SBLive sbeinit.exe take forever to load. Any tips?

[under]

Hi all.

I'm new here, just a little background:
I've had my Mame cabinet since '99 when I picked up a SF2CE converted from a Defender cabinet for $400 at an arcade that was closing. I was really just looking for 2 players, 14 buttons and a good monitor, which I got. Since then I've gone through many iterations of the hardware, software and operating system.

Right now I'm trying to get back to a working DOS setup. I've run 3 different version of Linux which all worked fine except they didn't handle the on/off nature of an arcade cabinet. I had the 2 minute boot time and ckfs would be constantly running if my brother didn't shut it down properly.

Long story short, I've got the urge to get this baby up and running again and DOS is my only reasonable option.

Back to my question/problem:

My setup currently consists of:
- AMD Duron 1300
- Gigabtye MB with AGP and 1 gig of ram
- Matrox G400 video card (I wire my VGA directly up to the RGB monitor, with a signal booster inline)
- SoundBlaster Live! PCI
- AdvanceMame
- AdvanceMenu

I've based the DOS install on Fraggal's Boot CD, (the latest) but what I found was that when sbeinit.exe runs, it takes at least a full 60 seconds to initialize!?!

I have no clue what the problem is here. I suspect it might be an IRQ searching thing.

My Gigabyte motherboard's bios doesn't have a "Plug and Play OS" setting, but it does have settings for each IRQ to "monitor" or "ignore". I assumed I knew what those settings meant, but it didn't seem to matter if I "ignored" all or none of the IRQs.

Any ideas?

I also have a SoundBlaster 128 PCI that I have tried to use, but I always get an error message about "PCI device not found". (close enough, I know you've all seen this message at one time or another)


I suspect its an IRQ problem with my motherboard, but I'm at a low point right now. I've tried a multitude of changes and settings. From switching to IRQ 7, to not specifying the high DMA, etc... However I am will and would be grateful for any tips.

Thanks for any help! 

- Under

[gonzo90017]

Why not use Spystyle's boot CD based on Fragals?
If it's because of Advmame you could also try Arcados. It uses the last version of Advmame. They're currently working of version 2.0 which will support for more systems.

[under]

Hi gonzo90017.

I've got Spystyle's Boot CD as well, but I was holding off trying it because of the time it takes to install everything. I figure I would try to sort out the SB Live issue directly. What I'll do is take a look at Spystyle's SoundBlaster driver install batch code and see what settings he uses.

Also, I think you meant AdvanceMenu. I used ArcadeOS as my first front-end years ago, but I was happy with AdvanceMenu.

Either way I can handle the software install and setup myself if I could just figure out the reason sbeinit.exe takes so long to initialize.

Thanks.

-Under

[gonzo90017]

No. I meant advancemame. The link I gave you is not for ArcadeOS it's for a project called Arcados. It uses Advancemame and AdvanceMenu. But if you can do it yourself you have no need for it.

[tikbalang]

check your mobo if it has a VIA chipset and onboard sound. advmenu/advmame supports VIA AC97 sound chips internally. enable it in the bios and then set in your .rc files:

device_sound vsync/ac97