SB-AWE64 Missing Driver Disc. GM emulation insanely slow, MT32/GS missing...

Nazo

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 2, 2002
Messages
3,672
I'm trying to set up a sort of retro gaming system, an old P2-233 I've underclocked to 166 so that those things with the overflow problem don't crash due to the processor being too fast. I was lucky enough to get an AWE64 (ISA) for it, which is a convenient card for such a time thanks to the fact that it more or less covers all bases but the UltraSound, and everything supporting UltraSound supported General Midi anyway (excluding MIDI players or whatever explicitely designed for the UltraSound.)

Thing is, it didn't have a driver disc with it. I remember it was a pain to get PROPER dos support out of the thing. I had to install Windows 95 drivers and then play around with the managers and such until things were exactly right as I recall. Unfortunately, I no longer have that disc. I made do with what I could, and I found a synthgm.sbk file which at least got AWEUTIL to work, but, the file was from DirectX, so when I later tried the so called "basic" disk I found a file that may or may not have been there before that appeared to be a different size, so I overwrote the old one with it. Thing is, some things, such as Descent 2, still don't work right with General Midi emulation enabled. That's fine in Descent's case since it supports AWE, but, what about the things that don't? When I start up Descent 2 with GM configured in the music, there's no music and it runs so insanely slow that it takes a good 10 minutes to completely start up. And this is a game designed to run on a 486, not a pentium 2! I'm kind of wondering if that synthgm.sbk file is really the correct one after all, but, as nearly as I can tell, it did come from the basic disk for this card.

Also, I have been completely unable to find the other two sound bank files, synthmt.sbk and synthgs.sbk. I really wanted at least MT32 emulation for some of the really old things. GS I can probably live without, I don't think I used it very much. And, yes, I know emulation isn't perfect, but, it's worlds better than that god-awful OPL music.

Anyone know where I can find these forgotten files and/or what the heck is going on with GM emulation? Sorry, I know this is kind of a weird question. Probably no one can help, but, this is the best place I could think of to ask. Someone might still have one of these though. Problem is that since it's so old, I can't find proper support anywhere and most of this stuff is forgotten.

EDIT: Ah, nevermind on those other two files. I finally found them and they seem to work. Also, it appears that GM emulation isn't messed up everywhere. I'm not really sure WHAT to think exactly, but, so far Descent 2 is the only over the very small number of games I currently have installed which failed to work correctly with GM emulation. I'll have more installed later though and add what ever else fails. It's really weird though...
 
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