Digital sound under true DOS with ISA Soundblaster

[red_avatar]

I consider myself a veteran when it comes to getting old games running, but this one has me stumped:

A week ago I bought an old IBM Aptiva 166 with 64Mb RAM and 2.0Gb HDD. I put inside my own old (ISA) AWE64 Gold and a DVD drive. The AWE64 gave me some problems at first because of conflicts with the ethernet card that was in there so I removed it. Win98 had no problem detecting the soundcard, and installation of the drivers went fine. Music and sound would play withotu a hitch under Windows.

BUT. Like I said, I consider myself a veteran. It's commonly known that just using drivers in DOS for your soundcard will often result in sound being too quiet. Since AWE64 didn't come with nearly as many DOS utilities than the older Creative soundcards, I took the liberty of using the older SB16 utilities that work fine - in specific SB16set.exe which lets me set volume on any aspect of the soundcard and quadriple the soundoutput.

Let me get to the problem: nearly half of the games, usually the pre 1995 ones, give me problems with digital sound. Music works fine, no problem. But digital sound won't work - nor under DOS nor under Windows. Weird, because in other games it works just fine. The games where it won't work (among others) are:
Doom
Legend of Kyrandia 1&2&3
Worms
Theme Park (it says "using 8bit sound" at the start, yet the starting movie had sound at first)
...

Games where it does work:
Little Big Adventure
Lands of Lore 2
Command & Conquer
...

I suspect that no older Westwood games (Dune 2, Lands of Lore) will work with digital sound (which is annoying since I have speech versions of all these games).

What could be the problem ? I set all the settings as they should :
config.sys and autoexec.bat have the right lines - 220 I5 D1 H5

Now, the older SB16 utilities also have a diagnostic program which I tried. Oddly enough, it would detect the address, IRQ but not the low DMA. (which is set at 1).

Now I began thinking - despite it saying the soundcard is detected - could it be that somehow DMA 1 is not available ? Music doesn't need Low DMA, and the more recent games use High DMA for digital soundI believe ? Windows does too. So can it be that old games that use low DMA won't have digital sound ?

If that is true, what should I do ? BIOS says that DMA 0,1,2 is free, so what could be taken it ? Is there a way to check ? I really want this to work - I bought this computer just for these old games, and having no sound would be really awful after all the trouble I went through.

[486 player]

Try 'em. If not work check with msd which device uses 1 and changfe it's or dissassemble it.

[Guest]

Try 'em. If not work check with msd which device uses 1 and changfe it's or dissassemble it.

BIOS state DMA 0-3 are available, yet the soundcard doesn't have access to either of them so I can 't change DMA 1 to 0 or 2 or 3! And yet in Windows NO hardware is already using DMA 1 or 0,2,3.