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Sound drivers in Windows 98SE DOS Mode?

ScanDisk

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Apr 1, 2017
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Niagara Falls, Canada Eh?
So,

I have just become the proud owner of a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 Series laptop, Installed 98SE on it and got all drivers installed on it (Windows) except for the Infrared port, which I can't find but is irrelevant because I never use that anyways.

As far as DOS Mode goes, I downloaded a DOS Mode launcher that someone else made, and it gives several configurations to start dos with, and I am able to start it with different types of memory, conventional, extended, expanded, with mouse, etc.

So I am able to start it with memory and mouse drivers, but still no sound. I would presume that in order to get sound in DOS mode, I'd need to write a batch file to execute in order to load the sound drivers.

The laptop was Yamaha DS-XG for sound hardware, and it is apparently sound blaster compatible which is god for use in DOS.

Problem is, I don't know what to write in the batch file in order to get the drivers to load. Does anyone have any basic pointers, or has experience in using DOS mode with sound?
 
If the BIOS doesn't specifically have an option to toggle SB emulation mode the chipset *should* be okay with you installing the Sound Blaster Pro or Sound Blaster 16 DOS drivers, using the default values and "it just works".
 
It depends on the soundcard. Older cards had all the support in hardware, but when windows came along, half it was moved into software as part of windows.

So a real SB Pro, SB 16, AWE32 or AWE64 (ISA cards) will work in DOS with the appropriate drivers loaded, but things like ES1868 (I think it is) will not.

The first thing is to start the computer and press F8 to enter dos mode. Set up your autoexec.bat to load the soundcard drivers and try a soundblaster-enabled game (like Doom). If you can get it to work, you should be able to figure it out from there.
 
Since that's a PCI-based sound chip it might need something to configure it before it works in DOS. Was there a SETUPDS program included with the drivers you have?

Once it has been enabled with an I/O port address, etc. then you should at least be able to run something that uses adlib FM sound.
 
Okay.

So I found Dos drivers for the chip that's in the Yamaha DS-XG "card", and it works.

All I have to do is run setupds.exe right after getting into DOS mode to load the drivers (at least I think that's what it does) because if I don't do that, then sound doesn't work, but if I just run it and exit it quickly, all sound works.
 
My Toshiba Satellite Pro 480CDT has the Yamaha OPL3-SA(x) drivers. Maybe your system sports one of that same family of chips?
See:
http://device.yamaha.com/en/lsi/download/win2kme.html

FWIW, your PIF for MS-DOS mode would need an Advanced specification of a CONFIG.DOS (say), with a line reading DEVICE=SOUND.SYS and probably an AUTOEXEC.DOS with a SET BLASTER= line which reflects the I/O address, IRQ and DMA channel used, e.g. BLASTER=A220 I7 D1.
 
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