pouët.net

For some reason, Unreal can't find my Sound Blaster Pro 2. I'm running it on a 386SX-25, and the soundcard is at address 220h, interrupt 10, dma channel 1. Crystal Dream I and II both work fine without even needing "set blaster=blah blah blah." Unreal, however, with and without the set blaster command, will not detect the SB Pro. I had set blaster=a220 i10 d1 h5 t6, which is where the soundcard is (confirmed by Creative's detector program), but is Unreal looking for different paramater or syntax?

IIRC there are tons of programs that only work with an SB on IRQ 5 or 7. Testing in DOSBox, Unreal might be one of those softwares, since it instantly quits with the SB set to IRQ 10.

Yeah. a=220/int=5/dma=1 was pretty much the go-to setup.

Is there any way to re-configure the Blaster so it is at IRQ 5?

change some jumpers on the card

Is there a reason why they did not support different IRQs other than the requirement of some kind of setup? If it's just because they hardcoded the value, it should be easy to change that in the binary (esp. with dosbox debug).

pretty sure i10 is the problem. try 5 or 7

Alright. Turned off the computer, removed the cover, adjusted IRQ to 5, put it back together, fired up Unreal, and....Selected soundcard not found. Turned off PC again, removed cover, changed to IRQ7, put back together, turned it on, fired up Unreal, and...it works! Thank you everyone!

That's how later cards were configured from the factory.
Earlier cards were configured for int=7 instead.
I've encounted some software that is hardcoded to 7, but nothing that is hardcoded to 5, so I think 7 is the most compatible setting.

Unreal v1.1, the final version, seems to work with all single digit IRQs. In DOSBox Daum that is. Oh well.

yeah but the dude was running real hardware, no dosboxing

Hence "oh well". Still odd.

any IRQ > 7 is a chained IRQ which was added later to the PC design by adding a second PIC and routing its output into IRQ 2 of the first PIC (this is why IRQ 2 and 9 sometimes get mixed up). A lot of demos/intros and other sw won´t operate properly with such an IRQ (either completely unsupported, or "supported" but buggy/broken)
Most compatible SB IRQs are 5 and 7, less widespread 3 and 4, everything else is to be avoided.
I/O should be 220, or 240 as fallback, 8 bit DMA apart from 1 is hardly recommended.

Also, this line is wrong... There is no H5 on an SBPro and T6=SB16. It probably won't cause problems for anything that runs on a 386SX, but the technically correct line would be 'SET BLASTER=A220 Ix D1 T5'.

Actually, T4 is SBPro. Don't recall what T5 was, if it existed.

Get a GUS ;)

so, 2e10'th question about disappearing sound on SB16+ after vectorworld part (in both versions) ;)

Damnit, I even looked that up because I wasn't sure if it was T4 or T5 myself. Guess the website I found was wrong.

Old age. I can't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I can't ever forget how to program the PIC, what the SB env strings are, and other useless minutiae.

Interesting, I had a quick look online and found this thread.

T5 would be an SB Pro 2.0 then... Which is what I have. And I know for a fact it is installed with T4.

The DOSBox code looks correct.. I guess T5 is just the big unknown SB.

Just one post below...

Lol. Well, when I wrote that page 18 years ago I was looking directly at one of my SB manuals, so I'll try to dig it out and see which manual it was. Likely my SB16ASP manual.