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My first IRQ conflict! Need some help.

Thanks for the detailed video. I am out of specific ideas; if I had the system, I would start to more-or-less randomly try various things until I get more information. Also, I would completely remove Windows from the equation. If sound does not work in DOS, then Windows won't make it work either.

Note 1: Your CMOS battery is low. Even though your BIOS appears to work correctly, the actual hardware configuration may not fully apply or get lost between reboots. I have an Acer 486 notebook with heavy issues unless the CMOS voltage is high enough and stable.

Note 2: You can set the audio resources in the BIOS. Can you verify whether anything is actually mapped when the BIOS starts booting (i.e. Shift+F5). Starting with AdLib (which has the easiest interface). In DEBUG, what do you get when running "I 388"? Can you get any AdLib audio to work?

Note 3: You started Windows before running Doom. Windows may mess with the PnP setup and may accidentally or intentionally unconfigure the card. Try your DOS test before ever starting Windows (again, Shift+F5 or an empty CONFIG.SYS with only HIMEM.SYS loaded).

Note 4: Does anything change on the DOS side of things if you set the BIOS option "PnP OS" to "Yes"?
 
Changed PnP in BIOS to yes and booted with shift f5 to DOS.
Running I388 from debug returns "FF"
still no DOOM sound.

This system seems to not have trouble with the low CMOS battery - in fact, it seems it's marginal enough that the system doesn't lose its settings between mild times without power. I've never noticed and weird corruption or changes in settings. In any case, replacing the CMOS batt is not possible right now. It's a small soldered coincell, I'd need to source a replacement with the correct tabs. Annoying.

No Ad-Lib sound either.

Next thing I think I'm going to try is installing NT 4.0 to get away from DOS entirely. I don't want to leave NT on their as I want to run DOS games, but at this point I just want to verify the card itself works at all...
 
IMG_5852.jpeg
Here’s a shot of the motherboard with it visible - I believe the sound chip is on a daughtercard that also has the power button, LCD, and audio jacks.
 
If DEBUG returns "FF" at 388h then there is nothing mapped on that port; it's the default AdLib status port. In PCem, it returns "06".

My gut feeling says that "PnP OS: Yes" should require running UNISOUND, and "PnP OS: No" should not require UNISOUND.
 
Yeah that doesn’t sound good… unisound found nothing with that toggle on or off. I think I’ll wipe next and install NT 4 just to see.
Even though we haven’t solved it yet, I really appreciate the help. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near this point without it!
 
I would recommend booting Linux instead, but that's just me being much more familiar with it. :) Or Windows 98 SE, which has far better PnP support and is just a lot newer and may work better.

Good luck.
 
Would 98 SE negate some of the issues I’ve been having here? If so, I’ll go and do that. I just figured one DOS based OS would have similar problems to another - neither have been completely smooth before when it comes to drivers. I’ve never even run NT 4 outside of a VM.
 
When Windows 95 came out, Plug and Play basically did not exist yet. Everything was new and very experimental. The driver architecture was still very similar to Windows 3.x (you can even use Windows 3.1 display drivers!).

When Windows 98 SE came out, Plug and Play hardware had been around for a few years; the driver architecture had been refined substantially (WDM drivers), and many built-in drivers had been updated. The Vibra 16 had been released in the meantime (Windows 95 predates it). And the usable USB support probably improved other hot-pluggable interfaces, such as PCMCIA. Improved PCI support surely won't hurt on your system, either.

edit: Windows 98 SE can be booted from CD-ROM as well.

Windows NT4 is a bit newer than Windows 95, but it does not support Plug and Play, Hot-Plugging or Power Management well. While its driver support had time to mature (coming from its predecessors), it's not new enough to support your hardware yet, either. And it is limited to DirectX 3, if I remember correctly, so forget about gaming. Windows 2000 is probably better, but I wouldn't recommend going there.
 
Svenska said:
Windows 2000 is probably better, but I wouldn't recommend going there
Click to expand...
Lol, someone tried. The original HDD which is failing had it installed. It had a password so I didn’t get to desktop, but man did it boot slow.
I’m doing a 98SE install now on said original failing HDD. I’ll bet the media is perfectly helpful but it either has stiction or a sticky rubber bumper inside, I had to take the cover off and free the head. That’s my 3rd one of these thick Toshiba drives that’s had an issue. 2 had stiction and the other just died out of the blue…
 
I don't see a Creative chip in the board photo at all, unless I'm missing something. Laptops of the period almost always had ESS sound chips on them. Using a Vibra would be the exception rather then the norm.
 
Same issue… :(
IMG_5867.jpeg
I said above, I believe the sound chip was on a large daughtercard. It’s definitely not ESS or Windows would detect it as such.
 
3lectr1c said:
Despite what WinBook says this has, the only 95 drivers they provide for sound are for the ESS 1688??? I tried the ESS 1688 PnP driver just in case and as expected it doesn't work, Windows detects it as a Creative card... not sure what was up with that.
Click to expand...

Creative Labs briefly sold cheap clone sound cards based on ESS and Ensoniq sound chips in the mid to late 90s, which is probably why Windows thinks its some sort of Sound Blaster.

ESS's business strategy was to be cheap and good enough. They emulated SB 1.x/2.x and later SB16 for DOS compatibility. It wasn't until the very end of the 90s and early 2000s did they start developing their own sound hardware standards. I'm sure they saw the demise of Adlib and decided to shadow CL rather than compete with them directly.

ESS sound cards were ridiculously cheap back in the day. When a SB Live! could set you back $100-150, you could pick up an ESS card for $15-20.
 
3lectr1c said:
Same issue… :(
View attachment 1268658
I said above, I believe the sound chip was on a large daughtercard. It’s definitely not ESS or Windows would detect it as such.
Click to expand...

Run dxdiag and get the PCI device string for the sound chip, it'll tell you what the card really is.

If the hardware ID starts with 0x1102, then it is Creative Labs. If it's 0x125D, then it's ESS.

You can use this website to look up PCI device IDs: https://pcilookup.com
 
300h is usually used by the network card. Does this have a network card?
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Run dxdiag and get the PCI device string for the sound chip, it'll tell you what the card really is.
If the hardware ID starts with 0x1102, then it is Creative Labs. If it's 0x125D, then it's ESS.
Click to expand...
I don't think ESS chips ever pretended to be Create Labs chips. If Windows detects a Create Labs, then it most likely is Creative Labs and not a clone. My Opti card is detected by Windows 9x as "Sound Blaster Pro" (not Creative Sound Blaster), and my ESS card is also correctly listed as ESS. Neither are PnP cards, though.

This chip is ISA or ISAPnP, so there is no PCI ID to verify. UNISOUND would be able to list the ISAPnP ID, but it does not detect the card at all. Windows detects it, but the DEBUG test showed that no AdLib resources are actually assigned. Curiouser and curiouser.

czunit said:
300h is usually used by the network card. Does this have a network card?
Click to expand...
The MIDI port is configurable at either 330h or 300h. Given that Windows assigned some pretty random resources in the first picture, that's probably what it is.

In any case, the Printer Port also lists a resource conflict (probably IRQ 7 again). Which shouldn't be possible, since the sound chip is configured in the BIOS to use IRQ 5. Something is very strange. Might be corrupted ESCD data in CMOS, might be something completely different.

I'm out of good ideas for now. I'd make sure the CMOS battery is good (and CMOS is definitely fully cleared) and then try to boot Linux and read the logs, maybe something sticks out.
 
I run Debian personally; the last release using a 2.4 kernel was Debian 3.1 'sarge' from 2005, but I couldn't find full ISO images in their archive. The ISO images for Debian 3.0 'woody' (2002) have been archived at https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/3.0_r6/i386/iso-cd/. Generally, "a few years younger than the system" is a good aim.

I could not find ISO images for Debian 4.0, but Debian 5.0 'lenny' (2009) has been archived at https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/5.0.10-live/i386/iso-cd/ (ISO images) and https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/5.0.10-live/i386/iso-cd/ (live CD images), but I doubt these versions can handle systems with only 32 MB RAM.

Slackware or RedHat distributions of similar vintage may be worth trying as well, but I am not familiar with them.
 
Isn’t Debian from that time notoriously difficult to set up? Would some ultra lightweight distro that’s more modern be a better option? I can work my way around modern Linux but I’m by no means good with it.
 
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