I have been tring to make a system that would run DOS but still had an eye to future upgrade. I have been able to setup a multi boot machine with winxp and dos. How ever I have not had any luck getting DOS setup for sound. I have a PCI Soundblaster 16 installed. After trying unsucesfully to set up DOS drivers from several different locations I used an IRQ sniffing program to find the IRQ of the sound card. It would seem that my Aopen I945pa puts my sound card on IRQ 9 wich is a no go for dos programs as they don't have an option higher that irq 7. Looking in the bios I can find no way of manualy setting IRQ's on this board. Hope someone can help, as this seems to be my last option to get DOS up and running on this machine.Check out your SB drivers. You should have drivers for "legasy" support, which ENABLE the card under DOS.I just have an old system that runs DOS and it works great without any tweaking, etc. Trying to make the latest and greatest backward compatible can be a real headache and is less likely to work with each passing day. I would suggest investing $20-30 in an older system. Just boot to DOS and reinstall the sound card under DOS.When booted to dos the drivers won't load because they cannot detect the sound card on the irq or io port.Do you have CDrom drivers loading under DOS? Insert the SB disk and run the setup.None of the program files on the disk can be run in DOS mode. Because I am running a processor faster than 2.1 I am UNABLE to install WIN 95 or 98.So far all sb16 drivers I have downloaded that will run in DOS mode cannot find my sound card on any of the available IO ports listed by the install software. The card works PERFECTLY under winXP how ever so I know it is not a hardware problum.If you have the motherboard documentation see if it has a PCI/ISA shared slot. If so, move the card to that slot.Thanks for the feed back. I think I've about given up with it. I think I'll just make getting dos up and running on an older 800 system my NEXT project. haveing issues with some games now as well wich I suspect is related to memory and processor speeds. Be well, and thanks again.What is the exact model number of the SB card? Is it a card or on board sound? Look in windows device manager and see what it is listed as. Sometimes DOS games only need the SET Blaster= line in the autoexec.bat
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 P330 H6 E620
The P330 is only needed if the card has midi capabilties and the E620 is only needed if it is a AWE32. The H6 is needed by SB16 cards. All the other parameters are general defaults that most sound cards use.