Problem: No digital audio

[Magic48ges]

Hello all,

currently I'm building a PC for my old DOS/Win9x games,

mainly the Bullfrog Classics like Magic Carpet 1+2, Dungeon Keeper, C&C, etc. ,

and therefore I bought a KingDy KD3630 PC with KD1610 mainboard,

which features an ISA slot for my Creative AWE64 CT 4380 sound card.

I chose Windows 98SE as platform, since many of the old games will run smoother on Win98SE than on XP.

Sound effects work fine under Win98SE, but I have not been able to access the audio part of the CD drive,

or in other words, the audio files on a CD won't be played.

The option "Enable digital audio" is greyed out, and can't be enabled.

Under W2K on the same machine digital audio works fine, simply as expected.

In both cases I used the AWE64 drivers which were supplied by the respective OS.

I have the same problem on another machine (Thintune Large), so maybe this could be a common problem?

Is there a fix available? I didn't find anything related using the search field.

Cheers

Ray

[Ken-mkII]

The IDE Bus-Mastering driver may cause the "digital audio" won't work under Win9x system quite frequently (Depends on mainboard chipset), also there is some old CD Drives can't active digital audio function (Mostly old drives below 16x, so this is not your case).

If performance is your case, I bet that you better attach an audio cable between your CD Drive & your card card to avoid this situation.

[Magic48ges]

Many thanks for your reply.

I checked with an audio cable between the AWE and the CDROM drive: Analog audio from CD using an audio cable works fine.

The CD ROM drive is a TEAC CD224E, connected to the main board with a 44pin IDE flat cable and a suitable adapter pcb tied to the back of the drive.

But I have to refine the ideas behind:

I wanted to use a virtual CD ROM drive, and therefore installed MagicDisc for W9x.

MagicDisc seems to work fine in more modern systems. like WXP, but on my W98SE machine,

the W98 version tends to crash, and I wasn't able to get any audio sound out of that drive.

Then after some research I made two changes which changed everything, and now it all works fine:-)

First I installed the AWE64 WDM drivers instead of the normal drivers, which offer more options in the settings dialogs,

and finally enabled the Digital Audio enable dialog. (Why do the inofficial updates not include the WDM drivers?)

Then I installed the Deamon Tools 347 for W98 instead of MagicDisc.

The WDM drivers are the basis to the solution, and the Deamon Tools are the completion!

Ironically the combination of my KD1610 main board, W98SE, the AWE CT4380, the AWE WDM drivers,

and the Deamon Tools work in the DT default setting of analog audio in both the DT and the W98 dialog,

but w/o the audio cable, of course...

HTH

[Ken-mkII]

OOoh... You use VxD SB driver instead of WDM previously?! It is why Digital Audio check box greyout...

And, Daemon 3.47 is the BEST virtual CD-ROM mounting software for Win9x (I still use it for both my WinME & XP BOXes). But its' Analog Audio function is not 100% perfect, there will has no sound sometimes when playing audio tracks which is called by 3rd softwares such as emulators. But since you use digital audio instead, so there is not the problem for you.

[Magic48ges]

Yes, it turned out that it works without the WDM drivers, once you use the right Virtual CD:-)

Nevertheless, there were queries for the AWE64 WDM drivers for Win98 (SE) ,

so here they are, for historical reasons;-)

Cheers

Ray

awe64wdm.zip

[TmEE]

I would get a CD-ROM audio cable and run it from the drive to the sound card, will definitely work and even in pure DOS