7th guest on 486 with sound blaster 16, configure IRQ

[Divarin]

Hi all. This weekend I picked up cheap at a flea market a copy of 7th guest. I have never played this game but it was cheap, complete in box, and came with a rather thick book (strategy guide) so I figured why not.
I want to try playing it on my 486 dx/33.
This computer has a sound blaster 16 (ISA) and is currently configured to IRQ 7.
I do have the BLASTER environment set but more often than not games seem to ignore this setting and will fail to run correctly unless I go into that game's setup utility and explicitly tell it to use IRQ 7 instead of 5.
I don't remember why I set it to 7, maybe I was having conflicts at one point while setting this computer up.
So this game, at first seemed to run but had no sound. I went back into the installer and set it to Sound Blaster (or compatible), there's about 3 different sound blaster options (I don't recall exactly what each one is labeled as)
With the other two "sound blaster" options selected what happens when I try to launch the game is it just reboots the computer.
The install program has no option to set IRQ so I suspect it's just defaulting to 5 and that's where the trouble comes from.
Does anyone have any experience setting up this game? Can you recommend a way I can force it to use IRQ 7? Should I just try to get my sound card going on IRQ 5 and go and reconfigure all of my other games?

 

[VERAULT]

I remember playing this on my 486 DX4 120. I dont think it will run on a 33mhz.. not too well anyway. Great visuals for the time, I was amazed. Looking back its just a frustrating puzzle game that isnt very fair.

The last time I set it up was on a Gateway pentium 2 or 3 system a couple years back. I added a sound card to replace the onboard. I am sorry I dont remember the details but it was a bit of a pain to setup.

 

[Divarin]

Could be. It seems the "minimum requirements" is a 386 (yeah right)
The installer did do some performance tests and it checks out. It also seemed to be running at a decent enough speed when I had it running the first time (no sound working but otherwise playing)

I didn't see any obvious thing I could change in any config files to set it to IRQ7, and I'm not even 100% sure that's the problem, just what I'm suspecting.

IIRC I pretty much went throughout the 90's with a sound blaster set to IRQ 7 and although using 7 instead of 5 caused me a bit of a headache I always seemed to be able to use it, but maybe once windows 95 came out the irq issues weren't so bad, at least in windows games that were using direct sound.

 

[NeXT]

I wouldn't use anything other than the default IRQ, DMA and I/O range for a Sound Blaster. As you've noticed there's a lot of games from this era that ignore soft settings and just fire data directly at the default location for a Sound Blaster, if you tell it a Sound Blaster is installed.
A 486 will run 7th Guest fine. Myst is happy with a 33mhz 386.

 

[Divarin]

I got it working. First I changed my sound card's IRQ to 5. Then in this game's setup irq selection was an option. But it must have conflicted with the cd rom because as soon as it tried to access it the system rebooted.
So I changes my IRQ back to 7. Now in the setup IRQ selection was not an option. But I went into the ini file and changes it from "auto" to 7.
I also needed to free up a bit more conventional ram but eventually got it running.

 

[LiqMatrix]

When I was working at a small PC tech shop in the early 90s I can't tell you how many machines were brought in to get that dang game running. This game sold more multimedia upgrade kits than you can shake a CD-ROM at.