is it okay NOT to install the sound driver for 770X?

[Jefferson]

I clean-installed W98 Second Edition on my 770X

After the installation, I downloaded all the drivers and installed them on 770X as well.

But I've had the greatest difficulty making sound work on my dos/windows98 games; some work but most DO NOT work.

Then just for the heck of it, I did not install the proper sound driver and now it works! (at least a few that I tried, they work just fine!)

I noticed that W98 SE installations picks up most of the sound device drivers anyways (Codec, MPU-401, joystick, etc) but it does leave out one device that's

tagged "PCI Multimedia Audio Device"

If I install the sound driver, I know the error will be gone but the sound for the most of my games will stop working


question: What is this PCI Multimedia Audio Device that I did not install the driver for?
is it okay not to install the sound driver and just keep using it with the sound drivers W98 installed during the installation?

[pkiff]

question: What is this PCI Multimedia Audio Device that I did not install the driver for?
is it okay not to install the sound driver and just keep using it with the sound drivers W98 installed during the installation?

Sure, you can leave exclamation marks in your Device Manager no problem. All it means is that Windows has identified a device but can't make it work. It doesn't cause any additional problems to leave things unrecognized in there, though once in a while, I suppose, the system might spend some CPU cycles trying to find or activate the item unsuccessfully.

Having said that, I think there is something weird going on if installing the recommended sound driver is causing your sound in DOS/Win98 to break, and it's likely you can fix it with the right combination of drivers.

By "clean installed", I assume you mean that you used generic Windows 98 SE disk, not the factory recovery disks for the 770X? Then the first thing I'd check is to see if you applied the APM2APM.reg registry patch? There is a Supplemental Files Disk that includes a couple files that should be applied to a clean Windows 98 install, and it is connected to one of the exclamation marks that appears in Device Manager. This should ideally be done before applying the sound and video drivers, but you can probably do it now and it'll probably work as intended.

Phil.

[axur-delmeria]

I've never owned nor encountered the 770X, but its Thinkwiki page mentions that the CS4610 PCI audio chip is paired with the CS4239 ISA audio chip. This was done in order to have DOS audio capability (via Soundblaster emulation).

[KingBrog]

If you are comfortable with how the system works without drivers, then there is no problem ...