Multiple sound cards - Are they ever gonna play nice?

[uberlad]

My brother is a budding musician and to support this the parents got him a sound blaster platinum last year. As a musicians card it apparently rocks and he was even more pleased when one of his mates got him drivers that used the onboard DSP for realtime sampling and effects.

The only problem is that these hacked drivers have overwritten some basic functionality, such as the full duplex nature of the card, required by the net telephone software he wishes to eat the university bandwidth up with 8-)

Lucky skunk had a MX300 that he had in the machine previously, and we hoped that the two would be able to be used together. However, when the MX300 was plugged in, and the drivers put on, the machine resets itself. Everytime we try and initialise the MX300 we have the same problem. Windows claims that there are no confilicts but he does have very few spare PCI slots now, if any, and so I am suspect.

Is there any basic reason why the two cards shouldn't co-exist? Should we persevere with fiddling or will they never get on?

Ta guys.

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Jorden]

The busmastering thing springs to mind. As does IRQs used by both the cards. As does memory overlapping for both the cards. You could try to disable the SB emulation on both cards, and at least one of the gameports (in device manager in Windows)
You could try to provide us with some more specs about his PC, and an IRQ list when you have both cards in, and Windows doesn't reboot

But foremost I wonder what he wants to connect to the one card, and what to the other?

Jord.

[uberlad]

It isn't that the machine doesn't reboot, but that the second sound card doesn't initialise. It may well be the game port thing, I think it does reboot when it tries to initialise the gameport on the MX300 in the installation process.

Unfortunately his machine is there, and I am here so I can't give any IRQ lists etc but I checked and there didn't appear to be any conflicts there. I didn't check the memory though, that could well be the thing.

All I'm really trying to ascertain is whether there is any technical reason why they shouldn't work together.

He's trying to connect his speakers, instrucments and stuff to the soundblaster, and then connect the microphone to the MX300 for this VOIP app. The output of the MX300 would then go into the input of the soundblaster.

Sorry I can't give any technical info, it was more just a hope that someone had tried it and could tell me that it was all going to be All Right (TM)

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Thundrchez]

Way back in the day, I had my ISA SB-AWE32 working in conjunction with my Diamond Monster Sound (original). I'd be surprised if you had any success getting two modern cards like the Live and MX300 working together nicely.

[uberlad]

Gurm, any suggestions where I might look for such drivers?

Or should I just get him to talk to his local contacts?

;-)

uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Gurm]

I would get better hacked ASP drivers (ASP = Audio Studio Pro = SB Live Platinum on Steroidal drivers).

There exist many versions of these, and quite a few that work with full duplex enabled. He just got a bum set.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Gurm]

uberlad:

The creative news server might be a good place to start. They keep all articles for years (literally) and have an APS group as well as an SB Live! group. People inevitably post pointers.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.