Creative X-Fi Elite Pro 7.1 soundblaster drivers for MS-DOS 6.22 ?

Hello,

(See last line for my question in case you want to skip my story so far )

I am a little into "retro mode" right now. Copieing files from Pentium 166 to IOMEGA ZIPDRIVE, HAHA ! =D Via parallel port, it's going to take 40 minutes to copy 94 MB lol (under windows 98, so it was easy to multi select folders).

(I kinda wanna secure my old turbo pascal vga work in case I regret it and it goes lost and blablabla and might be usefull some day first thing I copied was scroll.pas for x-mode which was interesting)

It was actually quite cool to get this zipdrive working again, find another zipdisk (I have 5 of em) and one of them contain a whole bunch of stuff for watcom and vga programming and even xmode and ymode, so that is an interesting bonus.

WOW as I type this the zipdrive is making a horrible clicking nice... ok it seems it got a little stuck, was scared there for a moment that it was the click of death lol... I used the disk with most room, this is 100 MB model.. Don't think this disk was damaged but I might be wrong, so far so good.

I also found a copy of UFO, enemy unknown. I am dieing to play it on my newer computer via ms-dos and try it out on receiver or so, can't really connect pentium 166 to receiver cause it's too far away, I could get some old speakers, but they probably won't sound as good.

And I wanna boot my DreamPC into ms-dos 6.22 cause I always kinda wanted to do that. So maybe later I will create a partition for ms-dos 6.22, have to look up with that largest partition is that ms-dos supports and which file system format it should be, probably fat16 ? though maybe fat32 can also work with ms-dos 6.22 not sure ?!

I also want to try and boot the dreampc from the iomega zipdrive just to see if that is possible. I am kinda into discovering functionality that I never used.

So this will also be an interesting test to see if my dreampc's bios can boot into zipdrives via parallel port !

I might also start tinkering with parallel port setup to see if bandwidth to zipdrive can be increased, so far it's not so bad for ms-dos it's probably faster than floppy disk, would be funny to do a ATTO diskbenchmark on it to see how fast it truely is...

Cool thing is windows 98 supports it after boot, I guess I already installed drivers back then.

Anyway what I want to do is:

I want to load some kind of ms-dos drivers for Creative X-Fi Elite Pro soundblaster and see how this soundblaster sounds like under ms-dos.

I already checked folders and creative labs site but didn't find any specific ms-dos sound drivers.

Failing this I could move P166 close to receiver and use sblive soundblaster instead... it's only 5.1 surround sound but will probably be sufficient.

But I would also like to give the Creative X-Fi Elite Pro soundblaster a try to see how it sounds like.

Maybe in far future I program it and try to use it's x-ram... I have never done that and don't know what it is or how to use it, but I kinda wanna try that as well.

Finally there is the possibility of windows xp paritition on usb drive and listen to windows xp audio stack and battlefield 2 x-ram ultra sound pack to compare sound quality to windows 7 x64 ultimate.

This is also somewhat I want to do out of curiosity.

And maybe I want to listen to dune 2 on my x-fi elite pro soundblaster.

I could try some generic sb audio sounddrivers or the once ment for sblive, maybe that would work.

But I was wondering if anybody ever tried to get x-fi elite pro soundblaster working under ms-dos ?!?

I thought I did this but I am probably thinking of sblive drivers on sblive soundcard on windows 98 and later ms-dos.

Any recommendations how to get X-Fi Elite Pro 7.1 soundblaster working under ms-dos 6.22 ?

Bye,
Skybuck.

wrote:
Hello,

(See last line for my question in case you want to skip my story so far )

I am a little into "retro mode" right now. Copieing files from Pentium 166 to IOMEGA ZIPDRIVE, HAHA ! =D Via parallel port, it's going to take 40 minutes to copy 94 MB lol (under windows 98, so it was easy to multi select folders).

(I kinda wanna secure my old turbo pascal vga work in case I regret it and it goes lost and blablabla and might be usefull some day first thing I copied was scroll.pas for x-mode which was interesting)

It was actually quite cool to get this zipdrive working again, find another zipdisk (I have 5 of em) and one of them contain a whole bunch of stuff for watcom and vga programming and even xmode and ymode, so that is an interesting bonus.

WOW as I type this the zipdrive is making a horrible clicking nice... ok it seems it got a little stuck, was scared there for a moment that it was the click of death lol... I used the disk with most room, this is 100 MB model. Don't think this disk was damaged but I might be wrong, so far so good.

I also found a copy of UFO, enemy unknown. I am dieing to play it on my newer computer via ms-dos and try it out on receiver or so, can't really connect pentium 166 to receiver cause it's too far away, I could get some old speakers, but they probably won't sound as good.

And I wanna boot my DreamPC into ms-dos 6.22 cause I always kinda wanted to do that. So maybe later I will create a partition for ms-dos 6.22, have to look up with that largest partition is that ms-dos supports and which file system format it should be, probably fat16 ? though maybe fat32 can also work with ms-dos 6.22 not sure ?!

I also want to try and boot the dreampc from the iomega zipdrive just to see if that is possible. I am kinda into discovering functionality that I never used.

So this will also be an interesting test to see if my dreampc's bios can boot into zipdrives via parallel port !

I might also start tinkering with parallel port setup to see if bandwidth to zipdrive can be increased, so far it's not so bad for ms-dos it's probably faster than floppy disk, would be funny to do a ATTO diskbenchmark on it to see how fast it truely is...

Cool thing is windows 98 supports it after boot, I guess I already installed drivers back then.

Anyway what I want to do is:

I want to load some kind of ms-dos drivers for Creative X-Fi Elite Pro soundblaster and see how this soundblaster sounds like under ms-dos.

I already checked folders and creative labs site but didn't find any specific ms-dos sound drivers.

Failing this I could move P166 close to receiver and use sblive soundblaster instead... it's only 5.1 surround sound but will probably be sufficient.

But I would also like to give the Creative X-Fi Elite Pro soundblaster a try to see how it sounds like.

Maybe in far future I program it and try to use it's x-ram... I have never done that and don't know what it is or how to use it, but I kinda wanna try that as well.

Finally there is the possibility of windows xp paritition on usb drive and listen to windows xp audio stack and battlefield 2 x-ram ultra sound pack to compare sound quality to windows 7 x64 ultimate.

This is also somewhat I want to do out of curiosity.

And maybe I want to listen to dune 2 on my x-fi elite pro soundblaster.

I could try some generic sb audio sounddrivers or the once ment for sblive, maybe that would work.

But I was wondering if anybody ever tried to get x-fi elite pro soundblaster working under ms-dos ?!?

I thought I did this but I am probably thinking of sblive drivers on sblive soundcard on windows 98 and later ms-dos.

Any recommendations how to get X-Fi Elite Pro 7.1 soundblaster working under ms-dos 6.22 ?

Bye,
Skybuck.

Unless the manufacturer provides MSDOS drivers, I don't
see how X-Fi Elite Pro 7.1 soundblaster is going to work.

Your motherboard might have a RealTek audio, like a 7.1
AC'97 one of its own. The specs list ACPI 1.0b as well
(early ACPI).

http://www.ascendtech.us/foxconn-nf4...4sk8aa8kr.aspx

Are you certain you don't have an old SoundBlaster card
sitting around somewhere ? I thought MSDOS had some sort of
love for SB16 compatibility or something.

Making MSDOS work is pretty hard to do. On older computers,
you don't have to punch holes in the memory map. Newer computers,
you won't have a clue what holes need to be punched. My newest
computer, I wouldn't even try, because nothing is ever going
to boot properly. But I have managed to make an MSDOS floppy
for flashing the BIOS, on some older setups. (Doing " sys a: "
to a floppy, isn't exactly the same as installing MSDOS onto
the hard drive. The full version likely puts more files
on the machine. I've only done the sys a: method.)

Another option would be FreeDOS.

For gaming, people use DOSBOX, but I've never tried that
as I don't think I have any DOS games here. I have the files
here for QuakeIII Arena (purchased the Mac version, and you
can take the maps onto other platforms). I think I got
QuakeIII Arena running on Linux for example. But older stuff
was mostly on the Mac (and you know how bad that stuff is :-)
slow slow slow ).

Paul

Another possibility to get sound working in ms-dos 6.22 on my DreamPC would to try and use realtek audio chip on motherboard and perhaps realtrek drivers for ms-dos, not sure if they exist.

So lot's of things try, sblive drivers maybe some of them will work with x-fi soundcard, maybe some kind of backwards compatibility exists there, maybe not.

I already checked some sites, I fear no true ms-dos drivers exist for x-fi elite pro soundblaster... hmmm... or they might have been included with windows xp drivers not sure.

The realtek is realtek audio ac97, so that might also suffice to get sound under ms-dos...

However I think I will need special cables to connect it to the receiver, not sure.

Don't think I have those, but might buy em...

Or maybe even dos drivers for GT 1030 to use it's hdmi port but then I would have no vga/monitor lol.

Now I wonder if HDMI can be used under ms-dos... hmmm...

Seems like it would be easiest to just use pentium 166 and move it a bit...

But would be cool if old dreampc can also do it

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

I could also "fall back" to the 80486 and use "true" ms-dos based audio cards.

However the 80486 has windows 95 installed haha... but I can probably boot it from floppy disk and work from iomega zipdrive that be cool

or

go

"back up" to pentium 3... it also has some kind of sound card... forgot which one it was... hmmm

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

If I want to go ultra safe for ms-dos 6.22 partition size than 500 MB seems good after reading this:

"
MS-DOS 6.22 only uses CHS (cylinder/head/sector) addressing to access disks, so it doesn't really matter if the BIOS supports LBA addressing. The CHS BIOS interfaces MS-DOS uses to access disk support drives up to just under 8GB, so this also the about limit for the MS-DOS. (A bug in MS-DOS means that it crashes if a drive has 256 heads, so it's limit is a bit smaller than the BIOS limit but still almost 8GB.)

The limit you've encountered to due to the intersection of the BIOS and IDE limits on CHS addressing being much less than either individually. The BIOS supports addressing up 1024 cylinders, 256 heads and 63 sectors, while IDE supports up to 65536 cylinders, 16 heads and 255 sectors. Taking the minimum of these three numbers (1024/16/255) gives you the 504MB limit.

To get around the 504MB limit many BIOSes supported CHS translation, where they converted BIOS CHS addresses to IDE CHS addresses using some sort of transformation. Apparently though your BIOS doesn't support this, otherwise the drive probably would've worked. You should check to see if your BIOS has some sort of "large" drive support you can enable.

If you're not booting off the hard drive then I think there were drivers for MS-DOS that performed CHS translation. According an old Microsoft KB article (KB126855) I found "SpeedStor from Storage Dimensions, EZ-Drive from Micro House, and Disk Manager from OnTrack Computer Systems" are possibilities. An IDE controller won't work unless it has its own boot ROM, one that can perform CHS translation.
"

500 MB is a bit small. I do want it also readable on 80486, not sure if that old computer with use this CHS translation technique maybe not.

I could also go with two or three partitions.

500 MB
2 GB
8 GB

and so forth kinda funny, but I also want some primary partitions maybe for windows or so but as a first experiment to see what my computers can actually read/handle this would be interesting to do.

But since 80486 can't use usb devices it makes no sense.
P166 also can't use it.

Unless there is some invention to turn usb into serial or parallel port or something else... but probably not...

Though I might want to copy these partitions some day to some drive that I put into the 80486... then again maybe not.

I just don't want to store too much so that if I do copy it over it should be able to fit.

500 MB should be plenty for now for my purposes then I again I don't know.... exe's can take up space fast and compilers too and if I want even some gaming it will go full quick.

And since this is supposed to run on my dreampc, perhaps 2 GB will work, maybe even 8 GB, me a bit fuzzy about that.

Anyway that text above was from he

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange...y-supports-chs

And double anyway... I am now off to try sparky linux to see if it can support zipdrive.

ppa.c is in linux kernel possibly... can be compiled in and such... so I am hopefull it might work.

Would be very cool if it did ! =D

Estimated speed is about 30 kb/sec or so according to some other documents lol.

Bye,
Skybuck =D

Wow this experiment GOT DANGEROUS TAKE NOTE:

OH MY GOD: Do not install IOMegaWare Zipdrive drivers on Windows 7 x64 Editions

Hello,

I tried to forcefully install: ioware-w32-x86-402.exe

Also before that I tried to install: OEM21.INF

Also I tried to install: .cat

One of these drivers probably the first causes damage to the windows 7 boot process, windows 7 will no longer boot and fail to boot.

It will enter into a "startup repair tool" loop which is ****ing annoying as hell.

But there is more to the story obviously cause I am here writing the message and not dead yet.

First of all windows 7 x64 edition will blue screen during boot entering this startup repair boot screen loop.

Then it gets even more scary... press F2 repeatedly with a PS/2 keyboard caused complete boot failure... the processor will hang, the bios will hang.

What's even more annoying is I couldn't get into SAFE MODE by pressing F8 for same reason it's not picked up when using the PS/2 keyboard.

Also the boot menu by pressing ESCAPE failed to come up when using PS/2 keyboard many times, it was super weird.

Probably some interrupt causing problems with the BIOS.

It could also be a time related thing, first I have to wait till this ****ing annoying raid screen goes past it and then I have to press F8 repeatedly.

The time I tried it it didn't work. I start the panick a little bit.

FORTUNATELY I had Sparky Linux on a tiny little usb stick still stuck into the back usb port.

So I booted sparky linux.

The ****ing -noapic option didn't work at the back, noapic at the back also didn't work.

I ****ing lost it almost I was like how ****ing retarded are these retards.

It turns out this noapic option needs to be added somewhere in between or right after the linux commands/options begin.

So make noapic the first option and that's how I did it all small letters.

I also choosed advanced boot option, maybe that helped too.

Finally I boot into Sparky Linux.

I kinda wanted to access windows 7 system drive.

Sparky Linux wouldn't let me... It required some kind of retarded authentication...

It totally ****ed me off.. I totally forget the ****ing password or didn't even set it...

It probably requires stupid symbols that apperently I will never remember.

What's worse is the password is on my disk somewhere that now I couldn't access.

Well after trying many password and failed I decided to launch the browser.

Fortunately Linus and the other ****ing retards from the linux community didn't put a password on the browser.

So I still could use the browser and connect to the internet.

FOR THAT I THANK YOU LINUS and LINUX community lol.

I read up on how to get into safe mode and the many boot options that windows has.

I REQUIRES PRESSING F8 repeatedly, I DID THIS the first couple of times but apperently somehow it didn't get picked up.

I ALSO USED A USB KEYBOARD AS WELL...

Finally I managed to get the safe mode boot options by pressing F8.

Finally I choose "last good configuration"


AND BOOM HERE I AM....


BACK ALIVE from the DEAD ! =D


Now my beautifull music is playing enjoying this REVIVAL =D LOL.


All I can say Windows 7 kinda rocks but it has issues.


THIS SPOOKED THE **** OUT OF ME ! LOL.


I am not sure what is going to happen on next reboot.


GOOD THING I DECIDED TO REBOOT WINDOWS FIRST.


Otherwise I might have blamed it on sparky linux and I decided I really had to make sure my Windows 7 was working before I give spark linux and zipdrives a try.

HOLY**** what an adventure and a scary one tooo.


MY RECOMMENDATION: do not try and install any iomega zipdrive drivers on windows 7 x64/64 bit editions YOU WILL BE ****ED.

Now I still have to figure out why it didn't boot, but only if the issue persists.

This was so scary, I have to issue a warning message on the internet and how to restore your system.

Hopefully the last good configuration trick will work for you.

This is probably the easiest way to get back in... without having to fix anything ! =D


Now I am off to post this in the other thread as well and ****ing read what the fcking sparky linux password was... god ****ing damn it.

I must admit... this did prevent me from trying to **** with any files on windows LOL...

Maybe this was a good thing... cause when people panic they might even do more stupid things ! LOL.

But at least I wanted to look at some log files if present.

WINDOWS 7 PEOPLE YOU ROCK.

Probably sinofsky YOU ROCK TOO.

Windows 7 !!! YEAAAAHHH !!!!!! =D

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

P.S.:

BUT I AM MADE OUT OF NOT-GIVING-UPIUM ! =D

SO NOT GONNA GIVE UP EVER ! =D

Well I tried Sparky Linux but so far Linux completely sucks at driving to download any kind of driver.

It's simply not there.

Yet they do have a package manager for all kinds of crappy games ! LOL.

SO **** LINUX, **** YOU.

Maybe it was Sparky Linux to blame for not having this module onboard. Kinda wish I went with ubuntu linux.

But might as well install windows xp 32 bit then at least I know it should work.

Or even a windows 95 installation would be linux in this regards.

No longer all kinds of stupid commands, sudo get apt lsmod scci p[ort module conf blablablablablabla

WHAT A ****ing horse ****.

tHOUGH at least I learned a little bit of linux, but I got annoyed mostly... after all of this **** in vain.

Very disappointed.

Can't download anything... this is what now kinda sucks about linux... don't know where to place stuff... no installers.

Maybe it would be better with unbuntu... but this is also kinda ****ty... have to switch linux now and I have no idea if it will be worth it...

Can't tell against what linux version the tutorialks are written.

And quite frankly what suprised me the most is no version information in ppa.c or ppa3.c

****ing crazy LOL.

I am done with linux idiots for now.

Bye,
Skybuck =D

Ok windows and linux have convinced me these are too complex american crap operating systems and I am going about this the wrong way.

The easy way will be:

1. Partition usb drive for 500 MB and/or 2 GB and install ms-dos 6.22 on it.

2. Format as FAT16

3. Boot into usb/ms dos 6.22 usb drive

4. Run guest

5. Copy files from zip drive to this partition

6. Restart computer and go into windows and copy files from usb onto windows drive.

Fortunately when I build dreampc I was smart and ordered 2 TB drives this is maximum capacity for bios/master boot record tech from 1980... haha good joke this old crap is in my dreampc from 2006 lol. So far it works though

I hope eufi will be good though and not buggy but will see when new pc is bought if ever.

BYE COMPLEX ****ERS FOR NOW LOL.

Bye,
Skybuck.

OK I was scared to do clean.

But once I executed the CLEAN command it whiped that 128 MB reserved thing or whatever it was clean off... so now I can start fresh =D

https://superuser.com/questions/2021...6-in-windows-7

Quite cool this diskpart never used it before, quite risky though !

Must know the disk numbers fortunately they match as in disk management and I checked the sizes and they match too... fortunately different size for this disk from others so I was confident enough to try this ! YES FOR ME LOL Good thing I bought different sizes ! Did this just for these kind of situations ! =D


Disk Management and DISKPART don't let you delete partitions on removable media. But you can use DISKPART's clean command to nuke it and start over. Here is a series of commands that worked for me:

Tutorial
"
DISKPART list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 40 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 7538 MB 0 B

DISKPART select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART list part

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 500 MB 1024 KB

DISKPART clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART create part primary size=500

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

DISKPART active

DiskPart marked the current partition as active.

DISKPART format fs=fat quick

100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.
"

Now it looks like this:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: DREAMPC2006

DISKPART list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 1863 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 1863 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 3726 GB 3725 GB *
Disk 3 Online 114 GB 1024 KB
Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 6 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 7 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 8 Online 16 GB 1024 KB
Disk 9 Online 5120 MB 0 B
Disk 10 Online 2048 MB 0 B
Disk 11 Online 2048 MB 0 B
Disk 12 Online 8 GB 1024 KB
Disk 13 Online 5120 MB 0 B
Disk 14 Online 1024 MB 0 B
Disk 15 Online 24 GB 1024 KB
Disk 16 Online 16 GB 1024 KB
Disk 17 Online 8 GB 0 B *
Disk 18 Online 8 GB 0 B *
Disk 19 Online 8 GB 1024 KB

DISKPART select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART help

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601

ACTIVE - Mark the selected partition as active.
ADD - Add a mirror to a simple volume.
ASSIGN - Assign a drive letter or mount point to the selected volume.
ATTRIBUTES - Manipulate volume or disk attributes.
ATTACH - Attaches a virtual disk file.
AUTOMOUNT - Enable and disable automatic mounting of basic volumes.
BREAK - Break a mirror set.
CLEAN - Clear the configuration information, or all information, off the
disk.
COMPACT - Attempts to reduce the physical size of the file.
CONVERT - Convert between different disk formats.
CREATE - Create a volume, partition or virtual disk.
DELETE - Delete an object.
DETAIL - Provide details about an object.
DETACH - Detaches a virtual disk file.
EXIT - Exit DiskPart.
EXTEND - Extend a volume.
EXPAND - Expands the maximum size available on a virtual disk.
FILESYSTEMS - Display current and supported file systems on the volume.
FORMAT - Format the volume or partition.
GPT - Assign attributes to the selected GPT partition.
HELP - Display a list of commands.
IMPORT - Import a disk group.
INACTIVE - Mark the selected partition as inactive.
LIST - Display a list of objects.
MERGE - Merges a child disk with its parents.
ONLINE - Online an object that is currently marked as offline.
OFFLINE - Offline an object that is currently marked as online.
RECOVER - Refreshes the state of all disks in the selected pack.
Attempts recovery on disks in the invalid pack, and
resynchronizes mirrored volumes and RAID5 volumes
that have stale plex or parity data.
REM - Does nothing. This is used to comment scripts.
REMOVE - Remove a drive letter or mount point assignment.
REPAIR - Repair a RAID-5 volume with a failed member.
RESCAN - Rescan the computer looking for disks and volumes.
RETAIN - Place a retained partition under a simple volume.
SAN - Display or set the SAN policy for the currently booted OS.
SELECT - Shift the focus to an object.
SETID - Change the partition type.
SHRINK - Reduce the size of the selected volume.
UNIQUEID - Displays or sets the GUID partition table (GPT) identifier or
master boot record (MBR) signature of a disk.

DISKPART list

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601

DISK - Display a list of disks. For example, LIST DISK.
PARTITION - Display a list of partitions on the selected disk.
For example, LIST PARTITION.
VOLUME - Display a list of volumes. For example, LIST VOLUME.
VDISK - Displays a list of virtual disks.

DISKPART

DISKPART list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Reserved 128 MB 17 KB

DISKPART clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART list partition

There are no partitions on this disk to show.

DISKPART


YES ok let's go with this ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck.



Bye,
Skybuck.

****.

I was planning on simply re-installing MS-DOS 6.22 from VMWARE 8.

But apperently VMWARE 8 has a ****ing limitation too:

Error when trying to add big usb drive:

"vmware 8 the physical disk is too big. The maximum allowed is 2 TB"

Google search produces:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/419611

KABOEM BABY.

Running into all kinds of limitations !

NOW YOU KNOW WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS GO BIG with ADDRESSING. YIKES.

But I am not giving up yet.

I can try and copy the ms-dos 6.22 files from an existing VHD...

and maybe use some command to make this fat16 bootable and workable...

I think there was some kind of command for it

sys c: or something not sure !

Wow... carefull don't **** the wrong drive lol and I think this must be done from ms-dos os... so fortunately I can try and run the ms-dos 6.22 vhd and try from there maybe.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.