Crash or Inappropriate Sounds Occur with Sound Blaster and 486

• Microsoft Windows operating system versions 3.1, 3.11

SYMPTOMS

MS-DOS-based applications that use the Sound Blaster family of cards may crash or produce inappropriate sounds when used with Windows version 3.1 on some 386DX and 486 machines.

CAUSE

Creative Labs does not recommend running MS-DOS-based applications that use the Sound Blaster cards from within Windows.

WORKAROUND

You may be able to work around this problem in the following ways:

• Turn off the turbo button on the 486.
• Set the DMABufferSize to 64 in the [386Enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI file.
• Set the data bus speed of the 486 to 8 MHz.

MORE INFORMATION

The problem apparently occurs because data is being delivered too quickly to the Sound Blaster cards. Turning off the turbo button slows down the data transfer rates and, thus, may solve the problem.

Setting DMABufferSize to 64 reserves more space for the DMA channel to perform its buffering function and, thus, allows room for the increased data.

Another possible solution is to check the bus speed setting in the CMOS setup. If it is higher than 8 MHz, you may need to reduce it to 8 MHz. The bus speed of some 486 machines may be set as high as 10 MHz. Slowing this down may alleviate the transfer speed problem.