Hi! I have an old 486 running Dos 6.22 / Windows 3.11. Some time ago I got a Sound Blaster Pro with all the drivers and installed it on my system. It worked just fine but recently it stopped working, some hardware failure so I switched card to a Sound Blaster 16. I removed the drivers for the old card and installed new drivers downloaded from Creatives website. The sound card works just fine in DOS but when using Windows I don't have any drivers installed even though they show up in the control panel and in system.ini. I also tried reinstall the drivers but that didn't work. Any help would be aprechiated.

If it shows drivers loading in the control panel and there is a line loading them in the System.ini, then you do have drivers installed. It sounds like the drivers you have installed aren't working. I'm wondering what drivers you downloaded from the Creative Labs website. I have several old Creative Labs Soundblasters and they stopped providing any file downloads for those cards. Are you sure that the specific card you have is supposed to be supported by the drivers you downloaded? Another thing you can try is to use the Soundblaster 1.5 driver which comes with Win3.1. I have never tried it personally, but I've heard (heresay, on my part) that the Soundblaster 16 is backward capatible with the old Soundblaster drivers (in order to work with old DOS games released before the card was made). You won't get the superior capablilities of the 16, but supposedly you will get sound as if you had an original Soundblaster.

I have tried two different drivers, one official from www.soundblaster.com under support>downloads>soundblaster>other>16 They say support has expired but the drivers are still up for download. The other driver I tested was official but downloaded from third part. www.driverguide.com but that didn't work either, the same thing happened. When trying to install drivers for SB 1.5 I couldn't get passed the dialog where you select port and irq. I selected the correct values (port 240 and irq 5) but it told me the irq was set incorrectly... -Maybe there is a conflict with another windows driver?

An IRQ isn't software/driver-related. It's hardware, and IRQ5 is normally the one used for sound cards: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/re... Analyze your autoexec.bat/config.sys files to see which one DOS is using before trying to input the data into Windows: http://www.rinkworks.com/apogee/s/6... Also some other posts on Computing.net: http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... http://www.computing.net/answers/wi...

If it works "just fine in DOS", then that would be the correct address and IRQ to use for Windows. Unless there's some kind of "compatability software" being loaded as a TSR in DOS, of course. Normally, with DOS, the OS doesn't load any drivers for authentic SoundBlasters, just sets the "BLASTER" environment to the correct values and the individual programs (games) supply the driver. Newer computers and OS's can move IRQs around, but with the computer your using and Windows 3.1, as T-R-A said the conflict would be in hardware and would screw up the DOS as well. More probable that I was wrong and the SoundBlaster 1.5 driver actually won't work with your card for some reason.

Actually I the IRQ is software configurable... With the SB driver there was a program called diagnose that you could use to change sound card settings. I think the problem was the network card driver, which i found out was set to <IRQ: Any IRQ; Vacant> but was loaded BEFORE the SB driver in system.ini. After some hours of fixing, and it still didn't work I re-installed windows and that helped. Now I have both sound and network in winows. Thanks for your help! Mr 3D

Good work tracking down the real problem. Now it would be advisable to backup both the S/B software and your autoexec.bat and config.sys to some type of removable media and hang onto it should you have any problems in the future...