old soundcard compatability w/ newer O/S problem

i recently picked up an old computer from my parents (pentium 160 Mhz), which i planned to run older games i enjoyed in younger years (shadow warrior, duke nukem 3d, etc). it came from my folks with Windows 98 installed on it, and those games ran fine with the Soundblaster Awe 32 card which was already installed.

making NO hardware changes, i updated to Windows 2000 (for network compatibility with my newer computers) and reformatted all hard drives to NTFS (they were FAT32 before). I left the games installed exactly as they were before, except now i get the message "Soundblaster not responding on selected port". Is there some kind of compatability issue with those old soundcards/games and the newer Operating Systems? I can still use those old cards to run all my current audio software, and in fact they provide better latency times than a newer "better" soundcard i have. What gives?

The soundblaster Awe 32 and the Soundblaster 16 are the only soundcards i have that will work with those games, and of course this is a pure nostalgia kick, but if anyone has any advice on how to get those cards to run with those games on W2K, i'd much appreciate it. Thanks!

 

I'm suprised you got windows 200 working on an old 160Mhz. Well OK I suppose it's not to hard to do but it would be so slow.

At any rate installing windows 2k and using ntfs isn't really a good idea if you want to play old games. The games your talking about are dos based games built with the fat32 FS in mind. Now that you've gone and made everyhting NTFS you've not only possibily caused problems with the games but you've now also got yourself stuck in a windows only environment which means you can't boot into DOS with a boot disk and play them that way either.

The best suggest I could give you is that if you really want to use windows 2k get rid of NTFS. NTFS isn't very friendly with DOS based games. Although I really don't know why you went into win 2k for better network support. Windows 98 networks just fine with any windows version past 95. If you want a good computer for playing older games and that's all you want to do with it I would seriosuly just leave windows 98se as the OS.

 

thanks

actually the games play fine, they just don't have sound. so i guess i'm assuming that installing W2K or changing to NTFS does something to the port arrangement setup? as you can probably tell, i'm new at this, learning by experience as i go. but the games still run fine, and even faster in windows 2000 than they did before. just no sound. weird.

i've tried every combination of soundcard addresses, IRQs, interrupt settings, etc, with no luck. is there a section on this site that defines what those terms are? i've poked around but haven't found anything like that yet.

i'll change my smaller hard drive back to FAT32 when i get home from work, but if anyone could tell me about the Interrupt and address settings, i'd much appreciate it. Thanks for your info though, that does explain a lot.