advancemame and ac97 sound

[ushkar]

hi,
is there anyone who uses an onboard ac97 soundchip with advancemame in dos succesfully?

i have an intel motherboard with an AC97 chipset (82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller)
in my BIOS i have only the option enable/disable

if i change the setting in my advmame.rc to "vsync/ac97" it starts my games but...no sound.
when i run nssi.exe (diagnostic tool) it sees my ac97 chipset, but don't show any values for port, channel, irq,...
when i run advs.exe with a random wav file it gives an error (failed to initialize...)

i thought advmame supported ac97 automatically, but i think i miss something. do i have to load drivers or something?

getting a bit desperate with this...

[I/O]

Try the allegro and seal drivers.

[ushkar]

Try the allegro and seal drivers.

you mean the ones imbedded in advancemame? or external ones?

[tikbalang]

unfortunately, ac97 support is limited in advmame. there are four types of ac97 chips that i know of and i have been successful with via, sis and amd ac97 implementations. intel ich soundchip came out after the sound routine matured in vsyncmame (.60s), subsequently getting absorbed into and got stuck in the later versions of advmame.

[I/O]

Try the allegro and seal drivers.

you mean the ones imbedded in advancemame? or external ones?

Read the docs. That is how I found out about them.

[Popcorrin]

Try the allegro and seal drivers.

you mean the ones imbedded in advancemame? or external ones?

Read the docs. That is how I found out about them.

You could spend all day reading the docs for advancemame and it won't get you anywhere, especially when it comes to video and sound card drivers.  So much of the information isn't 100% accurate.

What you need is the dos drivers for the ac97 soundchip.  I used to have them but I have no idea if I still have them on disk somewhere but I do remember that it took a little searching to find them.

Also, there is an old post on these forums that had info on ac97 and dos.  I don't know if a search would turn up anything but it's worth a shot.

[tikbalang]

DOS support for the ac97 soundchip was only released by VIA. it emulates a soundblaster pro BUT this was dropped in the later chips. the good news for advmame is it can still use these late chips with "vsync/ac97".

my recommendation for OP is to disable the onboard sound and use an old ESS pci card (esstech.com). these cards are easy to configure and if it fails, then most likely other pci audio cards will fail too. this is because of the complex irq, dma sharing, ddma, tdma issues regarding pci features and plain DOS.