I grew up playing MS-DOS and Windows 95 CD-ROM games. I found a Pentium II machine on eBay and bought a Sound Blaster 16 card for it. However I'm having the hardest time getting WAV playback to work for this in Windows 98SE. I installed the DOS drivers and got it working in DOS mode, but WAV playback in Windows does not work. I get glitchy sound and "sound card is busy" errors when playing WAV files.

I chose to go down the "90s drivers compatibility rabbit hole" so expected these kinds of issues. But this one has me stumped and I'm thinking the Creative drivers aren't fully compatible with my 1998 Compaq. It's not a PnP card because I got it for DOS thinking it would work perfectly in Windows. My PC has onboard PCI sound which does work great in Windows though (which I currently have disabled in the BIOS).

I'm wondering if anybody who built these machines in their adult years have any input on what could be causing this particular issue. I'm using all the suggested IRQ and Low/High DMA settings.

It has jumpers due to it being a non-PnP card. There was a conflict with the card's MPU-401 MIDI port but I resolved that by moving to another IRQ. But the funny thing is Windows is showing a second ESS AudioDrive card installed, which is showing a resource conflict. I had this issue and thought it happened because Windows didn't install the non-PnP drivers from the CD when I installed Windows first then added the sound card after the fact. I re-installed the OS and only then did it recognize it as a Sound Blaster 16 or compatible after running the non-PnP hardware scan and driver installation.

I'm starting to think Windows believes it's seeing a different type of card entirely because it's non-PnP. I wonder if it's possible to turn the sound card/ISA bus off in the BIOS and only use it when playing DOS games, and turn the onboard sound back on for Windows? All I would need is a stereo 1/8" splitter plug to my speakers but it would mean I would have to choose between the SB16 and onboard sound for the CD audio line.

I love Dosbox and have used it in Windows 7 on my main PC. But I guess the reason I bought this machine is for the Windows CD games that use 3D acceleration/DirectX 7 that do not run in Windows 7 or have underlying DOS requirements. I've tried Windows XP in the past and still had issues.

I was little when this stuff was mainstream, so I am willing to learn from the ground up and make mistakes along the way. And playing my old games again is a pretty cool goal to shoot for in my opinion.

I'm using the Creative drivers specifically for Win98SE from their website, and Windows sees it as a properly functioning device with volume sliders in the mixer for WAV, MIDI, line in, and CD audio. I've also tried the Microsoft drivers from 1999 which result in an error saying the sound card is missing or not configured correctly after verifying there are no resource conflicts...

Unfortunately I don't have a way to isolate the machine or the card, I bought the card as-is. But if it's a card issue DOS would have problems with it right? Everything in DOS works perfectly every time I boot to DOS mode. And sound in Windows doesn't work every time I boot to Windows. No flakiness or intermittentness between the two OSes.

Like timtim reiterated, I think it's my Compaq not being compatible. It does use an ISA riser card and of course what I read says that shouldn't be an issue. So I'm suspecting that or some compatibility issue with the Windows drivers and ISA bus controller. I'm much more confident I can just switch between the 2 sound devices depending on what OS I feel like using. My BIOS seems to have several options for turning things on and off.

So I watched a lot more YouTube videos and did more research on Windows compatibility and bought a SB AWE64. Not the gold version, I have no use for RCA jacks. I considered the AWE32 but that card is huge and DOS basically sees this card as an AWE32 anyway. But yeah, this one has excellent Windows compatibility with proper setup CDs from Creative and there are guides to getting it working in DOS as well. Seems people trying to cover the whole decade run both Windows and DOS mode with this card.

I also enjoy point and clicks, and played a few of these in grade school I want to revisit.

I installed the AWE64 card and it works great in Windows. I should have done more research to begin with. In the meantime is anyone in need of a good SoundBlaster 16 for a 486 or other DOS machine?

Alright, I've been looking for an authentic beige monitor for a long time. Particularly a smaller one than the 17" flat silver CRT monitor I was using before. I finally found one while parting out an Arachnid Galaxy II dart game. I opened it up and was surprised to find the screens in these games are standard, although evidently commercial grade, PC monitors. This game uses a smaller beige monitor, perfect for what I was looking for. This allowed me to squeeze in a pair of matching speakers with good bass. Now the only thing missing from my "beige perfection" setup is the mouse.

Specs:
1998 Compaq desktop PC
Windows 98 Second Edition
2002 Maxtor 60GB HDD
320GB RAM
350MHz Pentium II CPU
ATI Rage Pro graphics card
1997 SoundBlaster AWE64 installed in Windows and DOS
CD-RW compatible CD-ROM drive
Floppy drive from a donor PC
Labtec speakers
2004 Daewoo 531X 14" monitor
Generic "Digital" 90s keyboard
Early 2000s Dell mouse

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My cousin used to live in this house. They had an old 486 running Windows 95 set up on the same desk as this one is. Lol, when I was little I brought some of my DirectX games over one year and was surprised at how bad they ran in software mode without a video accelerator card.

I bought the PC for $56 shipped on eBay, bought the AWE64 card for less than $30 shipped, a CD-ROM aux cable for $7, and the rest was free. So less than $100 for everything!