Posted by Ohso on 20, 2001 at 6:16 PM:
In Reply to: The best of both worlds... posted by Sirwinston on 20, 2001 at 5:59 PM:
I agree two cards does work well at least for those who still have ISA slots, but I think it is largely unnecessary. The Live will use standard values unless it senses them in use by something else. There are several ways to fix this. One trick is to go into your bios and force the Live's slot to IRQ 10 and to set IRQ 5 as being unavailable. Then boot into windows. The live will change it's emulation settings to the standard. Now you can go return your bios settings to normal and they should stay.
There are a couple specific instances of dos games that won't work with the Live's emulation in *pure* dos but those very few games will work fine in a dos window. I have a collection of about 500 dos games and have tested them all in dos boxes and in pure dos so I know what works and what doesn't. I gave away my AWE64 gold after testing the Live with my collection. :)
: I use a SB Live! Value for Windows games, *and* a Soundblaster AWE64 Value ISA card for DOS games. I almost always run DOS games under Windows, but the setup works flawlessly--the output of the ISA card into the Line-In of the PCI card. It works well since they use different resources and interrupts, so the DOS programs see the ISA card and ignore the PCI board, and Windows programs see both and allow you to choose which device. If you install the ISA card first, the Live!'s install program sees the ISA card and avoids installing the "SB16 emulation" that it wold install otherwise. I hated that SB16 emulation because it would always, on my PC at least, use nonstandard IRQs and addresses that DOS programs wouldn't automagically detect, so I had to set them manually. Not so now...