DOS MAME w/Compaq MB and PCI Sound

[bkeating]

Hi all!

This is my first post here...

I have a Compaq MB (I think its a proprietary mainboard).  Its like a PII 500 with 128 mb ram.  Running Win98 its not quite playable using Mame32.  It runs fine under DOS.  Problem is it only has PCI slots for the sound board.  I cant change the sound cards IRQ from IRQ5 to something else (I guess IRQ5 is reserved for video or something when running DOS).  Issue is the motherboards BIOS isnit robust enough to mess with the IRQ settings.

Bottom line: anyone experienced this?  If so any help would be appreciated...otherwise im just gonna buy a MB/video/sound combo from newegg.com for like $75.

Thanks all!

[Truecade]

I've had bad luck trying to get PCI sound cards to work in DOS when IRQ5 is already reserved for another component.  Most of the newer motherboards will reserve IRQ5 for video and it can't be changed, even with the BOIS.  Good luck, and let us know if you find a good newer motherboard that works with PCI DOS sound. 

[EwJ]

What version of mame23 have you tried?
If you are interested in running the classics,  you should be fine with w98 as an OS,  and an 'older' version of mame32 with that config. 
Newer games prob not.

[bkeating]

Its a fairly new version of Mame32 as i've only been doing this for a few months.  After beating my head to make it work i'm just gonna pony up some cash and buy a new MB/CPU.

I got lucky today at the computer store.  I bought a MB/CPU combo for $65.  Its a AMD Duron 1.8 gig.  I'm guessing that should be more than enough to run most games

[Encryptor]

I would try running it in Win 98 with the command line version of mame and maybe MameWah or Mala as they don't seem to be too resource intensive. If that doesn't work with  the latest version of mame try stepping backwards a version at a time. It's worth a try.


Encryptor

[vidmouse]

Or, if you're deadset on using MAME32 older versions,
they can be found here....

www.joymonkey.com

[ark_ader]

My suggestion is to look at the bios on the Compaq.

There should be a facility to enable the IRQs to manual rather than OS.

Swap whatever is using IRQ 5 with IRQ 7 - odds are you are  not wanting to use a printer with MAME.

Get snoop.exe (google it) and it will see your IRQs after post and dos boot.

I had the same problems in the past with Compaqs and it solved my issues.

[RayB]

My concern is that even if he got the IRQ conflicts out of the way, does the on-board sound support the DOS Sound Blaster drivers?

If you can get sound out of Windows mode, then yeah, your best bet may in fact be to use the Command line version. (but use an older version of MAME! Like .69 or .55 or even older)

[ark_ader]

He would need to set the Blaster variables, otherwise I do not see a problem, also good to enable Legacy Sound support in BIOS.  Funny thing is PCI can share IRQs, unless his PCI card is faulty....