SoundCard

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A bit of computer hardware that makes beeping noises, and is thus clearly the most important component.

You can't make a MachineThatGoesPing without one.

: Well, actually, most old PC speakers could make a fair Ping noise, although it would be a Ping sounding like a cousin of a Beep.

I see I have converted you to the cause of cross-linking. ;) --M-A

: Oh, I've been converted for a while. I persist in using "/Rin" rather than "Rin" on PhoenixFeathersComments, and so on. It's just a gradual process as one spots them... :) --AC

...

Ok, that's all the bad jokes about TCP-IP networking and small ducks out of the way...

: And tucked away on page Ping, in fact.

Anyway. One thing that strikes me as amusing is how few different DOS sound installers there were. There seems to have been this standard front end menu system - which in later iterations does an autodetect.

But, interestingly - it's backwards compatible. You can use the installer from one game to set the sound config for another. Which is incredibly useful when the other game in question fails autodetect under windows.

Still, not all games use it. And, annoyingly, Tyrian (even the windows based Tyrian-2000) fails to pick up my soundcard.

Anyone got any tips? I'm stuck on an SB-Live, since the speaker plug on my sb16 dropped off.

IIRC, there's a thingy to initialise the driver stack, another thingy to initialise the card and a separate thingy for the mixer settings. Don't remember what they're called, but they're on the installation CD. Then you need to read off the IRQ, DMA base and so on that the card initialisation spits out, and set your BLASTER environment variable appropriately. I assume your autoexec.bat or whatever Windows calls it these days (dosstart.ini or some such) does all this? - MoonShadow

: Oh, Ive got it all set up (though not got a blaster environment variable) - audio works fine in WingCommander for example. But Tyrians setup util tries to do something clever after I give it the dma, irq etc. and either locks up my machine or decides there's no card there. Let's see - I've got sbe16 running at startup, I gues sthat's the driver stack. I don't have any mixer, I don't think. System properties tells me I5 D1 A220 (with 330 for midi) but I can't remember the rest of the format for a BLASTER variable. It has a version number in there somewhere, I think? --Vitenka

I5 D1 A220 should be all you need :/ Is Tyrian's setup asking for one or two IRQ values? Oh, and Windows tends to mess about with the card IRQs anyway, so you probably don't want to feed those values to the setup util unless you're in dos mode. It doesn't sound like it's something simple/obvious, though :( - MoonShadow

: Um - one. Why would it ask for two? And windows munging things would be bad - it's windows I am asking what the settings are though. I'm sure old BLASTER settings had an H=3 or something in them - would I need one of those?

: My misremember. It's two DMA channels it can ask for, not two IRQs. D and H are the two DMA channels, I is the IRQ, A is the I/O base address and there's a card version thingy called T or something, too. MoonShadow has had a lot of pain from trusting the values that Windows gave him for these - the best bet is to boot into DOS mode (not shut down Windows into DOS mode, the card has been munged up by that time; press shift-F8 during boot and go into dos from there), run the Creative Labs dos utilities and examine the information they spit out to determine the values.

CategoryComputing