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ISA 16 bit Creative cards on 8086

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carlos12

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Well, I'm continuing in my quest for equipping my these days bare 8086. I'm seeking for a sound card. The problem, just as happens with the video cards, is that 8 bit sound cards seem to be scarce. The very few I found on sale are Adlib clones, but I want a Sound Blaster with DMA and sample playing. I would also like real OLP2/3 playing capability.

So my question is, can a 16 bit Sound Blaster card, of a 16 bit Vibra, work on an 8086? By the way, I don't know if the Vibra has an OPL chip inside.

Thank you!
 
Sound cards will normally work fine in an 8-bit slot. You can obviously not use 16-bit/high DMA, IDE/CD-ROM interface, and IRQs 9 and higher. But that's it for the limitations.

Now the issue might be with drivers. Vibra was already in the era of Plug&Play. The CTCM may not run on an 8086 due to using 80286 instructions. But you need that (or Intel ICU) to have the card getting resources assigned.
 
Yes, by using SBPNPXT.EXE, which is a reverse-engineered hack of CTCM.EXE to work on XTs.

Your milage may vary depending on what card you are trying to get to work.
 
Thank you for your answers! There's one thing I don't understand: does DOS need drivers for the Vibra card? For example, are they needed in order to run a game like, let's say, Prince of Persia?

Thanks again.
 
Not a driver, but the card needs to be initialized. So you need to run CTCM or on an XT the hacked SBPNPXT, UNISOUND, etc.

That's because these cards don't have jumpers. Resources are given to the card by Plug&Play.
 
The drivers are needed to initialize the sound card. PnP cards are disabled on boot, and needs a PnP compatible BIOS or a software utility to get an I/O address, irq and dma.
This applies also to some non-PnP cards whith software selectable addresses. My specific Vibra16 assumes to be in a 16-bit slot on boot, and do not work properly in a 8-bit slot without UNISOUND. The card is there, some games even detects it, but then there is no sound, or the system hangs when the music starts.
 
To amplify the above, yes, strictly speaking you don't generally need a resident "driver" for a Soundblaster card, the drivers will be inside the game and at most just rely on that BLASTER environment variable being set to give the game hints about what I/O ports and IRQ/DMA the hardware is at, but the PNP cards themselves need some kind of enabler to be run at boot to set the card's registers up.

Note that not all cards that need enablers are according-to-Hoyle "PnP". (ISA PnP was only formalized in the middle of the 1990's, pretty much too late to actually do much good.) There were a *lot* of cards made before the standard was made official (IE, the stubs to support remembering the assigned configurations were baked into BIOSes) that came up with their own sketchy techniques to allow software configuration. My first sound card was a jumperless ProAudio Spectrum 16 that needed an enabler to set up both its native mode and the Soundblaster Pro emulation, and lots of network cards also have sneaky unofficial ways of being jumperless but not actually PnP.
 
I finally found an SB16, model CT2770. I've installed on the PS/2 model 30 8086. The problem is that while OPL works right, there's no sound when playing samples.

What could be the problem? Maybe this model doesn't reproduce samples on an 8 bit bus? Or maybe I need to set up a jumper? Or is it just defective?

Thanks!
 
I ran sbdet.exe from http://www.shdon.com/dos/sound and got the following values:

Card: Sound Blaster 16/ASP/AWE 32/AWE 64 (correct)
Base port: 220h (correct)
IRQ: 0 (wrong value?)
DMA Channel (8bit): 255 (this value is wrong)
DMA Channel (16bit): 255 (also wrong)

So IRQ and DMA look wrong. How could I configure them with some more standard values? (like IRQ 7 and DMA 1). Thanks!
 
It looks like that card needs to be initialized with software to set the irq and dma. (But the I/O addresses is jumpered.) Did you do that with one of the setup programs mentioned above?
 
Sorry, I didn't try the tools because I thought they were only for the Vibra card. After reading your message, I tried right now SBPNPXT.EXE and it hanged my system. But UNISOUND.EXE worked great! It sounds great and every parameter is now correct.

Thank you!
 
the appropriate way to configure this card using 1st party tools is to set your BLASTER variable and then run DIAGNOSE /S
 
Hello again. While the sound samples work right and sound on both speakers, I realized that OPL/FM music only sounds on one channel. Is this normal, or maybe I left something to configure?

Thanks!
 
davide78 said:
I have Vibra-16 in my 8086 machine that works fine with the UNISOUND driver: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=72553
There are many different Vibra16, mine is an early model with no PnP and a real OPL chip. UNISOUND should work also with later PnP models.
Click to expand...

Thanks, mister! This worked fine with some crappy late Vibra card. Both OPL2 and digital on T3 level work great. But for some reasons Joystick isn't working. I can live with that. Unisound tool is great! Love it.
 
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