Windows 98SE install no sound in dos game - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 04:06:08 am
content: I have a fresh install of Windows 98ES on a 486 with a CT1740 Sound Blaster 16 that the sound works under windows but when I try and run dos games from windows I do not get any sound what so ever. I have checked that the Windows dos prompt sees the sound card settings with the (I believe) set command. Do I need to some how install the dos drivers in the windows dos prompt to get it to work? I can't use the reboot to dos mode from the shut down menu as there is no CD-ROM support and the game requires the CD to run.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 05:18:22 am
content: IIRC Windows uses drivers to access the audio card, DOS doesn't have an equivalent. Instead each individual app fires interrupts and writes directly to memory addresses where it thinks the card should be (ie the programs themselves contain the drivers).Perhaps Windows isn't allowing direct IO access to the necessary areas or your Soundblaster isn't on the right IRQ/range that your DOS game expects?(There will be other people here with better Win9x/Dos experience, if not then it's worth trying Vogons)

author: tpowell1830
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 06:34:50 am
content: This might help. Drivers and jumper settings.https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ct1740.htmlHope it helps...EDIT: BTW... this was the first item listed in a random web search, download at risk!

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 06:36:50 am
content: You absolutely need separate drivers for DOS. Back in that era sound cards used to come with two sets of drivers and software, one for DOS and one for Windows.

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 10:11:28 am
content: Windows 98 and ME include Soundblaster emulation for DOS applications running under Windows, provided you have a properly configured WDM audio driver. See 'SBEmul System Driver' athttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/kernel-mode-wdm-audio-components?redirectedfrom=MSDNIf the SBEmul driver is available it will inject the environment variable BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T4 for all DOS applications. Open a command prompt and check if its present, and not inherited from autoexec.bat.However running DOS games under Windows 9x usually doesn't go well due to DOS extender conflicts and lags caused by the OS continuing to multitask in the background, so IMHO your time would be better spent getting MSDOS Mode CD support working..

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 11:32:52 am
content: Quote from: poot36 on April 12, 2020, 04:06:08 amhmm, this is odd and should work... being a pre-pnp isa card it should work fine under dos and windows on it's fixed IO/IRQ/DMA settingsJust a note, there are no real 'DOS' drivers for old soundblaster, as most software just uses it directly with the aid of the SET BLASTER settings to tell it where the card isI would first take a look at what the settings are within windows and check they match the SET BLASTER settings.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 05:02:06 pm
content: @ tpowell1830 When I try and run the program I get an error stating that the system is running in windows mode and it will not install. I don't know why but when I start the ms-dos prompt from the programs menu it now takes me to a full screen dos prompt and not a window like it used to. When I type the set command into the prompt I do get BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6. Is this a issue as I do not see a MIDI address and don't know where I would go to change that line even if I wanted to? I know that this game can be run under Win 98 SE as I remember it from my youth.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 05:32:02 pm
content: Well I just tried another dos game (Commander Keen 4) and I have sound but the colors are very red looking and some of the motion is not very smooth. I think that I may have to set up a older OS or something to get this to fully work. Unless is there a Windows update that I need to get this working correctly? I have never seen a dos game have so messed up colors before, at first I thought my monitor had issues!

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 07:23:33 pm
content: A lot of those really old games talk to the hardware directly so it's possible that your video card isn't 100% backward compatible with what it's expecting. Does that game offer you a choice of video modes?

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 08:31:03 pm
content: I can't remember playing any DOS games from within Windows 95 or 98. Seems like it was always necessary to restart in DOS mode. That was so long ago though, hard to remember.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 08:41:31 pm
content: The video card is a ATI Graphics Pro Turbo PCI (atim64 - GX). I have never had any video issues with this game before. I even tried the SVGA option in the settings and it made no difference. I tried launching the dos game that had no sound from a win 95 boot floppy that had the cd drive drivers installed and the game starts to run but when I press a key to get past the start splash screen I get a rectangle of corrupted pixels in the same location on the screen and usually the whole system crashes. The game is The Berenstain Bears Learning at Home, Volume 1 if that makes any difference. It runs ok but with out sound from Windows. The colors are correct as far as I can tell. I don't have a audio cable going from the cd drive to the sound card, would that make a difference? I do know this game has red book audio tracks on the cd but I would still think that some sound effects would be heard. I just went poking around the install files of the game and found references to video and audio setup that I do not get presented with when installing or starting the game. Also you can somehow install the game to 4 floppy disks. When I did not have a sound card in the system I remember getting presented with the sound card option menu when I tried to start the game. I have no clue as to what is going on here.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2020, 11:39:17 pm
content: Well I just connected the audio out cable from the CD drive into the sound card and now I get some sounds but also a lot of interference from all the electronics in the CD drive. I can hear the motor spinning up and down as well as other electronic sounds. Is there any way to reduce these? I still don't have the other sounds that should play as far as I can tell. I have also noticed that the CD drive spins up and down a lot and causes the game to lag a lot. I assume that this is normal for Windows?

author: tpowell1830
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2020, 05:34:14 am
content: As I can't recall, from over 20 years ago, running from a Windows command prompt has different settings. Also, the Autoexec.bat settings and config.sys settings were critical. As best as I can recall, I edited autoexec.bat and config.sys settings. I do not recall what settings to do this, although, at the time, it was hope and poke. Sometimes with Soundblaster cards, the next higher revision would work. Be warned that if you put some wrong settings, sometimes it could hang the system. Suggest making a backup floppy and place SYS and a known working copy of these 2 files on it in case an edit froze your system. I built many PCs for people and each setup had its' own idiosynchrosis there were no easy setups or fixes. There are other things to consider as well, such as BIOS, hardware (such as modems) and DOS 'PATH' settings that could get you. None of this do I recall well, but even if I could teach you this dark art, it would take a lot of good karma to succeed.However, another Google search finds this useful page:https://madsenworld.dk/con_auto/index-uk.htmGood luck! Also, same disclaimer as in my previous post regarding unknown files on unknown websites.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2020, 09:53:56 am
content: Win98 you have to restart in MSDOS mode, and it will do that, giving you a full MSDOS environment and no windows running. Otherwise it just opens a copy of command . com either in windowed or fullscreen, but Win98 is still running in the background.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2020, 03:51:06 am
content: Well I got annoyed and decided to set up another CF card with just DOS 6.22 on it and the CD-ROM driver. I installed the game and when I go to launch it, it reboots the system after the intro finishes or I press the enter key to start it. Sometimes it will crash with a graphics corruption and then if I wait the time it would take for the intro to finish playing the system reboots. The graphic corruption is always in the same place every time. Picture attached, sorry about it being upside down. Do I need to change something with the memory manager or the files setting in the config.sys file to fix this?

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2020, 10:37:27 pm
content: Well I tried the game in Windows 95 B and it worked with all sound effects but the non CD audio is very quiet and the CD audio is very loud. Got any idea why this is? I also installed Windows 3.11 for workgroups on the DOS 6.22 install to see if that would let the game get passed the intro screen and it made no change. Have you seen a DOS game that requires a mouse pointer to work? That is the only thing that I can think of right now. I did test the memory requierments under Win 95 and it just requires 465Kb of memory to get past the intro screen and to a playable screen but if you try and go somewhere else in the game it does crash. Could the CD-ROM driver be causing it to not work correctly under pure DOS?

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2020, 06:54:59 am
content: Sure, there were DOS games that required a mouse. Most sound cards had a mixer program included in the software bundle that you could use to set volume levels, sometimes it was a TSR that ran in the background, you'd set it up in the autoexec.bat file. Crashes were also not uncommon, I remember spending a lot of time messing around with IRQ and address ranges, driver conflicts, fiddling with memory management to free up that last 10k of the 640k base memory needed to get some game to run. That's one part of the old days I really don't miss.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2020, 03:02:42 am
content: Well I loaded a mouse driver and that did not solve the issue. I know about the volume mixer but I don't think the midi volume should have to be cranked all the way up and the CD audio almost all the way down to work. I am starting to think that there is some motherboard issue but I am unsure about that. I have run memtest x86+ version 4.0 and it passed so I think the RAM is ok. Is there any other software I could run to further test the motherboard? I did boot the CF card with the DOS 6.22 on a CF to USB reader on a AMD Athlon X2 system with 2Gb of RAM and a Ge-Force PCI-E GPU and it did boot but error-ed with issues about the EMS memory not being available (I think because of the 2Gb of RAM in the system) and it could not set up the sound card (system only has PCI and PCI-E slots) but the game did launch correctly so that is something.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2020, 09:19:33 pm
content: It was not uncommon to have volume issues like that, there was no particular standard on how loud something was. Back in the "old days" there was a separate analog audio cable from the CD-ROM drive to the sound card.2GB is a HUGE amount of memory for a Win9x system. Back in the day if you had 64MB you had a beast, most Win98 systems were in the 24-32MB range. I remember I knew one guy who had 128MB because he had lots of money and could afford it, I remember what an insane amount of memory that was at the time. No matter how much you have, DOS can only see the first 640k and requires extensions to utilize extended and expanded memory and special memory managers to move TSRs into upper memory, the space between 640k and 1MB.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2020, 01:42:24 am
content: The 2Gb system was for testing the DOS install. I booted it off a USB card reader. The memory managers saw I think 64Mb of ram if I remember correctly. For some reason when I went to try it again, the system would not even POST and just had the fans running full speed. Very weird, I wonder if dos made a call to some bios function and partially corrupted it.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2020, 11:19:23 pm
content: Have tried another 486 motherboard and had the same crash. It does work correctly in dos box though with correct volume for both the CD audio and the game sounds. I did figure out that if I run the game directly off the CD that it gets past the point where it was having issues but I have no sound (this is on the original 486 system). If I try to run it from the installed folder it still crashes. I even tried a mechanical hard drive and had no change in the crashing. I was able to confirm that the game does not need a mouse driver to function. Got any ideas as to why it will run directly off the CD (with a lot of CD seeking sounds) but not off the install on the hard drive?

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2020, 10:57:27 pm
content: Well I tried swapping out the CD-ROM drive for an older one and the game now launches correctly. Now I just have to figure out why I have CD audio but not the background audio. I ran the dos sound blaster setup program and that got me the CD audio but not anything else. Also most of the animations are very choppy and the CD drive seems to be seeking around during them (most likely to play the CD audio). Got any idea how to fix these issues?

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 14, 2020, 07:47:07 pm
content: The background audio on a lot of games was MIDI, does the software with your sound card have a test utility that demonstrates all the different features? Some games also have a sound test in the setup.What speed is the CD-ROM drive you're using? The original 1x drives were very slow, then there were double, triple, quad speed and later much faster ones. I remember spending a lot of time trying to get some games to work properly, some stuff just wouldn't work well with other stuff.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 15, 2020, 03:41:08 am
content: The drive I had trouble with was a LG GCE-8525B CD-R/RW drive (52x32x52x) from January 2004 firmware version 1.03. The one I replaced it with is a CR-585-B drive unknown manufacture (x24) from March 1998.

author: clearscreen
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 26, 2020, 04:21:18 pm
content: Greetings,if i can help i would be glad to.Machines i've :my "old" 486 DX2 66 by digital equipment (olivetti rebranded) with win 3.11. The sound card is a sound blaster 16 (i've disabled windows sound system), videocard embedded is ati mach32, i've a also a network card (de220ct) and an adaptec AHA scsi card for cdrom (yamaha 16x10x40 rewritable). Disk inside is ESDI - 300MB, 5"1/4 1.2Mb floppy and 3"1/2 2.88Mb (EHD !). I play games under dos.I've also my old game pc i rebuild (from 1998). It's an AT BOX with a Slot 1 (i've a celeron 300A).Ram have been expanded from 384Mo to 768Mo (insane i now :-)Card is ALI 726 (i think i've usb support but i didn't set)I've VIP disk tray with a sdcard adapter inside 4GBi've 3COM network cardMy vodoo 4500 elpin works pretty goodAnd i've completed with an AWE64 CT4500 (4500 too lol)I've 98SE (swap disabled because of the ram i've) with a lots of trouble in sound card conf and shutdown trouble (i've resolved this saturday !!! , short digest : bios disable APM, windows disable energy management, irq for VGA : no way. Managed to restart from dos with edition of "Exit to dos.pif", parameters, advanced, tick new dos conf with default config.sys and autoexec.bat.OK but no clean shutdown (hangs) : Test with sysedit and msconfig with selective startup, disable all, then add wini.ini, system.ini, config.sys, autoexec.bat => error was EMM386 RAM AUTO (and not related to shutdown supplement to disable fastshutdown ... tricky ...)Finally i've disabled EMM386line on the windows conf (but not in resart to dos conf), i've the AWE driver and i've pif shortcut to play dosgames and it worked well (quakegl, dukenukem3D, doom, wolfenstein 3D, Raptor call of the shadow, blood, lands of lore, ...)So my question is : may i know the configuration you have ? There is "486" and "486". I ask that because of 98SE usage.CLS.

author: poot36
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 27, 2020, 02:30:22 am
content: Well I have managed to get sound under Win98se. I found if you press esc when the game is running it brings up a settings menu and that allowed me to force the game to use a Sound Blaster 2.0 compatible card. I now have full sound but the levels are still a bit weird. Also some of the animations do not play out smoothly and sometimes the sound clips that should play with them do not play or only play a portion of the clip (I think this is due to the CD-ROM spinning up and down to read the data and then the Red Book audio track) <- does anyone know how to fix this? Would changing the read buffer option in the Win 9 settings from quad speed or faster to a 1x drive fix this?@clearscreen This is a true 486 DX4 100Mhz chip 32Mb of FPM ram Sound Blaster 16 (CT1740) MS4144 Rev 1.4 motherboard with 256Kb of L2 cache SIS 86C201 (MS4407 Ver 1) (2Mb of ram (I think)) video card SanDisk Ultra II 1.0Gb CF card in a CF to IDE converter 3 1/2" 1.44Mb FDD serial mouse.