SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /E:2048 /P /F

ACCDATE=C- D- E- F-

Please notice that these boot files have full support for PS/2 or serial mouse [CTMOUSE], full support for Creative SB AWE64/AWE64 Gold, full support for 2 CD/DVD drives in DOS, 3dfx Voodoo2 SLI 3D only video card, primary [PCI or AGP] video controller LFB + VGA/SVGA Write Combining [which must have VESA/VBE 2.0 or 3.0 built into the BIOS].

HTH

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