Thinkpads Forum

I recently acquired a Thinkpad 600E which I am really enjoying since it was the only thing I could find with a battery that still works. I have it running Windows 98 SE and am having fun playing around with it.

The only problem is that I'm trying to really use it like a portable retro gaming computer (mostly for some dos games and stuff like the Neverhood). The only problem that I still seem to be having is that after I go to install the soundcard drivers I have for the laptop, it no longer plays any midi files, so there's no music in my dos games like Doom. I've tried looking at everything I can think of in the IRQ settings and whatnot (Though I probably didn't look very hard, since I don't really know what I'm doing ).

Any help would be appreciated in trying to get through this dilemma as it's starting to get on my nerves.


Some info about the computer:
Hardware:
Thinkpad 600E
DVD-ROM drive
11.2 GB HDD
D-Link DFE-690TXD Cardbus Ethernet card
Bytecc BT-144 USB Floppy drive
Software:
Windows 98 SE Upgrade from Windows 95
CCleaner
doom95
Mozilla Firefox
Quake 2
Microsoft Office '97
The Neverhood

If I recall correctly, DOS based games come with their small set of sound card drivers to choose from, and usually offer a separate "config" utility that allows you to specify the driver and IRQ/memory address of your sound card/MIDI hardware. Sometimes there's an auto-detect option, but that doesn't always work from Windows (you may need to boot into MS-DOS mode and modify your config.sys lines to allow mouse and CD-ROM access).

I have to know though - if you try to play a midi file from Windows, does it work?

Make sure MIDI is enabled in configuration. If you've installed the ThinkPad Configuration Utility for DOS, type this. Restart and it should work. The 600E has two synthesizers, one built into the PCI sound chip that's a rather decent wavetable synth and the other is an FM synth built into the ISA sound chip. The wavetable one is selected with General Midi on DOS games and the port is generally 330, if it isn't "ps2 ? midi" can tell you. The FM synth is active when you select Sound Blaster for music.

I actually got this solved a few weeks ago and forgot to write a response, so I'll put one up in case it helps someone else.

So the first problem I discovered was that I had download a faulty sound driver from the site notebook-driver.com (or something of the sorts like that ).

I downloaded the driver listed on this site, and I could play a midi file just fine

For some reason though when I restarted Windows, it autoselected Crystal FM Synthesis instrument and I couldn't hear the music in DOOM anymore until I went to the multimedia settings in Control Panel and changed it back to the Crystal SountFusion(tm) instrument (I figured this out by playing a midi file and switching the single instrument until I could hear it playing )

My only complaint is that the music in while playing DOOM is really faint, but that could be a problem with the DOOM95 engine so I'll figure that out one day

vic485 wrote: My only complaint is that the music in while playing DOOM is really faint, but that could be a problem with the DOOM95 engine so I'll figure that out one day

Music is plenty loud for me, but I'm using the DOS version of The Ultimate Doom.