Sound Card Address under Windows 98

[Don Ward]

I write free Morse Code tutors for Hams and Pilots.
These are DOS programs using PB3.5. If there is a sound card
present I use it with address &H388. This works fine for MSDOS,
Windows 3.x and 95 but not for Windows 98 even if I reboot in DOS.
Any advice welcome.



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[Andrew Collins]

Originally posted by Don Ward:
I write free Morse Code tutors for Hams and Pilots.
These are DOS programs using PB3.5. If there is a sound card
present I use it with address &H388. This works fine for MSDOS,
Windows 3.x and 95 but not for Windows 98 even if I reboot in DOS.
Any advice welcome.

Do you have the SET BLASTER variable set in AUTOEXEC.BAT?


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[Don Ward]

Originally posted by Andrew Collins:
Do you have the SET BLASTER variable set in AUTOEXEC.BAT?

Yes it is Andrew, in fact that's how I check the soundcard is
there using the ENVIRON$ function. This usually returns the
sound card address A220 but I find that A388 is more reliable
for different systems, except WIN98 that is.



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[Tom Hanlin]

Are you running all your tests on a single machine? If so, the problem may be that
Win98 is remapping the ports for your sound card. With current OSes and PnP hardware,
this is not unusual. Using a hard-coded port address is not necessarily prudent for
that reason.

If the problem is with a different machine, you might check as to whether the sound
card actually supports DOS-compatible sound handling at all. With some Windows-based
sound cards, DOS compatibility may be missing entirely, or may require additional
configuration or drivers.


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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff

[Mel Bishop]

Originally posted:

--------------------------------------
This works fine for MSDOS,
Windows 3.x and 95 but not for Windows 98 even if I reboot in DOS.
--------------------------------------

When rebooting to DOS I assume you are warm booting. I found that
a warm boot does not necessairly reset/reinitialize everything.
The video adaptor, for instance, and (apparently) your sound
card. The only way to reset the entire system is to go the cold
boot route.

This is the short version of my experience. If anyone wants the
long version, let me know and I'll lengthen it up a bit.




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[Don Ward]

Hi Tom,
I developed the programs originally on a 8086 DOS machine,
using the internal speaker then modified them to use the sound
card when Windows 3.x came along. They worked fine when I upgraded
to Win 95 but when I got a laptop with Win 98 they failed.
If I boot my laptop with DOS 3 they work! Same thing with my
computers at work. I looked up the addresses allocated by
Windows in the Device manager under Control Panel and the
addresses there don't work either. I have got round it for now
by detecting WIN 98 and using the internal speaker again.
Don


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[Gary Akins]

Don - if the sound routines work when you boot MS-DOS 3 (wow, is that an old version! ), then the chip would seem to be Soundblaster-compatible at the register level...

What's probably happening, then, is that Win98 and/or the laptop's device drivers are preventing your DOS program from directly writing to the sound-chip's registers, either by accident or by design. If so, I'm not sure there's any straightforward way around that problem... other than the obvious, which would be to check the laptop maker's site to see if there's any device-driver updates available for that model.

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[Don Ward]

Thanks Mel, I will try a cold boot but even if that works I don't
want users to have to do that.

Gary, it does the same thing on all the machines with WIN 98
so it is not just my laptop.

Don

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[Hans Ruegg]

You might want to have a look at the following website,
it has an assembler routine for detecting the port address
and other data of the soundcard: (On my system - under Win98 -
it worked all right and returned 220h for the Sound Blaster
Port, the same value as in the "Blaster" Environment setting.)
http://www.ilook.fsnet.co.uk/x86/x86sb.htm

Hans Ruegg.

[Don Ward]

Thanks Hans, I will try that.
Don

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