Dave-H

Thanks, I tried changing both those options in HDACFG.INI, but still not a peep of sound. I guess the driver just isn't talking to the hardware. There are no audio related entries in the BIOS.

Strange that the extension didn't work for you, but as you say you don't actually need it anyway unless you want to switch between locales regularly.

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy today! The contents of my HDACFG.INI file are here - [ALLHDA] $00D8=$269A8086 $0101=$0BE910DE [HDA] TSR=TSR Found PCI_VID=$8086 PCI_DID=$269A [BUSMASTER] myPCIHI=$0012 myPCILO=$1000 myPCI=$00121000 aPCIHI=$0011 aPCILO=$1000 aPCI=$00111000 [HDA_269A8086,948015D9] cardmemregistersLO=$0000 cardmemregistersHI=$DE80 Mytimer=1 Verbinterface=$1 wait1=$100 wait2=$100 pcipatchB=$0000 PCI_BUS=$00 PCI_DEVICE=$1B PCI_FUNCTION=$0 GCAP=$4401 VMIN=$00 VMAJ=$01 GCTL=$0001 CODEC BITMAP=00000100 CODEC Index=$2 CODEC_VID=$10EC CODEC_DID=$0883 CODEC_REV=$100002 CODEC_NODEINFO=$010001 CODEC_AFG_GPIO_CAP=$40000002 CODEC_AFG_SUBSYSTEM_ID=$15D99480 CODEC_AFG_PM_SUPPORT=$0F CODEC_AFG_PCM_DEFINITION=$E0560 CODEC_AFG_F000B=$01 SleepingWidget=$02 VolumeWidget=$14 OutputWidget=$02 [Volume] PCM=$FFFFFFFF I've attached the memory file you asked for too. I hope this gives some clue as to what's going on! Cheers, Dave. HDADAVEH.TXT

Understood. The driver is listed. The small window is what pops up when you select its settings. After dismissing that, it then appears as an option as a playback device. Unfortunately, selecting it doesn't work, there is still no sound, and on a reboot it disappears as an option again, and as before there is only one option in the dropdown to select playback devices, and it's blank. The device ID is PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_269A&SUBSYS_948015D9&REV_09.

Tried changing the system.ini entry, but no difference I'm afraid. Should there be an entry for this in the Device Manager "Sound, video and game controllers" section?

HDA2.DLL is in my C:\Windows\System folder. (In fact my Windows folder is C:\WIN-98, but that shouldn't make any difference.) HDA2.DLL is listed as a loaded module in msinfo. These are the relevant sections from my system.ini - [386Enh] device=*COMBUFF device=TURBOVCD.VXD device=*dynapage device=*vpd device=*int13 device=*enable device=convmem.vxd device=c:\programf\afterdar\adw30.386 ebios=*ebios woafont=app850.fon keyboard=*vkd display=*vdd,*vflatd mouse=*vmouse,msmouse.vxd device=dva.386 MinSPs=16 ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 Paging=on PagingDrive=C: ;Entry MaxPhysPage=40000 limits memory use to 1024MB EMMExclude=C000-CFFF [Drivers] wavemapper=*.drv MSACM.imaadpcm=*.acm MSACM.msadpcm=*.acm Adwrap=c:\programf\afterdar\adwrap.drv MSVideo.VfWWDM=vfwwdm.drv MSACM.lhcodec=lhcodec.acm Voice=C:\UTILITIE\EXTERNAL\BITWARE\is101.drv VIDC.YV12=ATIYUV12.DLL VIDC.VCR1=ATIVCR1.DLL VIDC.VYUY=ATIVYUY.DLL VIDC.YVU9=IYVU9.DLL wave=mmsystem.dll midi=mmsystem.dll wavehda=hda2.dll As you can see, I'm using the ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 option. I have never needed in recent years to use a swapfile on Windows 98, as it can access over 3GB of RAM! I did try changing it to ConservativeSwapfileUsage=0, and rebooting, but no difference. Cheers, Dave.

@deomsh There is a "High Definition Audio Controller" entry in the "System Devices" section of Device Manager, but nothing in the "Sound, video and game controllers" section. There is no "Multimedia Devices" section, is "Sound, video and game controllers" what you meant? There is definitely no sound at all coming from the speakers during startup. I did reboot after copying Hdaicout.hda to the C:\Windows folder (not C:\Windows\System?) I'm getting a message from autoexec.bat on startup which say "TSR loaded", I assume this means it has correctly loaded. @Destro Yes, that is my fallback intention if the Windows 3.1 driver won't work for the onboard hardware. I only need sound at a basic level as I'm not a gamer and I don't use the PC to watch movies. I haven't used a Soundblaster card since my first Windows 3.1 PC back in 1993! Are there any Windows 10 64 bit drivers for them though?

@deomsh I've followed your instructions, and everything seemed to go OK, with no crashes or error messages. I now have an entry called "High Definition Audio Controller" in my Device Manager "System Devices" section. It says it's working but has no driver files loaded, I assume that's correct. The relevant entries seem to be there in autoexec.bat and system.ini. No sound so far though. I copied the Hdaicout.hda file you linked to to my Windows folder, but no difference. Does this mean that the contents of that file need modifying somehow?

Wow, thank you so much! I never thought for a moment that the answer to this might be a driver designed for Windows 3.1! I will try this out later on and let you know how it goes, I'm working in Windows 10 at the moment. Cheers, Dave.

Not yet, but I have downloaded the necessary files. I'll have a go with them later this evening, I'm working in Windows 10 at the moment! I'll let you know how it goes, but I'm very optimistic that it will be fine. Having the interface in US English isn't the end of the world for me of course, but if it's possible to get 52.9.1 to be in British English that will be really good, even if it needs another extension installed to do it. EDIT: I've now installed 52.9.1 with the language pack and the locale switcher. All seems to be working fine!

Thanks guys! I guess this is just too big an ask, even for the geniuses here. I could just do without sound on Windows 98, but an alternative might be just to fit a cheap PCI plugin sound card, and use that for Windows 98. I can free a slot for it. I would want to connect the speakers just to that to avoid having to switch the source when I change operating systems (I do this with my dual graphics cards, using the input switching on a multi-input monitor, but I'd rather not have to do this with the speakers as well!) It would be great if I could use the PCI plugin card just for the actual listening audio, but use the HD onboard hardware for the microphone and line input on Windows XP and Windows 10. Would that be possible? It works OK with the graphics cards, Windows XP is the only OS that both cards have drivers for, and they are both installed and seem to coexist (one card is ATI, the other Nvidia needless to say!) I would hope to find a sound card that has drivers for all three operating systems. There are drivers for all three for the old motherboard's AC'97 sound system, so if I could find a card based on that I would have thought it would do the job. I've had a look, and I found a couple of possibles, but none of them seemed to have Windows 10 drivers, which also have to be 64 bit! Any advice gratefully received. Cheers, Dave.

I just had to change my motherboard, as the old one developed a fault. It was a Supermicro X7DAL-E server board. I was very lucky to find someone selling two of them which turned out to be unused, but they are X7DAL-E+ boards. The only major difference between the X7DAL-E and the X7DAL-E+ is that the former has a Realtek AC'97 onboard sound system, and the latter has a Realtek ALC883 HD onboard sound system. I've got one of the new boards up and running fine, and I found audio drivers for Windows 10 and Windows XP, but I'm having trouble finding a driver for Windows 98SE. There are many listed online which claim to work on Windows 98, but they don't, the installer just says it's not compatible with the OS. Is there any answer or workaround for this? I only want basic sound on Windows 98, nothing fancy. BTW I have absolutely no idea why Supermicro thought that is was necessary to put a 5.1 HD audio system on a server board! Thanks, Dave.

You'll feel at home where I live, in Ealing in West London, there's a huge Polish community here!

It's not even available in different versions of English. US English only.

I assume you've tried a clean startup using the system configuration editor? Is the problem still there if you do a clean startup?

I got a free "upgrade" from Windows 8.1 after the original offer ended before I decided to bite the bullet, by saying I needed Windows 10 for its accessibility features. That was a limited time offer supposedly though, so whether you can still do that I don't know. There was certainly no check on whether you genuinely needed it for that reason or not!

I wonder if MS will restart the free (and perhaps automatic) "upgrade" to Windows 10 "offer" for Windows 7 users when it approaches EOS? If that extends to Windows 8.1 as well, I'll have to be on my guard again on my netbook, as any update to Windows 10 will hose it as there are no compatible graphics drivers for it!

@VistaLover I tried that UA string too, and I got past the first incompatibility error message, but then got a WebGL error message instead. Switching over to my other graphics card, which is much better than the ancient one I normally use on XP, made that error apparently go away, but I've now just got a static picture which appears to have no embedded links, so I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with it to try and go any further.

Thanks, that's very interesting and good to know, but I think I'll stick with the extension, I can see more quickly and easily how that's set, and it doesn't seem to be causing any performance problems.

How do you do that on Firefox without an extension?

I use an add-on called "Custom UserAgent String" which should do that for you, and it will "stick". I have it to spoof the user agent just on Facebook so it serves HTML5 video as it was otherwise dropping back to Flash. There are other add-ons which will also do the same thing, essentially restoring the functionality that Presto Opera had to change the user agent string on a site by site basis.

@xrayer Have you tried reducing the resolution and/or colour depth on the Nvidia Control Panel? Obviously it's a severe problem, but if the Windows Explorer being unstable is the only issue, and all other display functions are fine, I wouldn't have thought that the driver itself was unstable or the card physically faulty. I would have suspected the shell extensions as being the likely culprit too, but if you have disabled them and it makes no difference presumably it can't be that! FWIW I have Nvidia driver version 320.92 installed (this is a Quadro driver, not GeForce) and it works fine, and before that I had GeForce 340.52 installed with a GeForce card, and that worked fine too. Maybe try that version as it certainly worked for me.

I don't know about the others, but to get Otter to work with HTML5 videos on YouTube, I had to replace some files with those from the XP SP2 compatible version. See here. You can download otter-browser-xp2.zip from here. Extract it to a temporary location, select all the files in the Program Files\Otter\lib\gstreamer-1.0 folder, and paste them into the same folder of your working version of Otter, overwriting if necessary. I found that made YouTube videos work fine in Otter on XP. I did it ages ago, and have never had to repeat the operation, even though Otter has been updated many times since then. HTH.

@mixit You sir, are a genius! The addition of the css file (my chrome folder was empty) has fixed it perfectly! I love this forum so much!

Thanks @Mathwiz, I'll have a look at that version of Serpent and see how it goes. I'm not thinking I will abandon FF52ESR imminently. The Instagram video issue is annoying, but I can obviously still view them on my phone or on other browsers (including Google Chrome 49 on XP!) so it's not the end of the world. If other sites start breaking though, I will have to reconsider. Cheers, Dave.