DOS ain't dead - Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

RayeR

CZ,
06.12.2007, 12:50

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo (Announce)

As I mentioned before, I ordered this new mobo - one of few with ISA slot and C2D support. I hoped that ISA slot will guarantee smooth run of my old good ISA soundcard under DOS which I used on previous mobo Abit BX133 Raid and olders. It's ESS1868 SB compatible with 1MB MIDI ROM bank and I could run most of games and demos on it before.

Currently I have problem with this ISA soundcard under DOS. When I run the ESS configuration utility it successfully recognize it and set proper IO, DMA, IRQ but I cannot hear sound. All programs hangs when playback should start (I can hear only a silent pop/click sound when DSP was initialized) or don't recognize soudcard. It seems that I/O ports decoding works fine because I can set mixer options and other things in DSP. But maybe problem in IRQ/DMA.
What I tried:
a) use various DMA 0,1,3 and IRQs 5,7
b) set IRQ 5/7 to be reserved for legacy card in SETUP/Plug&Play options (to prevent other PCI devices use this IRQ)
c) disable APIC in SETUP
d) disable ACPI in SETUP
e) under Windows98 works only sound from windows apps not from DOS apps
f) I tried original Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA but with same result (driver initialization OK but hangs/no sound)

Any idea what to try else? How can I separately test function of IRQ and DMA? I never programmed any DOS soud application (I only made alternative mixer for ESS card but it use only IO ports).

Maybe this simply mean that P4 and later systems are not compatible for DOS sound anymore and emulators are the only way. But I wanted to try all possibilities before I give up :-| Anyway thib board have some other + like lots of COM ports...

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Japheth

Germany (South),
06.12.2007, 14:08

@ RayeR

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

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> Currently I have problem with this ISA soundcard under DOS. When I run the
> ESS configuration utility it successfully recognize it and set proper IO,
> DMA, IRQ but I cannot hear sound. All programs hangs when playback should
> start (I can hear only a silent pop/click sound when DSP was initialized)
> or don't recognize soudcard. It seems that I/O ports decoding works fine
> because I can set mixer options and other things in DSP. But maybe problem
> in IRQ/DMA.
> What I tried:
> a) use various DMA 0,1,3 and IRQs 5,7
> b) set IRQ 5/7 to be reserved for legacy card in SETUP/Plug&Play options
> (to prevent other PCI devices use this IRQ)
> c) disable APIC in SETUP
> d) disable ACPI in SETUP
> e) under Windows98 works only sound from windows apps not from DOS apps
> f) I tried original Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA but with same result
> (driver initialization OK but hangs/no sound)
>
> Any idea what to try else?

Is the card fully SB16 compatible, or is it just SB Pro?

Does Win98 device manager confirm that the expected IRQ and DMA resources are assigned to your sound card?

> Maybe this simply mean that P4 and later systems are not compatible for DOS
> sound anymore

If your legacy card works in Win98 it must also work in DOS. Is there no low-level test program supplied with the card?

---
MS-DOS forever!

RayeR

CZ,
06.12.2007, 14:55

@ Japheth

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

Post reply

> Is the card fully SB16 compatible, or is it just SB Pro?

I think SBPro 2.0

> Does Win98 device manager confirm that the expected IRQ and DMA resources
> are assigned to your sound card?

Yes, that values I also tried.

> If your legacy card works in Win98 it must also work in DOS. Is there no
> low-level test program supplied with the card?

There's no test program on driver diskette. Just esscfg which do some initialization but it's not TSR (like SB Live emu). I used various games for testning and mpxplay.

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

tikbalang

06.12.2007, 14:26

@ RayeR

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

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> and olders. It's ESS1868 SB compatible with 1MB MIDI ROM bank and I could
> run most of games and demos on it before.
>
> Currently I have problem with this ISA soundcard under DOS. When I run

- on your mobo bios: set PNP OS = NO

- on your ISA CARD: disable the IDE ctrlr if it has one, or disable one of the ide ctrlr of the mobo.

- since you got it working in windows, look into its resources and use those settings for esscfg.exe.

- since newer vidcards use irq 5, force it to use irq 9 or 11. 10 is usually used by pci soundcards that emulate sb at irq 5. remove all cards except the vidcard and the sndcard until you get the sound working.

here are some 3rd party SB tools for dos:
http://www.badongo.com/file/5455132

RayeR

CZ,
06.12.2007, 15:01

@ tikbalang

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

Post reply

> - on your mobo bios: set PNP OS = NO

Yes I needed to set this to be able to reserve IRQ for legacy card.

> - on your ISA CARD: disable the IDE ctrlr if it has one, or disable one of
> the ide ctrlr of the mobo.

Yes it have IDE controller. Currently I don't remember how it can be enabled/disabled. Card is jumperless. There must be some sw for it.
But before I hadn't problem to use this IDE with onboard IDE - it assigned different ports.

> - since you got it working in windows, look into its resources and use
> those settings for esscfg.exe.

I also tried this settings.

> - since newer vidcards use irq 5, force it to use irq 9 or 11. 10 is
> usually used by pci soundcards that emulate sb at irq 5. remove all cards
> except the vidcard and the sndcard until you get the sound working.

My VGA use IRQ 9 or 11 like most of other onboard PCI devices. BIOS displays PCI listing during boot-up and I can see all IRQ assigned. There was ANY device ocupying IRQ5/7 when I set it to be reserved for legacy device.

> here are some 3rd party SB tools for dos:
> http://www.badongo.com/file/5455132

Thx, I'll try later in evening...

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

tikbalang

09.12.2007, 07:05

@ RayeR

Failed to setup ISA soundcard on new Commell P4LA mobo

Post reply

> > here are some 3rd party SB tools for dos:
> > http://www.badongo.com/file/5455132
>
> Thx, I'll try later in evening...

is it working yet? i have several esstech cards and they are easy to setup for dos. i'm curious what the problem is with this hardware setup.

here are some more ideas to try:

- turn off USB features in the bios; eats up umb/hma, affects hardware?
- uide may conflict with SB, emulation or not
- play sound without using SB emulation; setup MPXPLAY to use "SoundcardName=ESS" in the .ini file.

drivers are here:
http://www.esstech.com/techsupp/drivers.shtm