So I made the boot disk from the Downloads page and also put the SBLive/SB16 emulatoion thing in C:\sblive, read the text at the end of the AUTOEXEC.BAT and some other documentation from the boot disk. When I run the SETUP from the DM2 directory, my computer always hangs whever I try to test the digital or midi sound. If I try to just run the game, it gets stuck trying to show the "FTL" intro screen. No sound is ever heard. I've tried using the blaster settings from Windows, the one specified in the AUTOEXEC.BAT, and the IRQ stated at boot time (presumably set by the config program on the boot disk), all with the same result.
I've had the game running successfully with an AWE64 using the Creative Labs DOS utilities and tweaking them just right, but that card is long gone now and I'm having no luck with the new one. Any ideas on what I might be missing?
Boot disk doesn't like my SBLive
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Zelmo
Re: Boot disk doesn't like my SBLive
Huh, what do you know.
So I got this Ensoniq sound card from a friend of mine and tried to get it working in DOS so I could play DM2. No luck there. I found a few driver files and some tips on how to make the card work (it has no official DOS support), but kept coming up short. So finally I decided to toss that card and go back to my SBLive, since it's more feature-rich and does everything I want except work for DM2. Uninstalled the Ensoniq drivers, took the related stuff out of the device manager, shut down, yanked the card, put the Live in, booted and installed the current Live drivers. Just out of curiosity I set up the boot disk again and restarted, to see just what kind of errors it would give me. The sound card initialized, so I went to the DM2 setup program, where every PCI (and motherboard-based) sound card has always locked up the system when I tried to run a test. Well, it auto-detected the sound settings pretty quickly and offered to run a test, so I obliged. Much to my surprise, I heard a familiar voice say "HMI module alpha humana on approach to space station Mercury." After I caught my breath I exited the setup and ran the game. For the first time since I ran the thing on a 386 with who knows what hardware, I saw and heard the whole intro, from the FTL logo to the thunder at the end of the title screen. It now works perfectly! Don't know why, but I'm not complaining. There must be something to the old practice of pulling the software and hardware out of the system and carefully putting it back.
Now the only concern is where to find a decent mouse driver. I don't like the acceleration in the Cute Mouse, which I didn't see a way to change when looking at the help file, and the mouse wigged out on me after a couple of minutes in the game. It seems the links on Interplay's DM2 page are broken, which is a shame because they used to provide a good mouse driver.
So I got this Ensoniq sound card from a friend of mine and tried to get it working in DOS so I could play DM2. No luck there. I found a few driver files and some tips on how to make the card work (it has no official DOS support), but kept coming up short. So finally I decided to toss that card and go back to my SBLive, since it's more feature-rich and does everything I want except work for DM2. Uninstalled the Ensoniq drivers, took the related stuff out of the device manager, shut down, yanked the card, put the Live in, booted and installed the current Live drivers. Just out of curiosity I set up the boot disk again and restarted, to see just what kind of errors it would give me. The sound card initialized, so I went to the DM2 setup program, where every PCI (and motherboard-based) sound card has always locked up the system when I tried to run a test. Well, it auto-detected the sound settings pretty quickly and offered to run a test, so I obliged. Much to my surprise, I heard a familiar voice say "HMI module alpha humana on approach to space station Mercury." After I caught my breath I exited the setup and ran the game. For the first time since I ran the thing on a 386 with who knows what hardware, I saw and heard the whole intro, from the FTL logo to the thunder at the end of the title screen. It now works perfectly! Don't know why, but I'm not complaining. There must be something to the old practice of pulling the software and hardware out of the system and carefully putting it back.
Now the only concern is where to find a decent mouse driver. I don't like the acceleration in the Cute Mouse, which I didn't see a way to change when looking at the help file, and the mouse wigged out on me after a couple of minutes in the game. It seems the links on Interplay's DM2 page are broken, which is a shame because they used to provide a good mouse driver.