Thinkpad 600, Win2k, and the curse of the disappearing FM Synth...

[Sudos]

I have a Thinkpad 600 I picked up the other day for $10 at a thrift shop, in decent shape, PII 300, 128MB RAM, 5GB HDD, came with Win98SE. as I already have a 98SE machine, I did an in-place upgrade to 2000 SP4 to mimic the setup I had with one half a decade ago. everything went fine, did all the updates, USP5.1, all the rollups, and to no surprise, even with that and a quick RAM bump, it can really play a game of Quake.

Chocolate Doom is what I really wanted to get running however, and this supports using the onboard FM Synth. on the current install there, this works. but since the drive is original, I thought, okay, let's upgrade the drive and do a fresh install of 2000.

everything installs okay again, updates, etc. and I go into the sound settings and the hardware FM synth is missing.
These laptops have a CS4237B onboard, and I'm really quite fond of the sound. I've done multiple rounds of uninstalling the WDM drivers, reinstalling, finding good win2k drivers for the chipset and installing those, but nothing has helped.

I'm hoping to reach out to someone with prior knowledge of any of the Thinkpads that had such an audio setup in it, which would be the 380XD/380Z/385XD/560X/560Z/600/770(E,ED) models, and hopes that someone installed 2000 on one of these and knows of the problem I'm talking about. I'm at wit's end, and getting more aggravated makes me remember I had a similar problem with the last 600 on my lap as well, but I don't remember for the life of me how I fixed it... it seems if this information was on a website somewhere, it's now lost to the test of time.

I even tried going back to the old hard drive, and with that the FM synth has also disappeared. I'm at wit's end now, and I'm fairly certain that I'm going nuts.

I've tried using the PS2.exe utility to no avail, it says that the MIDI stuff is enabled... but it's just not showing up. Any ideas?
what I think I've brought it down to is the drivers being enumerated improperly. I've tried uninstalling and letting Windows reinstall, but this either has the issue of only having "Modem #0 Line Playback/Record" available or the audio working but still no FM Synth. and yet it was JUST working a few nights ago.

[axur-delmeria]

Isn't this simply hardware failure? I mean it's around 20 years old by now. I've seen a much newer (non-Thinkpad) laptop have its entire audio subsystem go missing.

[RealBlackStuff]

Maybe this helps? http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http:// ... /jsoft.htm

[Sudos]

Isn't this simply hardware failure? I mean it's around 20 years old by now. I've seen a much newer (non-Thinkpad) laptop have its entire audio subsystem go missing.

Nope, and in fact, I've remedied the problem. I found an old post on a forum somewhere in 2007 that made reference to a driver soemone uploaded to DriverGuide back about 16 years ago or so, https://www.driverguide.com/driver/deta ... erid=86338 and the instructions were as follows:

• Run the Executable, click install

• Wait, let it work its magic

• After it says Success, go into the Device manager and uninstall the Crystal WDM Audio driver

• Shutdown, DO NOT REBOOT, open the laptop and disconnect the CMOS battery and remove all power, swipe power button a few times to deplete residual power

• Boot into windows after re-connecting the CMOS battery and re-setting the clock, and viola, Crystal FM Synth shows up again.

This worked, and I'm pretty happy it did.

[axur-delmeria]

I'm trying to jog my memory of the Crystal 4236B sound card in our Pentium I desktop almost 20 years ago. From what I remember, the WDM driver prefers the software wavetable synth that comes with Windows 2000 (this may be the same with Windows 98), which is probably why it disables the hardware FM synth.

It does the same with the hardware wavetable synth on Crystal Soundfusion PCI sound cards-- that's why the WDM driver is much smaller than the older VXD drivers which contain the MIDI sample set.

In any case, good work finding the workaround.

[Sudos]

I'm trying to jog my memory of the Crystal 4236B sound card in our Pentium I desktop almost 20 years ago. From what I remember, the WDM driver prefers the software wavetable synth that comes with Windows 2000 (this may be the same with Windows 98), which is probably why it disables the hardware FM synth.

It does the same with the hardware wavetable synth on Crystal Soundfusion PCI sound cards-- that's why the WDM driver is much smaller than the older VXD drivers which contain the MIDI sample set.

In any case, good work finding the workaround.

Crystal cards were always weird. and this onboard CS4237B is no different-- it seems that if I remove the CMOS battery and deplete power for a bit then plug it back in, it comes back, but only for one boot. after that one boot, it goes away.
Very weird. so no, this isn't yet solved all too much. it seems more like something that gets changed that Windows doesn't like. I haven't doublechecked with a copy of 9x to see if this behavior is the same, and in this case since this is 2000, I might have to downgrade to NT4 and see if that changes anything for how long it shows up.

I'm not running the latest BIOS on this yet (need to set up a proper disk image and get imgburn to not change filenames on me to do the no-battery upgrade trick...) but I'm planning on it to see if this fixes it.

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you checked any W98SE drivers as well?
I always found that much better than bare W98.

[axur-delmeria]

Windows 2000 uses WDM drivers while W98SE can use either VXD or WDM. In most cases, the WDM driver for 98SE and 2k are the same (I remember collecting various drivers for the Crystal 4236B/4237B when I still had that sound card).

[Sudos]

BIOS update didn't fix it. I'm thinking it's just how the NT kernel interacts with the hardware that's the issue here. so yes, I'll have to do what I've been considering and build a switch in someplace to disconnect the CMOS battery for a short while if I have a need for the FM Synth, since it is now quite apparent with the amount of times I've done it that removing that and removing all power from that in the board will make it show up again for the subsequent reboot after re-setting the time and date, and just for that one boot until done again.

[onespeedbiker]

Well I know it is possible; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W33Tw7pIteU

I don't know if it is just the manner of the right driver. I saw several, and this looked to be interesting http://www.soundcard-drivers.com/driver ... 092349.htm

[Sudos]

Well I know it is possible; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W33Tw7pIteU

I don't know if it is just the manner of the right driver. I saw several, and this looked to be interesting http://www.soundcard-drivers.com/driver ... 092349.htm

everything from soundcard-drivers is just a link to the junk drivereasy app. if you have an actual link to just the RAR file described on the page that would be much more helpful.
also, ayy, that's my video I did back in 2013.