Hello, I know SB live was discused here many times but not with (probably) NMI problem... 1st to say, I successfully used SB live emulation driver under DOS 6.22 on my previous mobo Abit BX133 Raid. But I rather used old ISA soundcad which played everywhere. Then I upgraded to new mobo Asus P5LD2 & Core 2 CPU. This mobo doesn't have ISA of course so I relied on SB live emulation which was not so bad (eg. all build engine based games worked). But unfortunatelly it doesn\t work now :( I setup SB emulation under windows 98 to configure it on usual values IRQ5, DMA1,5, IO 220... and rebooted to pure DOS. SB emu driver loaded OK and displayes message that initialized OK. Then I tried to play some dos games but found, that only music plays (thru MPU401 and adlib amulation) but no SFX sound anywhere! The only one DOS program which can play via Live is MPXplay - great hungarian player with embedded SB live support (i work without SB emu drivers). Then on other forums i found a message about missing NMI support on new mobos. There was explained that SB live uses PCI SERR rignal which should be connected to NMI to communicate with SB emu driver which traps the NMI. If there's no NMI, nothing can be trapped, results no sound. This really suxx! Damn mobo manufacturers when do you completly remove legacy support? But I belive that NMI was not leaved unconnected on the CPU and rather connected to some GPIO pin of chipset. Maybe there is a possibility to enable SERR - NMI routing. Or I can connect it via wire? But tracking routes on 8 or more layer PCB wouldn't be fun... Iny ideas? First I need to make sure that my problem is caused by no NMI. What's your experiences with Lice on new mobos?

Hi RayeR, I don't know for the others but i see nothing more enlightning than to comment this is a VMWare case, or maybe not! Go for it if you have enough juice. But then i'm afraid i wonder about the SFX sounds. ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Salutations, Michel Samson a/s Bicéphale

I already have installed VMWare, but this is not solution for all cases. Any emulation cannot be such good as Real Dos Machine. Eg. Blood game run under VMW but with corrupted graphics, seems like something wrong with palette. DosBox have good display but even on core 2 it is still slow. BTW is there any version which can utilize 2 cores? I see only one CPU loaded. I forgot to say, that I also tried some trashed CMI PCI soundcard but the result was even worse. CMI DOS driver + mixer found and initialized soundcard properly but when I try to start any program it freezed. I also try moving the card into all my 3 PCI slots, same result. Hope one day will be DOS emulation on such good level as is now Commodore, ZX spectrum etc...

Hi RayeR, I crossed my fingers knowing there may be a trade- off on processing power. I'd give it a decade (as MicroSoft had to evolve from Windows v3.1x to XP)! But even if we have optronic computers someday and all the synthetic CPUs DOS users can dream of, i'm afraid most of us may wery well move to some other bobbies by then... We were lucky that the captive DOS users from the industry helped to stimulate it so far, it seems you've reached the limitations of VMWare (no doubt there are!) and you'd need a once called server board with ISA. I searched for this 1st: DOS ISA "Legacy Audio" Server Board; then i tried something similar on Google Images... There happened to be quite a few links on the SuperMicro P4SCA MotherBoard for which i could find a product review. I guess you'll have to dig around to know how DOS-friendly it was when it hit the market - 3 years ago... Browsing thru Google Images brings a lot of obsolete HardWare so i tried another search when it started to feel depressing and bingo: try ISA SATA Board! As trivial as it may look i found two decent products where those two were combined: Attro's MB865 model (ISA=2, SATA=2) or MB880 (ISA= 2, SATA=4) Industrial MotherBoards. I believe you won't find many like these to grind your teeth on. I know how it feels when a guy tells you to go buy this or that all too well. I'm sorry. Good luck! ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Salutations, Michel Samson a/s Bicéphale

Of course, I have monitoring ISA motherboards for long years see http://www.volny.cz/rayer/hardware/... but: 1) it's price is overboosted (the PCI-ISA bridge chip cost few $ but board with ISA is 2x-3x expansive than normal boar) 2) it's hard to buy this in our country 3) any of this board don't support Conroe I think P4 architecture is bad so I completely skip it. This is why I completly leaved ISA mobo idea. With money which I would spent on whole ISA mobo I got nonISA mobo with good CPU... But I don't want to talk about emulation, I'd like to see opinion on SERR/NMI thing from somebody with good HW knowledges. I briefly go throught ICH7 datasheet and find that this chip is responsible for NMI. It have NMI and SMI output and SERR input. SERR signal is externaly collected from more sources, also from PCI-E. There is some programable routing in the chip. I hope that there's still NMI physical connection to ICH7. Maybe it's only uninitialized routing under DOS and maybe reenabled via SW. Or maybe SERR is only on PCI-E, then it would be possible to make bridge from PCI soundcard to PCI-E slot. BTW doe's anybody utilized those small PCI-E 1x? Me not yet, I'd rather more PCI/ISA :)