No Sound In DOS game on DOS machine

[ranchhand]

I built a new unit for someone, and my "charge" to them was their older DOS machine. My purpose was to set up an original old DOS machine to play some of the great old games I still have. 300+ SDram, 900MHz CPU, runs Windows98 smooth and fast. I "cleaned" it up, removed a bunch of old programs, etc. I put in an older harddrive, installed Windows98, installed a Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard and installed the drivers. Loaded up Mech Warrior2 (the old Win95 game) and it plays beautifully.

Okay, the inevitable problem: it will not play game music.

Great sound effects and music off the harddrive. I unload 4 racks of missles into an unfortunate enemy and the explosions and rocket sounds are great. It will play normal music CDs. It positively will not play the game music off the CDrom. I have tried everything and scoured the internet for tips. Nada.

Does anyone know possibly of a way to rip the background music to the harddrive and have it play from the harddrive? I tried that but it won't play it-goes looking for the CDrom. Possibly my Soundblaster card is too new for legacy system?? It seems in the back of my mind once long time ago I read about a hack to move the music to the harddrive so the whole game could be played from the harddrive, but I am not sure.

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks as usual.

[Faustus]

Odd, is it possible its actual CD audio on the game disc? Is the cable between the drive and sound card ok?

[ranchhand]

Yeah, that occured to me. I am going to replace the cable. This problem really has me talking to myself. If it were an IRQ conflict, the sound would not work at all. Oddly, I can see the CDrom light is on but no sound is coming out. I am checking around for an older soundcard to swap with the SBlaster, maybe the 5.1 card technology is too new (??).

[ROF]

From what you've posted I can say it's probably not the card but maybe the cable. Some cables do not include a notch which allows you to insert the cable backwards. See if you can reverse it, flip it 180 degrees, and re-insert the cable. Try playing an audio CD using media player to check for disc audio.

[ranchhand]

That's a good suggestion, Rof, but my cable has the notch. It's in correctly. However, once I did that with a old CDrom IDE cable, and I got the most interesting error messages until I discovered what I had done! :P

[ranchhand]

FerWhatItsWorth Dept. follow-up: Well, I got it to work. I unplugged the analog sound cable, rebooted into BIOS; I saw that both the onboard sound and the Soundblaster were enabled, so I tried disabling the onboard sound leaving the S/Blaster enabled, powered down. Replugged the cable in, a booted. Sound played like Tarzan! So now my son and I are taking a trip down memory lane playing all the Mech Warrior games (we have them all). The graphics are simple compared with what we have now, but I don't even notice it any more. Too busy trying to stay alive! Thanks all for your suggestions!

[ROF]

Thanks for the update. I'm glad to hear you resolved your problem into gaming goodness. I keep an older machine around for the same plus other reasons.